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Self hosting in 2023

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Re: Self hosting in 2023

#231

Post by marginalia_nu »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #229
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 examp…

This is sort of true of owning a car or a home or basically anything. Of those things, my server requires by far the least amount of maintenance (even considering needing to take a day to do something more invasive maintenance once two years or so).

I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#232

Post by houzi »

sandreas wrote: post #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-t…

While I like Proxmox and have used it in a startup, I wouldn't recommend it for enterprise simply due to how flaky the Terraform integration was the last time I checked. Probably a year or two ago. Regardless, the Terraform integration was done in the typical open source fashion of a single developer, where I'd question the amount of resources put into getting the software past 80% completion. The company behind Proxmox does not seem to prioritize the enterprise market segment.

We ended up using the REST API for automated provision management and there are certainly warts. It's a far cry from being a turn-key solution, which I'd argue is preferred by a large enterprise.

It's great for click-ops if that's your use case, but that also wouldn't qualify as an enterprise use case.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#233

Post by ptman »

mythz wrote: 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…

Hetzner is a good provider, but you can get some resources for free as well. https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#234

Post by pmontra »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #160
clnq wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do ISPs do this? Is there a legitimate reason or they just feel that their clients don’t host these services so they might as well block the ports for safety?

Not sure but probably some security thing - if you don't need it why leave it open to abuse. An ISP I've used in the past hasn't allowed self hosting on a standard plan but has allowed on a plan you need to ask for specifically.

Not necessarily security. Maybe just not having to deal with reports for self hosted illegal content. They might be more than happy to let other companies deal with that. Their competitors are probably doing the same thing.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#235

Post by dewey »

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 don't think people usually complain about it being too much work in a sense that you have to put in several hours a week. People usually even like the initial setup procedure because it's fun. When I was studying self-hosting things was just another hobby.

For me it's now more about always having it in the back of my mind that I should do regular updates, make sure the disks are fine and everything is healthy. If something goes wrong the first thought will be "something broke" and not "oh I guess the provider has some issues, let's try again later". Or if in a few years I don't want to do it anymore I know I'll always postpone moving it to a provider because it'll be a hassle.

There's just so many other things to worry about or work on that I don't want to also add time to make sure my email server is running.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#236

Post by progval »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #222
progval wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You gain no privacy

You do:

1. You don't reply to many incoming emails, so they would never be seen by the MTA

2. Even when replying, you don't necessarily include the whole original email in your response (though that's only a very minor improvement)

3. MTAs normally don't store emails, and it would be expensive for them to do so as you aren't paying them for storage. This protects your past and present emails from the MTA turning evil (or being hacked) in the future.

> 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.

Even consumer-grade routers support DMZs. With the right instructions, it's possible to only open the firewall to the server and keep it out of the home network.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#237

Post by komali2 »

spatley wrote: post #184
clnq wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do ISPs do this? Is there a legitimate reason or they just feel that their clients don’t host these services so they might as well block the ports for safety?

ISPs are media companies. They do not want regular people publishing content or having a voice unless they can get their commission. The world would not have become just 5 websites with identical content if everybody had a server at their house.

I believe this to be true because in the usa they really are media companies, aka Comcast, and I don't have this problem in other countries where I lived where ISPs were ISPs and nothing else. They delivered internet and maybe also phone.

In Taiwan I get 1gbps down, no caps, and a bunch of weird networky config stuff I don't quite understand but apparently you don't get in the usa, for like 30 usd/month. It's awesome.

Plus I'm torrenting basically 24/7 and my isp just doesn't give a fuck. When I did that in the usa Comcast sent me an email for every single torrent lol. My download is in the tens of terabytes a month and uploads are at least a terabyte a month. ISP doesn't care. Love it.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#239

Post by hoechst »

> Similarly, the bare metal solution consisting of nginx with manual Let’s Encrypt cert setup was too much of a hassle.

It's not a hassle. Setup once and then forget about it. It's dead simple, easy and there's a million tutorials on it online.

But it's boring (this is where I'm going to old-man-ramble about things, so better stop reading now). Imo, that's why we have so much bloat, complexity and overkill use of containerization that requires orchestration in software and devops. We don't go the easiest possible route, but the one that seems interesting and most fun.

I totally get playing with new stuff and going totally over board just to host a static html file for a personal project, with the goal to learn something new. But it's not just personal projects, it's whole companies that adopt this kind of approach, not even thinking 2 years ahead, when the "cool new software" you used is now not only not cool and new anymore, but abandoned and unmaintained.

I get that this is just a random "i did a thing" blog post, but this just annoys me :(

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#240

Post by acatton »

ptman wrote: post #233
mythz wrote: 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…

Hetzner is a good provider, but you can get some resources for free as well. https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

These free tier offers will kill you on the bandwidth costs.
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