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Self hosting in 2023

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Re: Self hosting in 2023

#71

Post by RheingoldRiver »

> a cheap UPS to keep it running in case of power outage (which happened once in the past year, so it might be a bit overkill).

I don't think this is overkill, I think it's necessary. A UPS is pretty cheap compared to the completely-uncontrollable chance of losing power in the middle of working on something. Sure, there's autosave and most things are relatively recoverable, but this is just such a cheap investment (at least, for most people who will be reading this forum, I understand it isn't for everyone) compared to such a scary reliance on something that is not very reliable (which makes me very upset about income disparity, it's something everyone should be able to have).

My power is extremely unreliable so maybe I'm a little biased - we get brown-outs (power drops for maybe 2 seconds and comes back) maybe 3-4 times a year, which is wild imo for what should be a very well-developed area (relatively wealthy suburb of Chicago) but it's a pretty old building so not too surprising I guess. That said I will NEVER have a desktop setup with a UPS, and I encourage absolutely everyone to do the same.

I also have a wireless card so that in an emergency I could tether my pc to my phone for internet if need be, and I highly recommend this as well. It's enough to reconnect and send a couple Slack messages quickly and then disconnect again and wait out an outage, without driving up your data bill. (Just use your phone? Maybe, but I don't have everything installed, and I can't type for shit on my phone keyboard anyway)

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#72

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

paxys wrote: post #64
Ayesh wrote: post #36

I'm still not convinced that self hosting is cheaper though. Where I live, both the electric grid and Fibre connections are unreliable, and the ISP charges about $3/month for a static IP. Assuming 2.5W for a RPi, it takes 1.8kWh a month, costing around $0.25 for electricity. This also has the downside of using residential IPs, having to deal with CGNAT/NAT if the ISP has no static IPs, exposing your home IP, slow dis…

Costs for hosting a static site or something with minimal computation is down to 0 at this point using any one of a dozen cloud/edge providers, so it's hard to compete with them on the basis of cost. The arguments for self hosting are really about having full control over your service stack.

The problem with a lot of these solutions is they have a nearly vertical complexity curve as soon as you want to get past a static site or minimally dynamic site.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#73

Post by poisonborz »

ktpsns wrote: post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

Not _exactly_ as easy, you also need a valid https cert, and set up a cronjob to renew it. And for some other reply here, "as easy as it was in 2003" really doesn't mean "easy" :v

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#74

Post by poisonborz »

Title would be better corrected as "website hosting". Self-hosting became a term for a much more ambitious scene to provide all kinds of services usually offered by FAANG/"big players", mostly in opposition to them.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#75

Post by Godel_unicode »

hsn915 wrote: post #60
ktpsns wrote: post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

That is not "easy". If it was, no one would be using cloud hosted sites like carrrd or squarespace or wix or whatever

Those are not solutions to “I don’t know how to host”, those are solutions to “I don’t know or want to know anything about how websites work below the GUI layer”. The hosting (in terms of dns and serving the bits) is almost incidental to their business model of designing and managing.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#76

Post by TheCoelacanth »

poisonborz wrote: post #73
ktpsns wrote: post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

Not _exactly_ as easy, you also need a valid https cert, and set up a cronjob to renew it. And for some other reply here, "as easy as it was in 2003" really doesn't mean "easy" :v

You don't have to have that. Expectations have just increased since 2003.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#77

Post by mythz »

Not sure why you'd self-host a public site from home when you can get a VM from https://www.hetzner.com/cloud for € 4.81 /mo (1vCPU / 2GB RAM / 20 TB bandwidth) with much better internet access. Residential internet connections are more unreliable, have poor upload speeds and requires running a server 24/7 with ongoing electricity running costs.

Or if it's a static rendered website you can publish on GitHub Pages for free and use a CNAME to use a custom domain which is what we do for our docs https://docs.servicestack.net created with https://vitepress.vuejs.org that uses GitHub Actions to automatically build and publish the site on commit.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#78

Post by imgabe »

threeseed wrote: post #42
layer8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I would decouple it from any residential ISP, but use a $4 VPS to still self-host. That also removes the need for a DDNS setup. Given some basic Linux skills, all you need is SSH plus nginx+certbot on Debian with unattended-upgrades or similar, that you can point your domain to.

Would recommend Tailscale over SSH. Really easy to setup/use and means you don't have to open up ports like 22 which are constantly being port scanned.

You can move ssh to a different port.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#79

Post by Godel_unicode »

poisonborz wrote: post #74

Title would be better corrected as "website hosting". Self-hosting became a term for a much more ambitious scene to provide all kinds of services usually offered by FAANG/"big players", mostly in opposition to them.

Disagree, I hear people use the term self-hosting all the time referring to this same thing. I hear your scenario called de-googling (or whichever your big co of choice is).

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#80

Post by rcarmo »

schemescape wrote: post #69
MSkog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't need/want a UI then Dokku is another option. It is more mature with things like built-in backups for the database. I've been a happy user for many years now. Coolify seems nice as well though. https://dokku.com/

Dokku was my Plan A :)

I you want something even lighter, have a look at https://github.com/piku
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