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Self hosting in 2023

grifel.dev

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Re: Self hosting in 2023

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it is much easier now. There are a ton of distributions who are catering for this use case, yunohost is probably the most well known one, but there are a lot more if you look on the awesome selfhosted list. I would also say that if you only want a static site the OPs setup is almost overkill. Just install caddy and a dyndns service. Takes care of the certificate for you and is super simple to setup.

FYI, Caddy has a DDNS plugin https://github.com/mholt/caddy-dynamicdns . Works with any DNS provider that has a Caddy DNS plugin which you'd typically use to solve ACME challenges, but instead it will set A/AAAA records.

This is new to me. I was going to run a separate DDNS for my homeserver, but given that the domain is only used in Caddy anyway, this reduce 1 place to configure stuff. Thanks

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it is much easier now. There are a ton of distributions who are catering for this use case, yunohost is probably the most well known one, but there are a lot more if you look on the awesome selfhosted list. I would also say that if you only want a static site the OPs setup is almost overkill. Just install caddy and a dyndns service. Takes care of the certificate for you and is super simple to setup.

FYI, Caddy has a DDNS plugin https://github.com/mholt/caddy-dynamicdns . Works with any DNS provider that has a Caddy DNS plugin which you'd typically use to solve ACME challenges, but instead it will set A/AAAA records.

Thanks for your work on Caddy!

Also, for those that don't know, Caddy also automates SSL certs (unlike nginx) and can render markdown files using templates [0].

[0]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/templates

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#143

Self hosting is appealing but I’m worried about exposing my home IP to the world. Is this something to be worried about

Yeah, it’s a legit concern (even if low probability).

An easy workaround is setting up a $5/mo VPS to act as a bastion host and relaying all your traffic through that.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel care is apparently free for the raspberry Pi https://tuxcare.com/patch-raspberry-pi-systems-without-a-reb... Also I think you can use Ubuntu PRO on the pi, which includes Livepatch.

I'm only seeing a long and posing as an article telling me to sign up for a 7 day trial.

All Linux kernel livepatch stuff are paid services, as I understand it, the Linux kernel live patches aren't possible to just produce automatically, it requires a team with enough Linux kernel knowledge to make it work and usually such teams want to get paid.

Also, I think that the base Linux kpatch tools are open source, but the infrastructure that RedHat/SUSE/Canonical/etc use to provide them are not. However, I think the Gentoo folks do have some open infra code.

https://github.com/dynup/kpatch https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Elivepatch https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Live_patching https://github.com/gentoo/elivepatch-server https://github.com/gentoo/elivepatch-client

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#145
post #77

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…

Some people have symmetric gigabit (or faster) home internet these days.

Renting slices of someone else's shared HW hardly compares in terms of price to owning the full machine. Expected lifetime of some cheap SBC you'd use for hosting your personal projects is ~10 years. It can cost say EUR 50-100 to run it that long these days. 10 years of that hetzner VM is EUR 577. That's 500 EUR I can do something else with per machine.

Whenever I try calculating HW ownership vs renting in the "cloud" for personal usecases it at worst comes up to paying off in a year, and usually sooner.

There are also many other benefits of having physical access to the HW.

Just right now about 7 SBCs I run have total cost of ownership at $20 on average each and I've been running them for 5-7 years...

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#146
post #77

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…

You don't control a VPS, uptime doesn't matter, and even my 5 Mb/s upload is just fine. Electrical costs are marginal. But most importantly there is nothing more convient than $ cp photo.jpg ~/www/ and sending someone the link example.com/photo.jpg. Plus you have tons of space. That's not to say that a VPS in addition isn't useful or fun. https://indieweb.org/POSSE and all. It just isn't at all required.

Just recently I linked my home LAN with my VPS with WireGuard. I needed to configure queues on my home router because I got consistent 100MBps on the wire and this is a bit too much for my VPS provider (too much to pay, not to handle).

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#147
I personally prefer to self host Proxmox with ZFS. It is ready for enterprise use and can be easily backed up via external drives. There is even a Raspberry Port (https://github.com/pimox/pimox7), but I would never use a Raspberry to self-host again (not because it is not suitable or reliable, just because I need a little more power)

I use

  Fujitsu D3417-B1
  Xeon e3-1225v5
  32GB DDR4 ECC
  Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (with up-to-date firmware)
  Pico PSU 150w
and it is using 9.3W in Idle and about 12W running my daily services. It can even run a macOS VM for experimenting / software development, USB-Passthrough, Replication, etc. etc.

It is rock solid stable, not too power hungry, can run nearly ANYTHING and I never looked back.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#148
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…

As mentioned in the blog post. I wouldn't probably put a "real" production app on it so easily. You can replicate the same effect and more on a service like hetzner. But if you have a Raspberry Pi laying around and like 2-3 hours. At least a blog is enough! And the amount of hardware related things you'll learn is massive. I've been running a few web bootcamps in the past. Explaining the hardware part through cloud a…

Self hosting can allow your budget to go much further. Tiny PCs like Intel NUCs or Lenovo Thinkcentres[1] are very light on power usage. I bought one that idles at 10 watts, which is $10.32/yr for me (assuming I never power it off). I bought it on Ebay and upgraded it to 32 GB memory for a total cost of $250. The cheapest comparable server on Hetzner costs around $36/mo so I break even in less than a year.

For production purposes, a public cloud has many benefits you can't get at home. But for hobby purposes, keeping the cost low is most important for me.

1. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#149
post #77

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 don't think people are seriously doing self-hosting for practical reasons - it's more for the fun and pride of setting something up yourself.

I run a basic commercial site on my home because after 2 years, my co-op owned fiber ISP has never had so much as a blip of downtime. If they did, I can spin up a cloud server, pop the backup down there, and redirect via Cloudflare in probably less than hours.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#150
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…

> self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding Did they have CGNAT in 2003? Because that breaks everything.

I'm in the US so I pay over $100/mo. for 15mbps upstream, but at least no NAT.
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