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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

#61

Post by bscphil »

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. I was especially surprised by:

> Every last weekend of the month, I will manually backup all the data to Blu-ray discs. Not once, but twice. One copy goes to a safe storage space at home and the other one ends up at a completely different location.

This is one paragraph after mentioning a 2TB+2TB NAS. Even assuming that's RAID1, a standard Blu-ray only stores 50 GB, so you need 40 of those. And then you need another 40 for the other location... every month?? Honestly it's probably cheaper to buy a new 4 TB hard drive every month.

If you're a cheapskate like me, backing up your encrypted (e.g. Borg) backups to a cloud provider like Google Drive isn't a bad option. My org provides me with unlimited cloud space, so I have hundreds of encrypted gigs on Google Drive. No reason to think it'll disappear overnight.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#62

Post by shockeychap »

"A drinking game recommendation (careful, it may and probably will lead to alcoholism): take a shot every time you find out how someone’s data has been locked and their business was jeopardized because they didn’t own, or at least back up their data."

That one put a smile on my face.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#63

Post by thestepafter »

llaolleh wrote: post #59

I really love the idea of self-hosting, but man, you have to go through 9 layers of configuration hell and come back out alive. It's not necessarily fun programming - more of changing variables and running commands, which you might get wrong anyway. I wonder if there's a viable business model for this. Automate the setup through scripts and process automation for any provider. You pay a one time fee + a reasonable am…

So how much would you pay?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#64

Post by napsterbr »

bscphil wrote: post #47
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 affe…

I can see why that's a bad experience for you, but IMO Hetzner did the right thing here.

What if I forget to pay my AWS bill for a week and, because of that, all my resources get deleted? IIRC AWS will inactivate your account after 3 months without payment, so the same thing would've happened there. 3 months is a nice trade off between "forgot to pay my bills" and "no longer use the service".

ETA: for sure it sucks they sent the bill to collection. Uncalled for, they could've attempted to settle directly with you first.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#65

Post by Sphax »

I'm willing to bet you could run all these services on a single VPS. Having to manage 6 different hosts is going to be a pain in the ass, even if you use something like ansible.

As far as backups, I don't understand why the author doesn't just encrypt them and send them to a cloud storage; it's what I'm doing personally with restic and it's not even expensive.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#66

Post by hedora »

I’ve found the following setup works well. It’s simpler, but less featureful:

Website is a git repo stored on a nas, and backed up. (GitHub would also work; private repos were scarce when I set this up). It’s published with “s3 sync”, and sits behind a cheap cdn.

Desktop is backed up to NAS (via NFS; would use syncthing if I was setting this up again. Previously, I used Unison, which confused some other users of the desktop, but I like it anyway.)

NAS uses synology’s client side encrypted HyperBackup to B2.

Calendar and contacts are on the nas, using baikal, which runs in a docker image on the synology. My phone is fine with periodic access to the contacts and calendar server, so this sits behind the firewall, and is not accessible via the internet.

Total monthly cost is pennies, not counting domain names, or the B2 backup data.

The main problem is that all the data will be compromised if the NAS is stolen. I’m looking for a good solution to that next.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#67

Post by vorpalhex »

mikepurvis wrote: post #50
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 h…

I used to have a portainer centric setup.. now I just use docker-compose directly. I have my compose split into different files with a makefile to keep things "make start" simple. Highly recommend.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#68

Post by belval »

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…

I think the diagram gives a skewed view of how hard this actually is.

I run a very similar setup only my VPS is only a proxy for my home server and it requires very little maintenance. I run everything with docker-compose and I haven't had to work on my setup at all this year and only about 8 hours in 2020 to setup the Wireguard network to replace the ssh tunnels I was using previously for VPS -> server communications.

At the end of the day YMMV and use what you are comfortable with, but it's not as crazy undertaking as it sounds.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#69

Post by clairity »

mikepurvis wrote: post #55
clairity wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've actually daydreamed about starting a computing appliance company that would make a variety of services plug and play for consumers and small businesses, from email to storage, to networking, to security, and to smart home. it's actually the direction apple is headed, but they're encumbered by the innovator's dilemma, which leaves an opportunity for an upstart. google and facebook are similarly too focused on adt…

It would be fun stuff to build, but I feel like you'd struggle to make money. Google and Amazon can afford to give away the hardware, and they can smuggle their ecosystem into your house as a thermostat or a smart speaker or a phone app, or whatever. Like, how do you persuade the audience of enthusiasts (think: Unifi buyers) to pay for a subscription to managed software they run on their own computers, raspis, whatev…

there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strategy yet. so yes, they’re vulnerable to the behemoths right now, but those dynamics aren’t locked in yet.

it’s mostly tough because of the high upfront capital costs (manufacturing, r&d, and marketing). people still talk fondly about discontinued apple routers and what nest could have been as an independent venture, for example.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#70

Post by Hard_Space »

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 had a more positive experience with Hetzner, and would recommend them. They do indeed default to Frankfurt DC.
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