Self-organizing construction principles are a natural fit for large-scale distributed system in unpredictable deployment environments. These principles allow a system to systematically converge to a global state by means of simple, uncoordinated actions by individual peers. Indexing services based on the distributed hash table (DHT) abstraction have been established as a solid foundation for large-scale distributed applications. For most DHTs, the creation and maintenance of the overlay structure relies on the exploration and update of an already stabilized structure. We evaluate in this paper the practical interest of self-organizing principles, and in particular gossip-based overlay construction protocols, to bootstrap and maintain various DHT implementations. Based on the seminal work on T-Chord, a self-organizing version of Chord using the T-Man overlay construction service, we contribute three additional self-organizing DHTs: T-Pastry, T-Kademlia and T-Kelips. We conduct an experimental evaluation of the cost and performance of each of these designs using a prototype implementation. Our conclusion is that, while providing equivalent performance in a stabilized system, self-organizing DHTs are able to sustain and recover from higher level of churn than their explicitly-created counterparts, and should therefore be considered as a method of choice for deploying robust indexing layers in adverse environments.