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

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

#151
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is against the ToS for most residential internet providers and can subject you to disconnection/ban from one of the few/only carriers available in your city.

How tyrannical. In Romania, my ISP Digi gives me a free domain name.

Due to old infrastructure (early adopter problem) and generally having more people with internet connected devices, ISPs differentiate between residential and business internet plans.

Business plans typically provide either an SLA or at least less likely to employ traffic shaping. Residential plans tend to thus prohibit running a public facing server for commercial purposes, since they're over-provisioned on the assumption that residences don't always fully utilize their capacity. This is becoming less of an issue with fiber optic internet lines, but coaxial cable networks can easily see a few heavy users adversely impact everyone else.

All of that said, I've never lived anywhere with an ISP that prohibited public facing home servers- they really only had the stipulation about commercial purposes. I imagine if your server was receiving a ton of traffic (say, a popular blog) you'd get a nasty letter about it, but I don't know of anyone who has run into it.

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

#152
post #37

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. 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 le…

FreeNAS kinds of sits in that area, but it suffers from some of the same community contribution problem. It’s definitely hit or miss. I’m thinking the solution has to be like 10 core things that are rock solid rather than dozens of things that range from excellent to hasn’t-worked-in-2-years.

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

#153

I'm running Nextcloud on a shared webhosting and have mounted a Hetzner storage box as external storage into it. That comes down to around 7 €/month for hosting costs, which I find fair. I'm using the Nextcloud Android client, which could be better but does its job, to sync photos from my phone to the cloud. That can also be configured quite nicely to have specific folders for uploads, that should help you with keepi…

I let Hetzner run NextCloud for me https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share It's an amazing value.

that sounds like an awesome deal, but the latency for me in the US would be painfull. Looks like they do not offer US hosting for this.

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

#155
post #139

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 m…

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

I dont think most people have issues with corperations in principle. It is a few particular companies people want to avoid.

Hosting is commoditized; if your host becomes a problem you can migrate. This isn't as easy with Google.

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

#156
I'd encourage hosting out of your home if possible: For an upfront cost of maybe an Intel NUC or equivalent, you get capacity that's dirt cheap. I run Sandstorm and let Cloudflare's cache handle the brunt of any of the public websites I have so that doesn't hit my house.

I don't have a ton of concerns about publicly-accessible Sandstorm, but if you're using something else, either Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale are relatively good options to hide your home connection and secure your access to your server from the public.

I'm not super hot on Nextcloud as a product, I tested it and found it slow and janky. It's exceedingly popular, but there's a lot of better apps out there if you run something that can spin up some containers.

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

#157
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…

I run Nextcloud "locally" too. It's "local" in the sense that it sits on an laptop-turned-server by my desk [0]. Add a domain name, a simple dynamic DNS [1] and a forwarding rule on your router ; your local machine is now reachable from everywhere. No (useless for that usecase) additional intermediary like Tailscale in the middle. It has the added benefit of allowing you to share everything that is on Nextcloud with…

This would definitely be the ideal solution, and it is certainly how the Internet was intended to be used, but a lot of residential ISPs either frown on hosting services on a residential link, or outright forbid it. Plus, CGNAT is more or less inevitable at this point, might as well embrace it.

Like you mention, services like tailscale and cloudflare tunnels are a way around it, but that introduces complexity and additional trust in another company.

The main reason I host my stuff on a VPS is because if an attacker finds their way in, I don't want them to have unrestricted access to my home network as well. (And I'm to lazy to set up a DMZ...)

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

#158
All this discussion about Nextcloud in a thread about Linode.

With Hosting, you largely pay for reputation. Reliable/trustworthy providers are gonna cost more.

On one end of the spectrum you have good-enough-for-the-CIA AWS. $$$

On the other end of the spectrum you have communists running Data Centers out of their basement. $

I suggest Linode. Super reliable provider, much less price than the big names. I would expect the same service out of DigitalOcean, Vultr... just pick the company where you like the owners honestly. Linode's the one me teacher used tho.

Assuming you got the income, $40/mo for 8GB should be good enough to run a ton of hobby projects. Or maybe $20 for 4GB to start, I think Linode lets you upgrade droplets.

Avoid AWS. Using AWS for a hobby project is retarded. Its meant for enterprise.

Option B would be to use a RaspberryPi. Its extra work for less performance, but Pis are a lot of fun. Its like owning a toy that can run NextCloud.

If you're getting into self-hosting btw check out https://yunohost.org/ and https://landchad.net/

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

#159
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is the (modern) way.

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

#160
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what keeps you invested in BSD. I'm not a hater or anything, and in fact I have some experience, my last Sysadmin job involved a network with almost exclusively FreeBSD servers and I had to do some fast learning on their spin. It was objectively great, but eventually I migrated everything to Linux in order to make things more accessible to the people coming over from Windows servers, and I didn't find tha…

For me, why I have all my servers in colocation running FreeBSD. Is for the reason that it's not Linux. Even though I am Linux Engineer by job title, I've lost the sticky from the adhestive that Linux used to give me. It feels now more of a pressured big-corp grab then an OS that made game-changing moves. It's made it's comfort zone. I am cynical and that when one thing gets popular I tend to shift. So when FreeBSD b…

Hipster engineer :)
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