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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

#121

Post by NicoJuicy »

api wrote: post #85
mattowen_uk wrote: post #79

Y'know what, Although I'm currently self hosting my email, my websites, my storage, my SQL, my Active Directory etc., I'm also in the process of migrating the whole lot to Azure and/or independent hosting. Why? It's just too much hassle these days; I want my down-time to be no longer dictated by my infrastructure. I don't want to have to spend off-work hours making sure my boxes are patched, my disks are raided, my o…

The author of this post cites $55/month as his cost. This is wrong. If it takes him, say, two hours a month to maintain (probably conservative) then if you value those hours at $100/hour the actual cost is $255/month. The reality is probably in excess of $1000/month. This only makes sense for people who have an abundance of spare time, and that's pretty rare these days. Free software for DIY hosting like this is "fre…

You also need backups and cloud redundancy , if something would happen.

You'll need a devops team as soon as you use the cloud ( eg. kubernetes)

Those will cost easily more.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#122

Post by gsreenivas »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #102
mikepurvis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hardware sales. People will pay for the convenience of a device that works out of the box with minimal setup. On the software side, integrate tightly with your own subscription services (offsite backups, VPS, etc) to upsell to those who want that, and win over the enthusiast crowd by making it possible to host your own alternatives to those services with a little technical know-how. Open source most components to app…

this is Helm - check us out at thehelm.com

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#123

Post by johnbrodie »

12ian34 wrote: post #103
johnbrodie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 docke…

Interesting. My volumes were similar and I even had issues with my 'beefy' enough DO VPSs. The primary issues for me were with the clients, especially if I, say, moved a folder of 2000 files from one directory to somewhere else within the Nextcloud drive using the UI. Anyway, I'm not here to troubleshoot that - I've long since decided that it's just too much for my personal simple use case of keeping two folders in s…

Ah, during our migration we did try to move thousands of files from a "Dropbox" folder to a "NextCloud" folder, and indeed the Windows client was not happy. Since it was a one-time thing, the solution was to move the files "manually" over SSH and just run the NextCloud "scan" utility to pick up the changes on disk.

I'm running NextCloud via the official Docker image, reverse proxied through nginx.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#124

Post by lucideer »

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…

After reading through it all, I think this is more a condemnation of the author's diagram (or at least their decision to put that particular one up-front), than of their process in general, nor the challenge.

Breakdown of (my) issues with the diagram:

- author's interaction with each device is explicitly included, adding unnecessary noise

- "partial" and "full" real-time sync are shown as separate processes, whereas there's no obvious need to differentiate them in such a high-level overview

- devices with "partial" and "full" sync (see above) are colour-coded differently; again differentiation unnecessary

- including onsite & off-site backups in the same diagram is cool but would probably be nicer living in a dedicated backup diagram for better focus

Here's a simplified version of the same diagram:

                                                   ┌───────────────────┐
    ┌───────────┐                  ┌───────────────►                   │
    │ nextcloud │                  │               │     phone         │
    │ music     │                  │               └───────────────────┤
    │ videos    ◄─────realtime sync├───────────────►                   │
    │ photos    │                  │               │     laptop        │
    │ docs      │                  │               ├───────────────────┤
    │ calendar  │                  │               │                   │
    ├───────────┤                  │               │                   │
    │           │                  ├───────────────►     desktop       │
    │ crm       ◄─────┐            │               │                   │
    │           │     │            │               │                   │
    ├───────────┤     │            │               ├───────────────────┤
    │           │     │            │               │                   │
    │ analytics ◄─────┤            │               │                   │
    │           │     │            └───────────────►                   │
    ├───────────┤     │                            │                   │
    │           │     │                            │                   │
    │ web       │◄── daily sync────────────────────►                   │
    │           │                                  │     synology      │
    ├───────────┤     │                            │                   │
    │           │     │                            │                   │
    │ git       ◄─────┤                            │                   │
    │           │     │                            │                   │
    ├───────────┤     │                            └───────────────────┘
    │           │     │
    │ devtools  ◄─────┘
    │           │
    └───────────┘

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#125

Post by buffalobuffalo »

I've recently thought this would make a great business model. You set up a service where you deploy open source tools like email, picture storage, etc to run on aws lambdas for people. All they would need to supply is a domain name (via oauth access to dns providers) and an aws account. For a single user, the app's costs would probably be under a dollar for a year. They pay you a one time setup fee, and a maintenance fee only if they want to receive updates. Configure nightly backups for them, etc. I'd definitely pay if this existed already.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#126

Post by bjt2n3904 »

I've been running Nextcloud myself, and I love it. I've been looking to expand my infrastructure even further -- the synology NAS are wonderful.

The biggest thing is that I don't think this matters anymore. Google, CloudFlare, and Amazon rule the internet. If they don't want you to be on the internet, it doesn't matter how resilient your infrastructure is. Especially when it comes to critical things, like email.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#127

Post by mikepurvis »

vorpalhex wrote: post #67
mikepurvis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is helpful to know— I may try to move more in this direction the next time I'm hacking on it.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#128

Post by hoprocker »

I love it. Some of these solutions are things I looked into during the early days of Android, before Google had cemented hegemony on so many things. Namely, Subsonic and K-9 Mail were some early contenders that I remember, although both quite clunky at that point (Subsonic very much had the patina of a one good developer, but no UI specialist, team).

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#129

Post by grep_name »

I tried to have a setup similar to this during covid but ended up with a bit of a mess.

What I wanted was a home server that used X forwarding to forward services to my VPS, which also had some images running in a docker-compose stack that I wanted to have more robust uptime than my home server. I ended up being unable to get traefik to pick up on the x-forwarded ports, and ran into SSL certification issues that seemed insurmountable wrt hosting jellyfin this way.

Does anyone here use a hybrid home-server / VPS setup like this and know of a better setup? I prefer x port forwarding because I move about once a year and don't always have access to router settings

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#130

Post by 12ian34 »

johnbrodie wrote: post #123
12ian34 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. My volumes were similar and I even had issues with my 'beefy' enough DO VPSs. The primary issues for me were with the clients, especially if I, say, moved a folder of 2000 files from one directory to somewhere else within the Nextcloud drive using the UI. Anyway, I'm not here to troubleshoot that - I've long since decided that it's just too much for my personal simple use case of keeping two folders in s…

Ah, during our migration we did try to move thousands of files from a "Dropbox" folder to a "NextCloud" folder, and indeed the Windows client was not happy. Since it was a one-time thing, the solution was to move the files "manually" over SSH and just run the NextCloud "scan" utility to pick up the changes on disk. I'm running NextCloud via the official Docker image, reverse proxied through nginx.

My good old friend, the Nextcloud scan utility :) I lost count of the number of times I ran that and the trashbin cleanup. These are both problems I never ever want to have to deal with.
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