Screw it, I’ll host it myself • Hacker News Board

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#21

Post by napsterbr » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

> I’m living in Germany, so the obvious choice was to spin up my instances in Vultr‘s* data center in Frankfurt, as ping is the lowest to that center for me.

The author is probably aware of this, but just in case they aren't: Hetzner is an amazing company with two or three datacenters in Germany. I don't remember if any of them are in Frankfurt, but given they offer VPSs and beefy dedicated machines, I'd be fine trading a couple milliseconds for this flexibility (and overall better pricing, even if Vultr's isn't that expensive as well).

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#22

Post by SavantIdiot » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

syntheticnature wrote: post #16

planb wrote: post #9

Funny headline, because every time I try to self-host anything important like mail, I learn how deep that field is and how little I know and that I'll probably need many many hours to do everything right and in a secure way (and my mails would still have a higher probability to be classified as spam). Then I think: "Screw it, I'll just use GMail"

Interestingly, it doesn't look like the author is self-hosting email. I know mail-in-a-box exists, but even with that I find it's worth the peace of mind to pay someone else for mail hosting.

Same here. Over the past 20 years (25?) I've tried numerous times to self-host email and the issues I had with spam and blacklisting were too involved for me to resolve, and only got deeper. Definitely not something to attempt casually.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#23

Post by simion314 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

planb wrote: post #9

Funny headline, because every time I try to self-host anything important like mail, I learn how deep that field is and how little I know and that I'll probably need many many hours to do everything right and in a secure way (and my mails would still have a higher probability to be classified as spam). Then I think: "Screw it, I'll just use GMail"

I use gmail too but I also have an email from my cheap hosting as a backup. The big problem with gmail is not that Google is reading my email but that this giants can lock you out without a reason and without a right to appeal.

I am super salty that Sony banned my PlayStation account(used by my son) for 2 months (I have a Plus subscription paid for 1 year too) without no way for me to see the exact reason (was it a text message, or a screenshot that was shared, or just a report from an troll) and no way to contest this. I made my decision and fuck consoles my son will have to learn to use a medium spec PC for gaming.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#24

Post by varispeed » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

bndw wrote: post #18

IMO you can get 90% of the utility here (owning your data) with just the NAS and rsync. 1. Don't feed the FAANG 2. Store your SoR media, notes, documents on your own NAS 3. Automate a backup of the NAS, preferably both on and off site (I use rsync from a pi + large disk + cloud blob storage)

re 3 Restic is pretty good as you get your data encrypted locally, so it can be used over untrusted storage facilities.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#25

Post by clairity » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

I successfully extricated myself from Gmail to ProtonMail, only to be getting dragged back to Office 365 due to ProtonMail not having a working calendar and FastMail not supporting calendar sharing (to non-FastMail users) or delegation.

yah, microsoft won office productivity 2 decades ago with exchange and outlook (and owa), not just excel and word. the integration between email, calendar, contacts, documents, and access control is still unmatched, certainly not by google's hodgepodge of web apps.

proton is working on calendaring but it still has a long ways to go.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#26

Post by imwillofficial » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

Ok, I’m SUPER into self hosting, but this article? No way. 1) Duck out isn’t a thing, just stop it. 2) Half the articles cited as examples of corporate abuse were later revealed to be mistakes by the user or easily avoidable pitfalls. 3) Self hosting still requires trust (software you’re running, DNS, domains, ISP, etc...) The line of who to trust and how far is a tough one to answer, even for the informed.

How I solved it: 1) I use well vetted cloud services for things that are difficult/impossible to self host or have a low impact if lost. (Email, domains, github, etc...) 2) I self host things that are absolutely critical with cloud backups. (Files, Photos, code, notes, etc..)

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#27

Post by asattarmd » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

The most valuable thing for me is my photo library. All of them are currently in Google Photos. Is there any easy way to backup just that? I don’t care about my personal email, tasks, calendar etc. It’s just the thought of losing my photos scares me.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#28

Post by merb » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #4

The diagram alone is more than enough of an argument to dissuade me from giving this a shot right now - it's simply too complicated and too much to manage for the amount of time I can dedicate to it. BUT - I'm really thankful for people who keep posting and sharing these sorts of projects; they're the ones iterating the process for the rest of us who need something a bit more turn-key. I'm excited to see this eventua…

just use k3s + (restic + velero [backup]) it's soo much easier you can basically install everything with the same tooling and update everything with the same tooling. if something breaks, bam you can just restore the whole cluster with velero (including local volumes)

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#29

Post by johnbrodie » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

12ian34 wrote: post #8

I'm curious as to for how long you've been using this setup specifically in regard to Nextcloud, and how many and what volume of files you store in it? I've set up a few Nextcloud instances in the last 2 years on Digital Ocean VPSs and Raspberry Pis and I ran into so many problems and difficulties which scaled with the quantity and size of files I hosted on it. I took care in setting up everything to a relatively sol…

We've been using Nextcloud in my home for the better part of a year now, almost completely problem free. I even have auto-updates via watchtower. We have 136 GB of data on it (just checked now). Not sure where that lies compared to your data. It is running on a fairly beefy box though, not a rPi. Only issues so far have been needing to set up cron, which took about 5 minutes doing it the "easy" way (host runs a docker command in it's crontab). Collabora was super annoying to set up, but that was a one-time cost.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#30

Post by jedberg » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

Where does he host his email? It doesn't say.

Also, his website is very slow, probably because he's not using a CDN. A noble goal, but it has an impact on credibility. The slow website makes me feel like he doesn't care about user experience, which makes me assume that is true for his whole setup, and turns me off from even considering it.