81–90 of 307 posts
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…
I really wish someone could convince me self hosting is worth it but more often than not it just seems like busywork. Do you really need to self host your static website? There is no real privacy gained and probably some security lost. Then you get into hosting more complicated apps, email, etc, and making sure you can access them from anywhere at any time and it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
In my experience it's not much harder than navigating the AWS interface, where I often feel very lost. But of course YMMV.
> There is no real privacy gained
Why not? Other than I can't be sure that my device and browser doesn't spy on me I don't see your point?
It sucked. Cost a lot of time, and really, fiddling with firewalls and Apache configuration didn't teach me much.
All hail PaaS and the like. I'm not looking back.
One thing to be mindful of is security. The last you want is for your setup to be compromised, be used to send spam/botnets and then getting perma-banned from your ISP. I would argue it's a lot less risky just to put your static site on S3/Github etc.
Very hard to do and finicky to setup but at the time was suitable for my needs
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
Web servers like Caddy automate this for you: you just indicate that you want HTTPS for a particular site and the rest is taken care of for you (in the case of public sites and HTTP-01 challenges, at least). Link: https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/https
Even Apache2 has mod_md which does pretty much the same thing (sans DNS-01 provider integrations, at least out of the box), so it's going to be good enough for most cases and similarly easy to Caddy. Link: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_md.html#mdomain
Nginx integrates well with certbot, which does take a bit more work and configuration, but even that is passable: https://certbot.eff.org/
Things can get a bit tricky when you want to run your own CA or ensure mTLS, but in most cases neither will be necessary.
As for whether you even need HTTPS in the first place, I'd say that it won't hurt in most cases and will guard against MitM, the ISP included.
Self hosting is rarely complicated. It's also easy to achieve better performance and lower cost in many situations.
If this whole infrastructure is built just to render a static page, I can guarantee that from the point of view of someone reaching it out from Indonesia, then the PageSpeed wouldn't matter. It would be super slow.
In fact https://gtmetrix.com/reports/grifel.dev/KDVSwSmr/ shows that render time of your page is 1.8s and TTI is 1.2 sec. Which is 4X times of what PageSpeed shows.
I host my blog on CF Pages, and my front pages loads is subsecond time (around ~725 ms actually). This incurs no electricity bills or any additional costs to me. And it's aggressively cached, compressed and also distributed on Edge Cache. Which is literally impossible with RPI at home.
> 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 (…
Our little town of 6,000 or so loses power 3-4 times a year. One road with lots of ash trees loses power 10x a year.
People are beyond UPS here and into generators.
I'm all for self-hosting and run a few services on my LAN, but would never allow HTTP traffic from the internet to enter my network. If you've ever seen a public nginx log, you'll know it constantly gets hit by all kinds of bots and vulnerability scanners. No matter how secure and isolated I make the web server, I just don't want to see that traffic, nor expose my home IP to further scrutiny. It's trivial to host a s…
edit: this way, you get a free IPv4 (static) address as well, as well as security and avoiding DDoS on your home connection.
Man, I feel like sometimes people forget the 1990s. I was there, running an Apache service and whatnot. It sucked. Cost a lot of time, and really, fiddling with firewalls and Apache configuration didn't teach me much. All hail PaaS and the like. I'm not looking back.