Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 242 posts

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#51

Post by matthewaveryusa »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #22

Just get the oracle free tier. I've read my share of FUD about how bad oracle cloud supposedly is, but went ahead anyway. It's been something like 3 years, no complaints (including ~1.5 years of running their 4-core ARM/24 GiB RAM/200 GB HDD machine). https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free I've used many other free tiers over the years (living in a low-income region you pretty much have to), and they make it…

I'll second this. I've gone through many iterations of self-hosting and I think I finally found the sweet spot.

The 10TB of free oracle bandwidth means you can store media-intensive applications on the instance. For data at rest, I simply nfs-mount a 14TB disk I have at home hooked up to a raspberry pi running tailscale. tailscale is the bottleneck here because it pegs the cpus of the rpi and oracle instance, but I still get 250mbps (something about the arm crypto implementation being slow.) There's some rummaging that go will improve the crypto performance so fingers crossed. I think I'm using less than 10 watts with this setup.

For backups I keep it simple and plug in an external drive and run borg every once and a while. It's manual since the backup disk sits offline.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#52

Post by eduction »

hamandcheese wrote: post #39
eduction wrote: post #33

Your approach is nice and easy and sensible. I personally preferred hetzner to linode (which has a history of bad security) but I imagine the minimum price is higher. When you’re ready to reduce prices and increase privacy, take a look at a tiny (like t3a.micro or .nano) ec2 instance that forwards to/from your “real” server at home which can be beefier. The home server maintains a vpn connection to the ec2 instance.…

> The home server maintains a vpn connection to the ec2 instance. you also need to configure nat and port forwarding on both sides so you’ll need to get your hands dirty with nftables/netfilter (probably a night or two of pain realistically). You could simplify substantially by simply using the ec2 instance as a reverse proxy (well, that’s simpler to me, at least, as someone much more familiar with reverse proxies).

Yup but if you terminate tls at the ec2 side (as in a reverse proxy) the tradeoff is less privacy since the upload/download data is fully observable from the ec2 instance. (Correct me if I’m wrong here, this is my memory from when I decided on my own setup years ago.)

Some people might not care about this which is fine. Personally I’d rather take on slightly more overheard in setup (nftables vs nginx or whatever) and get the privacy in the bargain.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#53

Post by jtode »

jerf wrote: post #18

If 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…

In my case, I want it everywhere. I operate from a permanent deficit of attention, and I store all of my musical reference material in Google at the moment, because one thing I do always manage to have with me (so far) is my phone, so if someone calls for a song that I don't have memorized I can very quickly pull up the chart no matter what.

I've tried making binders, I've tried every suggestion anyone could possibly make, and the ubiquitous available of Google Docs while I have a phone with internet is the only thing that has verifiably made me more productive. It's only gonna be a few tenners per month to have it fully under my control.

So what you're saying about AWS seems to be that if I just use EC2 and their cheap storage and stick to things I understand (I understand a rented VM, for instance, and I understand the idea that whatever that VM sends out counts against a quota), that they would have a hard time catching me out, and that also seems true to me. Behind a firewall I'm extremely brave, the fact this is internet-public has me a bit more trepadacious I suppose.

I also considered using a local instance to start, but the documentation seems to be very against that and I don't like starting my journey with a new system in defiance of their stated best practices, that seems like the road to a broken heart to me.

edit: lots of suggestions to use dyndns type services, problem there is I'm on Starlink and have no public IP available. There might be a cheap bouncing service out there but that's more googling and in the final analysis I can afford to do it the straightforward way.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#55

Post by Saris »

raphaelj wrote: post #10

I 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.

I can't figure out the prices per month thing, if I select GP Compute and 'Monthly' it just says "Sorry, no results…"

Their pricing page is really confusing to navigate and figure out what's what.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#57

Post by joshmn »

preya2k wrote: post #42

Don't expect too much from Nextcloud – it will not be a 1:1 replacement for commercial services from Google, Microsoft, etc. Prepare to spend much time debugging, configuring, reading tickets, etc. If you only want files and Cloud office, consider using alternatives like Seafile[1] or the new OwnCloud rewrite in Go called OCIS[2], which are MUCH more stable than Nextcloud. [1]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ [2]: h…

How is SeaFile these days? I really want something close to Dropbox, but my own drives.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#58

Post by dijit »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #22

Just get the oracle free tier. I've read my share of FUD about how bad oracle cloud supposedly is, but went ahead anyway. It's been something like 3 years, no complaints (including ~1.5 years of running their 4-core ARM/24 GiB RAM/200 GB HDD machine). https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free I've used many other free tiers over the years (living in a low-income region you pretty much have to), and they make it…

I'm not going to repeat my experiences here because it's frustrating to write it out and probably annoying to hear.

I can't in good conscience however, ever allow someone to recommend Oracle Cloud uncontested.

If it's working for you, I'm not going to fight, but please don't recommend it, the axe of Oracle is heavy swung- even if it hasn't caught your neck yet it definitely strikes.

EDIT: for those curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#59

Post by Helmut10001 »

jtode wrote: post #53
jerf wrote: post #18

If 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…

In my case, I want it everywhere. I operate from a permanent deficit of attention, and I store all of my musical reference material in Google at the moment, because one thing I do always manage to have with me (so far) is my phone, so if someone calls for a song that I don't have memorized I can very quickly pull up the chart no matter what. I've tried making binders, I've tried every suggestion anyone could possibly…

Use wireguard or cloud flare tunnels - personally, I have connected all the places I regularly spend time with persistent site-2-site IPSEC. Having your own infrastructure is a real blessing and relief from FAANG.

Re: Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

#60

Post by tweetle_beetle »

rakoo wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985. I think part of the problem is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that is not fun. It’s that boring middle layer between the OS and apps. Compounding the problem is the fact that th…

> The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985. It exists: https://yunohost.org/#/ . Install the distro, and then it's all clickety-clicks for all your apps (which are softwares like nextcloud, cryptpad, bitwarden, bitter, etc..)

That is definietely the idea, but in practice all the app stores suffer from same problems - mainly that keeping the apps up to date is a lot of thankless work.

Yunohost is mainly full of community contributions, quite a few of which have been abandoned. Some are stuck on old versions, some use migration scripts which may or may not do things the correct Yunohost way, some use migration scripts with bugs which can lead to data loss. The front end is slick, but it's the wild west behind the scenes. There's not even a mechanism for regularly reviewing if apps have been abandoned - I've manually reported a couple.

Cloudron is probably better than most as they have a financial incentive, but then that targets their apps towards "professional" users.

Post reply on HN