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Screw it, I’ll host it myself

markozivanovic.com

191–200 of 495 posts

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#191

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…

Did you ever receive complaints that your emails are ending up in spam folder for Gmail/Outlook/?

How about you receiving a lot of spam emails?

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat OT, but never realized how expensive those cloud instances are. For comparison, I pay $4.95/month (billed annually) for a KVM VPS with 2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 40gb SSD, 400 GB HDD in the Netherlands. That seems a lot better for selfhosting where you probably want more raw storage than more SSD space.

That's pretty awesome, what provider are you with?

https://www.prometeus.net/site/terakvm.php

But it looks like I got it on a sale, TERAKVM-400 comes down to $6.94 at normal prices.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#193
post #172

I'm doing something similar with a NUC that I colocated. $27/month for a gigabit port + 5 IPv4 addresses, and it's far more powerful than any VPS I could get for the same amount of money. It was a little bit of work to set it up initially, but now I maybe spend 30 minutes a month making sure things are updated. Hosting my own wiki, DNS over HTTPS server, Matomo analytics, and a few other random services.

Wow, maybe my understanding of colocation costs is outdated...but $27/month sounds crazy inexpensive! May i ask @dervjd where/from which colo provider you are getting such costs???

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#194

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…

These complicated setups which we see are complex because they try to save costs by using some part of the cloud. Shared VM resources in the cloud, which is all you really need, are dirt cheap compared to the really simple alternative.

Renting space in a rack at a colo facility and putting an nginx server on it is really simple, but it's also expensive compared to the complex solution in the original post.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#195
post #58

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 sol…

I am perpetually confused about why people think that self-hosting on a VPS solves their privacy and security problems. While I'm sure there are controls in place at reputable VPS providers, it wouldn't be too difficult for them to grab absolutely anything they want. Even disk encryption doesn't save you. You're in a VM, they can watch the memory if they need to. Using a VPS can also make you more identifiable. Your…

With rclone you can encrypt data locally while uploading. This allows you to host everything from home and use the cloud only for backups, basically end-to-end encrypted.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#196

The problem I have always had when building elaborate home server setups is the "set it and forget it" nature of the systems I've installed bites me in the ass. Since it's not my full-time job to manage these systems, I'm really not familiar with them the way I might be with the systems I manage at work. These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it u…

This right here; but even more so.

Eventually, whatever platform / tool you use will need to be upgraded. Security vulnerabilities, new features, etc happen and projects like these can get abandoned within a 5-year timeframe. When you have to migrate to either a new or upgraded platform, you have to figure it all out yourself. When the config is broken by an upstream dependency, you’re on the hook too. Who knows if the build tools you used still work on current versions of things.

Like it or not, we’re all kind of stuck on these platforms we don’t control. The alternative is to become fluent in yet another technical stack, but one that will be used infrequently and won’t really translate to anything else unless you’re trying to build your own cloud service on consumer-grade hardware.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#197

> 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…

It does seem like a "Hetzner Storage Box" would provide a lot more storage for the money: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#198
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Free as in free puppy" is my other favorite metaphor. Free software is a gift to the word, but IMO it's important not to undervalue the time and expertise of operationalizing it.

Free software was always intended as Libre software or Freedom software, though. The main concern is autonomy, not economic costs. I expect you know this already, which is why the puppy analogy sort of fails.

Very fair point, since "free puppy" misses the "free as in freedom" aspect. I think it works better than than "free as in beer", which captures part of the CapEx dimension but none of the OpEx dimension.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#199
post #119
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well that is only if you look at software/ops as a 100% commercial undertaking. It is not. One way to understand why people self-host is to understand why people self-cook their food. It takes significantly longer to prepare food (get raw material, cut, cook) than ordering it. People still do it for $reasons - some find it fun, some find it cheaper, some find it nice to be able to control the taste, some find it more…

Far fewer people cook their own food for fun versus preparation time not being the only constraint: cost, availability, health, transparency (of prep & ingredients), dependency etc

It's common for people to delude themselves into thinking they haven't wasted their time by convincing themselves they did it for fun (or the lols, or whatever) - I'd say the difference is whether they knew )or stated) this upfront, or only after they failed, or had a better solution pointed out to them.

2nd most common also: at least I learnt something / gained xp - which is fair enough, if true.

> Only concentrating on the dollar cost is too narrow a view

Not if you convey other resources/constraints in dollars. Just attach a dollar-value to your free time, perhaps with discounts for things with side-benefits.

Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself

#200
Looks like the author is undecided on what to push next. Hardware - software "solutions" are not the issue, his definition of what his data is worth, to him, as to the pushers as part of an overview of how to stump the global masses is still opaque to the author. F** the data, it is the amassed, filtered, analysed dataset that is globbed over the wire that matters. If the author really has some content with rationality in-built, originality expressed, it is probably half an a4 page in hand-writing. That would be his back-up(so as not to forget what in a bright flash came up in his processor-mind, the once in his life-time), as it would be his legacy to the world. His billing and buying patterns, with his earnings defining his prodigy of consumption not power who cares? What the glob tells about similar individuals, that is what power minds.

Above as to repaint the context, really... this article is as close to a reduction to "nothing" as can be conceived.

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