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Self hosting in 2023

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Re: Self hosting in 2023

#221

Post by progval »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #213

Sorry to be the "grumpy old man", but i don't get it. In my experience, self hosting usually falls into two categories, people that "just want to host a simple static website", and "host all the things", and both are usually served better by using the cloud. Most are in the category "i want to learn about self hosting", meaning they have (close to) zero experience, and while self hosting by itself isn't hard, maintai…

Sending emails is hard because of the blocklists, but receiving (and storing) is easy. You can self-host the latter and delegate the former to a company specialized in it.

> Not matter your setup at home, you will never create something as resilient as the major cloud datacenters

That's true for hardware failures, but there are weekly stories on HN about major cloud providers randomly deleting people's accounts; so you need to setup off-site backups yourself either way.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#222

Post by 8fingerlouie »

progval wrote: post #221
8fingerlouie wrote: post #213

Sorry to be the "grumpy old man", but i don't get it. In my experience, self hosting usually falls into two categories, people that "just want to host a simple static website", and "host all the things", and both are usually served better by using the cloud. Most are in the category "i want to learn about self hosting", meaning they have (close to) zero experience, and while self hosting by itself isn't hard, maintai…

Sending emails is hard because of the blocklists, but receiving (and storing) is easy. You can self-host the latter and delegate the former to a company specialized in it. > Not matter your setup at home, you will never create something as resilient as the major cloud datacenters That's true for hardware failures, but there are weekly stories on HN about major cloud providers randomly deleting people's accounts; so y…

> You can self-host the latter and delegate the former to a company specialized in it.

But what would you gain from it ? You gain no privacy, no improvement of service, no added resilience (probably less). All you gain is additional work maintaining your services.

> so you need to setup off-site backups yourself either way

You will always need backups regardless if self hosting or cloud hosting it, but by not opening up your firewall, you will have a much more secure home network, especially if you're not a security expert, which many people are not.

My personal mail backup consists of running a local dovecot instance that is synchronized every x hours using imapsync, and the dovecot mailstore is then backed up by my normal backup jobs every x hours. My provider does support an API for downloading a backup, but it's slower and more error prone than simply just synchronizing the email locally, and if need be, i can access my mailbox locally.

Restoring it in case of data loss or changing provider is also "easy", as i can simply reverse the imapsync.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#223

Post by input_sh »

judge2020 wrote: post #128
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…

> even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1] Is it common for EU countries to not have symmetric gigabit fiber?

Note: Europe, but outside EU/EEA.

Yup. I have a gigabit fibre right up to my home, but the best speed available to me as an individual is 400/40. Gets really annoying from time to time when I need to upload like a couple of gigabytes.

On the bright side it's like €30/month, which also gets me cable and some streaming service subscriptions (HBO Max, Tidal, shit like that), which from what I can tell is a pretty good deal compared to more western countries.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#224

Post by [deleted] »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #154
NorwegianDude wrote: post #86

More people should try to self host things again. Seems that people are forgetting how things work and instead use services that does it for them at some cost. Self hosting is rarely complicated. It's also easy to achieve better performance and lower cost in many situations.

This. I have anywhere access to 5 machines, way more storage than I need, and 100% control of everything that goes on in the network.

[deleted]

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#225

Post by Vayl »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #154
NorwegianDude wrote: post #86

More people should try to self host things again. Seems that people are forgetting how things work and instead use services that does it for them at some cost. Self hosting is rarely complicated. It's also easy to achieve better performance and lower cost in many situations.

This. I have anywhere access to 5 machines, way more storage than I need, and 100% control of everything that goes on in the network.

For someone who knows nothing about self-hosting, where should I start? I'm a self-taught junior dev but haven't had a chance to dabble with any aspect of deployment yet... willing to learn though.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#226

Post by olavgg »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #220

Self-hosting is weird. I hear a lot of people say it's so much work, but I put like an hour a month into my server at most. I think it's mostly fine from an administrative standpoint, as mentioned elsewhere, not much has actually changed from 2003. You definitely don't need kubernetes. If anything, I think most of what's changed since then is that there's been a flood of bad sysadmin advice making people believe they…

I have self hosted Gitea, but its for my team, and you can only reach it with my self hosted wireguard.

It is not a lot of work at all, I update the Gitea lib a few times every year and its as simple as replacing one binary file.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#227

Post by marginalia_nu »

olavgg wrote: post #226
marginalia_nu wrote: post #220

Self-hosting is weird. I hear a lot of people say it's so much work, but I put like an hour a month into my server at most. I think it's mostly fine from an administrative standpoint, as mentioned elsewhere, not much has actually changed from 2003. You definitely don't need kubernetes. If anything, I think most of what's changed since then is that there's been a flood of bad sysadmin advice making people believe they…

I have self hosted Gitea, but its for my team, and you can only reach it with my self hosted wireguard. It is not a lot of work at all, I update the Gitea lib a few times every year and its as simple as replacing one binary file.

Yeah mine is publicly accessible, I should have probably added.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#228

Post by sodimel »

chung1905 wrote: post #218
sodimel wrote: post #212

I'm selfhosting a few services (a small php website w/ blog & admin, a nextcloud instance, some small django websites, and my txt rants here: https://misc.l3m.in/txt/ ). Why txt? Because I only have 600kB down & 200kB up, and even if I can share websites with images (webp) and other files (fonts, css...), my connection is too bad to be able to share this kind of content to hundreds of visitors, like the hundreds of v…

Your txt site are really similar to mine: https://wiki.chungn.com/ I found it's really nice to store those text data in txt files instead of a database.

What a nice knowledge base you have! I'm kinda jealous.

The point of the txt thing (at first) was to show a friend that you can start a blog right away with only some txt files (he wanted to start a blog, but he started right away to worry about the time to setup something). In the end I used this txt thing to share posts to a broad audience without clogging my connection too much.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#229

Post by lifthrasiir »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #220

Self-hosting is weird. I hear a lot of people say it's so much work, but I put like an hour a month into my server at most. I think it's mostly fine from an administrative standpoint, as mentioned elsewhere, not much has actually changed from 2003. You definitely don't need kubernetes. If anything, I think most of what's changed since then is that there's been a flood of bad sysadmin advice making people believe they…

I used to keep a server in my room for a decade and I plan to retire it this year. An hour a month is actually a lot as this overhead is highly non-uniform; the server may work fine for months then need a whole day worth of work, which I can no longer easily sustain. [1] That said, I have of course run lots of softwares I haven't written, so maybe the actual takeaway from your experience should be that.

[1] For example, distro upgrades. Have a distro that somehow promises no breakage? Good! Now I can spend hours to migrate to that distro and learn all its quirks only to find that the promise didn't actually hold.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#230

Post by fallenhitokiri »

judge2020 wrote: post #128
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…

> even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1] Is it common for EU countries to not have symmetric gigabit fiber?

Going from 1000/50 to 1000/1000 would cost me an 860€ premium right now (Germany) and this is a good offer, it can get more expensive without special promotion.
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