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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

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Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#41

Post by imwillofficial »

dvdkon wrote: post #20
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"

Regarding email, I spent some tens of hours setting it up, including implementing DKIM, DMARC, SPF and getting my mail delivered to Gmail and O365. That was over a year ago and things mostly just work with the occasional upgrade or configuration change. You could also save a lot of time by going with a pre-packaged solution. I understand if you don't have time for that, but at least in my experience, self-hosting ema…

It is near impossible. I did all the same things, totally valid and secure setup, gmail would never deliver. YMMV.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#42

Post by imwillofficial »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #22
syntheticnature wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to self host email, just use your own domain. That way if a provider gives you lip, you move on. It’s the email address itself that is valuable, the emails can be backed up.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#43

Post by pjerem »

asattarmd wrote: post #27

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.

https://takeout.google.com/ is exactly what you want. Deselect all, check "Google Photos", click Next, chose your archive format, confirm. It'll take some time but at the end of the process, you got a nice zip with all your Photos in original quality.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#44

Post by ClumsyPilot »

merpnderp wrote: post #3

I always wonder why people don't trust their offsite back-ups to cloud providers. I know they're trying to get away from getting locked out of their data, but what are the odds a burglar steals their computers on the exact same day their cloud provider locks them out because they violated the 'no making fun of ridiculous cloud provider lockout policies' policy? As long as your house burning down and your cloud gettin…

I agree, the backup doesn't have to be trusted if you encrypt, and check if it's down.

If you have a friend with good internet, you could put a NAS in his house or even give it to him for him to use, just get a quota for some storage.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#45

Post by watermelon0 »

codpiece wrote: post #33
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"

Email totally sucks. I ran BSD servers for an enterprise web app, but Postfix/SASL/Cyrus brings me to my knees when I need to build it. Most hosting providers with a $3/mo CPanel option gives you an out-of-the-box, highly configurable email server.

I definitely trust Google/Outlook/ProtonMail/Fastmail with my data a lot more than any of the web hosting companies.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#46

Post by pjc50 »

I've had my own domain for something like 22 years now, but it's been a long time since I used it to actually host stuff. Email in particular I gave up over a decade ago and pointed at a hosting provider. I still read that email with mutt over ssh.

I suppose I should have another go at a blog.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#47

Post by bscphil »

napsterbr wrote: post #21

> 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 trad…

I don't know what qualifies as "amazing company" in your eyes (they're certainly cheap for what you get), but my experience was certainly very bad:

I rented a VPS from them experimentally for a month, then left to go on vacation thinking I had cancelled it, but I had not. They left it running for another month that I hadn't paid for, and then sent the bill for the extra month to collections, so that's presumably affecting my credit score now.

Sending a bill for a recurring service to collections rather than just canceling the service is trash-tier company behavior, IMO. I strongly recommend against using Hetzner.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#48

Post by johnbrodie »

I had the same thought as the title of the article go through my head, but we ended up with a simpler setup as I wanted something I don't have to constantly mess with:

* Put together an overbuilt NAS box running ZFS On Linux

* Simple docker-compose file for all services

* Backups through borgmatic (via ZFS snapshots)

* Auto-updates through watchtower

* Punted on email and use FastMail, switched to our own domain from gmail

Services we run include:

* PhotoPrism for semi-Google Photos functionality

* Nextcloud and Collabora for file sync, sharing

* Kodi for home media

* Tiddlywiki

* DDNS through Gandi since we're on a dynamic IP

* PiHole for some ad/privacy protection

* Robocert for SSL

* Nginx to reverse proxy everything

It wasn't _easy_ to set up, but in a year, any given week I typically spend 0 hours dealing with it. No problem that _has_ cropped up has taken more than a few minutes to fix, mostly around docker networking and auto-restarting containers after Watchtower auto-updates them, a problem I've since fixed.

This setup seems way easier than k3s or some other recommendations, doesn't require much new knowledge, and is as portable as I need it to be. If needed I could plop the docker-compose on a new machine, change some mount points, and largely be up and running again quickly. It's let us switch to "deGoogled" phones and unplug from almost every hosted service we used to use.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#49

Post by mcjiggerlog »

asattarmd wrote: post #27

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.

Yeah, https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync.

There's a decent guide here: https://ubuntu.com/blog/safely-backup-google-photos.

I run this every night on a raspberry pi, syncing them to my local NAS which is in turn backed up to cloud storage.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#50

Post by mikepurvis »

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…

> 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.

Yeah. I have a basic home server and I feel like even with fairly modest needs/desires (Jellyfin, Deluge, Zoneminder, some kind of file syncing, I gave up on photos because my whole family uses Google for that), it's hard to find a reasonable workflow/setup that covers it all. It was basically down to partitioning by VM (proxmox) or partitioned by container (docker), and I went with Docker + Portainer, but I'm not really happy with it; even basic functionality like redeploying a Compose configuration has sat as a feature-ask for three years [1].

Maybe I'm wanting it to be something that it just isn't, and I'd be happier with microk8s and managing the apps as Helm charts. But is that just inviting additional complexity where none is needed?

[1]: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/1753

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