Self-Hosting
Self-hosting means your organization deploys and administers CrowdCAD in infrastructure it controls or governs. This path offers greater operational control and clearer administrative ownership, with corresponding responsibilities.
Overview
Self-hosting is the controlled deployment path for organizations that need environment ownership, role-based administration, and governance aligned with internal policy.
In the current CrowdCAD project context, this commonly maps to organization-managed cloud infrastructure. Specific provider choices can evolve over time.
Why organizations choose self-hosting
- • Greater control over infrastructure and deployment lifecycle.
- • Clear administrative ownership for access, change control, and system operations.
- • Flexibility to align configuration with governance and operational requirements.
- • A path for organizations that need centralized multi-user operational environments.
What self-hosting involves
- • Provisioning and maintaining runtime infrastructure.
- • Managing authentication, authorization, and account lifecycle controls.
- • Defining retention, backup, and incident-response operating procedures.
- • Monitoring, patching, and reviewing operational security posture over time.
Firebase deployment path
Many organizations self-host CrowdCAD on Firebase because authentication, hosting, Firestore, and storage are integrated in one deployment model. The Firebase setup guide provides step-by-step local, CI, and deployment instructions.
Who should consider self-hosting
- • Organizations with clear administrative ownership and technical stewardship.
- • Teams that need centralized multi-user operations across recurring events.
- • Programs with governance expectations that require explicit infrastructure control.
- • Groups that need broader configuration flexibility than a lightweight evaluation path provides.
Operational responsibilities
Self-hosting does not automatically satisfy legal, privacy, or policy obligations. Your organization remains responsible for deployment decisions, security settings, access controls, retention practices, and internal legal or regulatory review.
Administrative and security considerations
- • Who has administrative access to production environments?
- • How are privileged changes reviewed and documented?
- • What controls govern data access and event documentation retention?
- • How are outages, incidents, and recovery procedures handled?
- • Use a dedicated project per organization rather than shared demo infrastructure.
- • Keep service-account credentials and deployment secrets out of source control.
- • Apply least-privilege access patterns for data and storage rules.
When self-hosting may be the better fit
Self-hosting is often the better choice when your organization requires centralized governance, formal administrative control, or deeper configuration flexibility than a lightweight evaluation path provides.
Source documentation
This page keeps public-site framing while mapping to self-hosting guidance from the project repository.
View source document (updated 2026-04-10)
This guide helps organizations deploy CrowdCAD into their own Firebase/GCP project so they retain full control of data (recommended for HIPAA). > Fork recommended. If you plan to customize CrowdCAD for your organization, fork evanqua/crowdcad on GitHub before cloning. Forking keeps your changes attributable, lets you receive upstream updates, and makes collaboration visible to the community. If you only want a read-o...