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Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

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Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#191

Post by danenania »

exhaze wrote: post #118
nicoburns wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with AWS is that you can’t really do anything without understanding 1. IAM, and 2. VPCs/networking. And these are probably the two most complicated parts. For DIY you’re probably best off avoiding AWS

Sounds about right based on my experience with AWS for past 8 years. Does anyone (besides AWS/TF/Pulumi, for whom it’s not their core product) attempt to solve the networking and IAM? These two areas, esp AWS networking, despite being fundamental building blocks, just never get coverage. I know I’m being a beggar and beggars can’t be choosers, however, I believe that there are folks here who could solve this problem…

There's definitely something to this... but I think in practice most projects end up needing some amount of customization in their networking even if it's 90% "standard". In attempting to provide this, you might end up just gradually recreating TF/Pulumi anyway.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#192

Post by galaxyLogic »

This all seems quite complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to use Amazon Lambda or similar service. Spend your time creating and optimizing the applications instead of the infrastructure.

I've known people who built their own boat and also built the engine for the boat. And it's a great hobby which gives you a great sense of accomplishment. But, if you just need to get some fishing done, buy the boat with the engine already installed.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#194

Post by rstat1 »

abdusco wrote: post #189
rstat1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Caddy's docs aren't great either. Last time I tried to deploy it to give SSL to something that didn't have it, took me 2 hrs to figure out the docs enough to get it working.

Caddy 1 docs felt handcrafted for each use case it supports, whereas Caddy 2 documentation feels generated, except for a couple of pages, which is enough to cover 99% of my needs.

Yes exactly.

I also think Caddy 1 was just simpler to use in general, so it didn't matter as much. But I don't have much experience with that version, so could be wrong.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#195

Post by walrus01 »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #192

This all seems quite complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to use Amazon Lambda or similar service. Spend your time creating and optimizing the applications instead of the infrastructure. I've known people who built their own boat and also built the engine for the boat. And it's a great hobby which gives you a great sense of accomplishment. But, if you just need to get some fishing done, buy the boat with the engine alr…

maybe the goal is to develop the skills and experience to be able to build more boats. or to work on marine diesel engines. or to do something like rehabilitate gigantic 70 year old wooden tugboats.

you can't always rely on third party things to host your stuff if your intention is to become the person who runs the hosting services for other peoples' stuff. same way you can't rely on a boatyard's contractors to maintain your boat if your goal is to become an engineer for medium sized yachts.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#196

Post by Yaina »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #192

This all seems quite complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to use Amazon Lambda or similar service. Spend your time creating and optimizing the applications instead of the infrastructure. I've known people who built their own boat and also built the engine for the boat. And it's a great hobby which gives you a great sense of accomplishment. But, if you just need to get some fishing done, buy the boat with the engine alr…

I also self-host my own site and some smaller web-services. It's a pain and I don't like it, but the costs are low and predictable and I don't have to write for any proprietary API like Lambda

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#197

Post by chickenpotpie »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #192

This all seems quite complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to use Amazon Lambda or similar service. Spend your time creating and optimizing the applications instead of the infrastructure. I've known people who built their own boat and also built the engine for the boat. And it's a great hobby which gives you a great sense of accomplishment. But, if you just need to get some fishing done, buy the boat with the engine alr…

Personally, I would never use Lambda for a passion project. The uncontrollable pricing model is not friendly for individual developers. What do you do if you wake up in the morning to a $1000 bill? Leave it up and just keep pouring money down the drain or just end up rewriting the whole site to custom infrastructure so you can control the spending anyways?

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#198

Post by erulabs »

laydn wrote: post #84
progx wrote: post #13

Easy setup with: - traefik (nginx proxy with auto letscencrypt) - portainer (docker container management) - fail2ban (basic security) - logwatch (server / security stats by mail) - munin (server stats) - restic (cloud backup) - unattended-upgrades (auto install security updates) - apticron (weekly info) - n8n (automatisation for e.g. quick info via telegram, if something not work) Run every app that you want in your…

A few months ago, I made an offer of $100 in one of the freelancing websites, for someone to set-up something like your configuration on one of my Digital Ocean instances. I asked for a few more apps to be installed (git, svn, etc). There were no takers :-) I think a web site/service which lets you choose "apps" and spawns a VPS instance would be very useful and profitable (Think "ninite for VPS"). I started to work…

This is what we’re building over at https://KubeSail.com :)

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#199

Post by Ameo »

_xnmw wrote: post #139

This is super useful, thanks for posting. I hate AWS complexity-as-a-service, just give me a damn baremetal machine and let me run and tune my own services. I love having full visibility into raw disk/cpu performance and even benching my hardware. So many useful comparisons here, Bunny.net vs. CloudFlare, and the fact that you got this far without even using fail2ban! Questions (not necessarily for OP, but for anyone…

Hey, author here!

- Request rate is pretty low on average and peaks at around 15 requests/second. That's nothing really and it would probably take 100x or more request rate before I saw any kind of CPU bottlenecking or similar; my upload would probably bottleneck first. The biggest resource usage on the server comes from some expensive database queries made by some of my applications. - I'd definitely be down to use that kind of CPU but it wasn't available at the price point I wanted. Most of my stuff isn't CPU-bound anyway. - I used to self-host my own mailserver and webmail, but to be honest it was a disaster. Even after spending tons of time configuring reverse DNS, DMARC, SKIN, SPF, and the other list of arcane and specialized stuff you need, I still had tons of issues with mail I sent going to spam. I gave up and pay Google to host my mail for my own domains now. - I really haven't done much tuning. MySQL/MariaDB is the DB that gets the most load and its settings are most default. I have put a lot of effort into profiling my apps' query patterns and making sure proper indexes and schemas are in place, though.

Re: Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server

#200

Post by lbriner »

laydn wrote: post #84
progx wrote: post #13

Easy setup with: - traefik (nginx proxy with auto letscencrypt) - portainer (docker container management) - fail2ban (basic security) - logwatch (server / security stats by mail) - munin (server stats) - restic (cloud backup) - unattended-upgrades (auto install security updates) - apticron (weekly info) - n8n (automatisation for e.g. quick info via telegram, if something not work) Run every app that you want in your…

A few months ago, I made an offer of $100 in one of the freelancing websites, for someone to set-up something like your configuration on one of my Digital Ocean instances. I asked for a few more apps to be installed (git, svn, etc). There were no takers :-) I think a web site/service which lets you choose "apps" and spawns a VPS instance would be very useful and profitable (Think "ninite for VPS"). I started to work…

Although not exactly user-friendly, I created my first proper bash script the other day for setting up a postfix server on a vps. You have to create the vanialla vps first but then the script does all of the apt install stuff and then uses awk/sed/whatever to modify config files.

The nice thing is that it is mostly what you would do manually anyway and the commands are unlikely to change much/often since they will install latest versions of postfix etc. when you run the script.

I think this might be more doable since the scripts are easy to create and maintain so perhaps just a site with bash scripts for e.g. "Postfix + Sendmail" or "PHP7 + nginx"

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