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Self-Host All the Things?

tedium.co

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#11

Post by WXLCKNO »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #2

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

I recently got 1.5 gigabit internet (1.5 down, 940 up) and it's been amazing.

The fact that my desktop pc only has a gigabit card is perfect because I'm naturally throttled against using the entire. Obviously I can do this in my router (dream machine which is also gigabit only though) but it leaves a lot of room for everything else that's hosted at home even during peak utilization on my pc.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#12

Post by Nextgrid »

dijit wrote: post #6
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though. You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam. There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow…

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#13

Post by Nextgrid »

dijit wrote: post #7
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #2

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

I guess that depends on where you live, I have almost the same upload vs download speed on my ISP Bahnhof in Sweden. Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.

To be fair, they can do that just fine regardless of whether you’re running externally-available services. Most untargeted, low-effort DDoS relies on filling up all your bandwidth with spam traffic, not exploiting some layer-7 vulnerability in an application you host.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#14

Post by tedivm »

gwbrooks wrote: post #10
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

You can get high deliverability -- the keys, whether you're using your own servers or someone else's come down to a clean list that won't generate complaints and staying within the TOS of your mailserver host or third-party SMTP service. Host your mail-creation/list-management/analytics stack yourself (I like Mautic and MailWizz but there are other options) and use a third party for SMTP services. Amazon SES charges…

I'm not sure why you're getting the downvotes but this is the way for people who want some level of self hosting. I finally gave up hosting my own mail server about two years ago- I had been self hosting email since 2005, but it reached the point where delivery to the big companies was extremely difficult. If someone wants to host their own software but actually have their emails delivered they really do need a third party SMTP service that specialized in deliverability or has a big company behind it.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#15

Post by dijit »

Nextgrid wrote: post #12
dijit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though. You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam. There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow…

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam.

Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually.

We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm not sure what else we could have done to weed out the people who just smack the spam button honestly.

That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months.

I think a major issue is that people don't want to even check how to unsubscribe and they see the “mark as spam” button as a “just make this go away” button.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#16

Post by monsieurbanana »

Nextgrid wrote: post #12
dijit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though. You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam. There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow…

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Could be, or it could be that those systems are so aggressively tuned that newcomers have no chance to not be labeled spam while established players are whitelisted.

(I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as you're saying)

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#17

Post by kefirlife »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #2

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

One option to consider if you really want to host something is to get some space at your local transit provider collocation space. You have access to considerably larger amounts of bandwidth without all the complications of getting the path to your home to be sufficiently high bandwidth, and with sufficient capacity for your purposes. If you want something relatively highly available then power redundancy is important, and in my opinion leaning on existing infrastructure for this purpose is an additional benefit of this approach.

Setting that up will be a lot more in depth and complicated than leveraging a cloud service provider, so you need to consider the cost benefit analysis for yourself. However, if you want to self host and want the bandwidth, I think it is a route worth considering.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#18

Post by capableweb »

dijit wrote: post #6
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though. You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam. There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow…

+ unsurprisingly, lots of hosting providers disable SMTP/block port 25/ban you if any email sending is being detected coming from your instances, legitimate or not, as the problem with hosting IPs that are sending spam is so annoying (and even illegal in some places).

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#19

Post by justin_oaks »

I thought this article would go into more than a handful of apps.

What apps do you think work well for self-hosting, even if it limited to us tech folk?

I've self-hosted Grafana and InfluxDB for monitoring and metrics and found them OK to self host. The authentication and TLS setups were the most annoying.

I've self hosted a few kinds of wiki software, but I eventually settled on a combination of a single Tiddlywiki file and uploading to S3. It works well for most of my own knowledge storage. I even went so far as to write my own plugin to save the Tiddlywiki file to S3, so I can press a button in Tiddlywiki to upload it.

I have a self-hosted docker registry, which is just the reference repository provided by Docker. It has required almost no maintenance since I set it up.

[Edit: for clarity]

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#20

Post by luckylion »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

That's also why the phishing campaigns now use Amazon SES (and amazon happily lets them, as long as they pay, it seems): their email will get delivered.
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