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

The ARM VM provided by Oracle is actually quite powerful (definitely much more so than anything free by GCP or AWS). Since I have no point of reference for that processor, I have no idea if you're getting four real cores, but it at least feels so. Compiling large C projects is faster than doing it on my machine (although the target architecture is different, so the comparison is a bit pointless).

The two x86 VMs are puny and can only be used as VPN gateways, or for static site hosting, or something like that.

Not using any of that newfangled "serverless" nonsense, and do not plan to. For work projects we rely on colocation with properly self-provisioned and fully controlled servers. It would be silly to use free tiers since you get absolutely zero uptime guarantees.

> Not sure where you’re getting that information from

From personal experience. There have been other conversations on HN in the past about this. Mine was not an isolated incident.

That's a great plan! I'll say that self-hosting may be _the_ number one thing I'm most passionate about due to concerns similar to yours (privacy, ownership, and so on). I've self-hosted many of my own services for a very long time and so I have my own experiences to share as well.

I'll say right off the bat that I don't see any red flags with your proposed plan. The following bullet points are primarily meant to offer some additional options or mental nudges to help you brainstorm - like I said, there's nothing abjectly wrong with your architecture, so this list may just offer more ideas:

- I've self-hosted a few email servers (and still do) and I think punting on that (or just doing the backup plan) is probably the right approach - you can DIY it today, but it's a part-time job. If you ever do decide to take ownership of your email, bringing your own domain to Fastmail or Proton Mail has also worked well for me. Today I host one domain on Linode and one on Ramnode. As with most things email, there are tons of nuances with doing it yourself - I had to get both my email servers' public addresses placed on an allowlist with their respective providers.

- I self-host most of my services on my own hardware in my homelab. I eschew the big, expensive, loud, power-hungry hardware in favor of smaller, cheaper, and swappable hardware, and the strategy has worked out really well. I primarily use ODroid hardware (they offer both ARM and x86-64 hardware). You mentioned a floating/non-public address as a constraint, so you could still do this with tailscale/headscale/something similar and gain the benefit of cloaking your services inside a private network (and using some public/free cloud instance as a low-power VPN endpoint). I don't think DigitalOcean/Linode are bad choices, but I very much like owning the hardware layer as well.

- I've been self-hosting before Nextcloud existed and used its progenitor (ownCloud) and developed a harsh distate for the huge, sprawling complexity of the system (it was hungry for resources, broke on upgrades constantly, etc.). That story may be better now, but I've sinced move on to hosting very targeted, smaller services. For example, instead of Nextcloud's file syncing, I run syncthing everywhere, and instead of Nextcloud's calendaring, I run radicale. Nextcloud will probably be fine, but I've been happier with running a smaller collection of services that do one thing well (syncthing in particular is an exceptional piece of software)

I could really ramble on but I'll just include a list of the stuff I host if you have any questions about it. I blog[1] about some of these, too: Transmission, Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, Vaultwarden, espial, glusterfs, kodi, photoprism, atuin, Jellyfin, Vault, tiny tiny rss, calibre, homeassistant, mpd, apache zeppelin, and minio. Outside my lab hardware I run a few instances of nixos-simple-mailserver, mastodon, and goatcounter (used to run plausible). I also run a remove ZFS server that I mirror snapshots to as my remote backup solution.

[1]: https://blog.tjll.net/posts/

Re: dynamic dns, I've just started self-hosting some services and piping them through cloudflare, and I use the docker container oznu/cloudflare-ddns to handle IP changes.

Bonus is that I can restrict incoming traffic on the router to cloudflare ip ranges, and use cloudflare tools to restrict traffic.

I suppose you could accomplish the same with a VPS but this is all free.

What’s the point of replacing one corporation with another (especially if you have to maintain the server yourself)?

Host it on cheap hardware at home, with plenty of RAM and CPU. If the power is off for 15min, that doesn’t matter for personal use.

As a plus, you can host it in plaintext (or at least, load the LUKS key), so that applications can index your data, allowing a lot of cool stuff. You can lock it in down more strictly, tailoring it to your specific environment.