I use https://racknerd.com/ was lucky to get a good vps for 19$ a year (A YEAR).
Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
11–20 of 242 posts
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#12Buy a Minisforum UM350. Install Linux on it. Set up Tailscale on it and all devices you want to have access to its internal services. Set up Nextcloud on it.
There you go, $300 one-time cost, and you have a very powerful private server that can run all your self-hosted stuff. Via Tailscale, it can even expose some services to the public internet, if you feel the desire to do so.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#13I really like Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/ . Similar offer and simplicity as DigitalOcean, but way lower prices. I had to reach support a few months ago, and they were pretty responsive. They also show the prices per month , not per hour/milisecond/byte/whatever. As I'm also the one paying the invoices, I really like that.
Also, Scaleway is European, with datacenters in France, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#14Check out lowendbox.com there are much much cheaper options
And it's sibling, lowendtalk, and search sites like https://www.serverhunter.com/
But definitely be extra careful with your backup and DR plans if using dirt cheap hosts…
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#15That's a reasonable plan. And I 100% agree that controlling your data is preferable to having it mined.
What frustrates me, and why I don't do it any more, is we don't have a manageable story for most things. In many cases there's a good recipe you can follow to stand up the basic service. But hardening, security patching, etc. aren't covered. You have to come up with your own solution to make sure it's up, etc. On top of that, projects come and go, and someone may unfortunately choose a project that's a dead end and won't be patched. (And big-budget cloud doesn't solve many of these issues, either).
My personal fear is that a lot of self-hosted stuff becomes like all the unpatched Wordpress sites, years ago, that were just vectors for hacks. It wasn't that the data was stolen, they were pretty much pwned to launch other attacks. There are just too many solutions out there for all the bits and pieces needed to keep stuff up and secure. And all those fiddly bits are hand-integrated (for the most part). I'd like to find something that provided me a full stack, with all the boxes checked. I would get monitoring and security patching around all the bits.
In the interim, I try to use products from companies that either don't primarily make money by advertising based on my data (even if the products are more expensive). (Note that advertising is what you do when you're out of real ideas - so it's inevitable that all companies head that way when MBAs with no imagination want a safe return). Or, I use products that are (as much as possible) open source. (There are still disturbing amounts of proprietary blobs in my Raspberry Pi homely servers, for example).
With all that said, I wish you luck! I've run my own infra in the past and it's fun.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#16You can also consider hosting it at home. More than likely you've got fiber at home, with decent capacity, and you need (1) closet (2) UPS (3) static IP from ISP with a decent firewall/router. It's not ideal, but a lot cheaper and could be perfect for what you need.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#17I really like Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/ . Similar offer and simplicity as DigitalOcean, but way lower prices. I had to reach support a few months ago, and they were pretty responsive. They also show the prices per month , not per hour/milisecond/byte/whatever. As I'm also the one paying the invoices, I really like that.
Also, Scaleway is European, with datacenters in France, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
FYI for anyone in the US, this means they're going to ask you for some sensitive information like a copy of your passport. Even worse, they're probably going to wait until after you've given them all your registration details, including your credit card information, to ask for it.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#18If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. Everything syncs when it is in the house, which is just about always for the laptops and pretty often for the cell phones, and when it is out and about it just doesn't. It all works out.
I have a backup process running on it, but back up disk space is a lot cheaper than live disk space attached to a VM, so it's a lot cheaper than the requisite VM disk space would be.
That said:
"and I think I know how to get that done without getting snagged by one of their runaway expense traps, but I'm not completely sure. I do not trust them not to find some way to slip a thousand dollar bill past me before I realize what their automated system is doing."
This is a per-service concern. EC2 may be old & busted & "just VMs, dude, get cloud native you early 2000s buffoon" & totally uncool... but also precisely because it is just a VM, it is also bounded. It won't blow up on you, because you can't just use 100 times the service you expected. Worst you can do is use the network like crazy, and for as expensive as bandwidth is at large scales, at this scale it's not going to break your bank unless you really screw up. I'm bounded by the fact my home network connection won't let me go too crazy anyhow. (Or on a small T3 instance you can turn on unlimited credits and then run those up, but there's a bound on how large that can be even if you're running 100% full time and it's not huge.)
Just some options. Mastadon is presumably more complicated to run on local resources, you'd still need something with a public IP that can be reached to work correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#19If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. Everything syncs when it is in the house, which is just about always for the laptops and pretty often for the cell phones, and when it is out and about it just doesn't. It all works out. I have a backup process running on it, but back up disk space is a lot cheaper than live disk space attach…
If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available.
I do the same but then have a VPN so I can reach it externally. One more thing to maintain but worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?
#20The flip side of 'stop relying on some faceless entity to manage it' is that it is a LOT of work to keep something like this up and running. Google automate it and have a ton of engineers to tend to things. But everyone else has to take care of software upgrades, security patching, backups and restore, cyber threats etc. In the long run, independence is worth something. It is just costly.
There's pro and cons.
There's a lot that can be automated now. I self-host everything, been doing for more than a decade now. Partly on home server and partly on servers I rent. Everything is kept up to date and the pain points have been fairly low.
It's definitely not a set-up and forget thing, but it is definitely not a lot of work.
It's also a good way to learn things, the process itself is not a waste of time.