Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-Host All the Things?

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 295 posts

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#41

Post by Witoso »

contradictioned wrote: post #34
margorczynski wrote: post #29

As for hosting your own apps I found Hetzner VPS or something similar to be very good. Just pack them up into a docker-compose with your CI/CR pushing an image into a repository and you can host a lot of low-medium traffic solutions on a single box with the cost being a fraction of "the Cloud" (especially PaaS). On the box there is a single Nginx acting as a reverse proxy to the exposed compose ports offloading SSL.…

I have something similar, but with traefik instead of nginx. Traefik integrates very nicely with docker using labels, such that the labels configure e.g. domain, path, http-auth etc for the web service running in a container.

Same here but with caddy-docker-proxy which I found a bit easier than traefik.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#42

Post by x0x0 »

linsomniac wrote: post #40

Self-hosting is a big operations problem, with few tools to automate it. Long ago, I had an associate tell me that he was having some success with setting up Wordpress sites for local political organizations. I said to him: "Oh, that's really neat! What are you doing to ensure that the sites stay up to date with security patches?" His response was completely unrelated to my question, which I figured was my answer and…

The entire discussion on the link obscures the fact that saas companies are providing a real service. Even if you don't want the product to be updated, staying abreast of security patches, external api changes, OS changes, client changes, browser changes, etc is real work. Self hosting requires the person hosting to do all the ktlo work.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#44

Post by mrmattyboy »

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.

One thing to say to this.. I work at a company and have personally setup quite a few mail servers for mass email sending and warming up IPs.. not fun..

(these are all legitimate interest emails)

I was in a meeting with a couple of people from the team and a QA engineer mentioned that everytime he's done with an email in gmail, he spams it off... _wut_..

Whilst yes, we have been blacklisted a handful of times and, based on spam reports (feedback loops), people do mark emails as spam for completely nonsensical reasons... e.g. users signing up, (getting and using the activation email), using the service and then spamming the activation email.

Edit: I definitely think there's a bell curve for sending your own emails:

* If you have a very small platform (at least in my experience), reputation doesn't mean that much, emails are generally accepted by providers (assuming IPs that you used haven't been previously used for spammy activity), so self-hosting might make some sense (though a third-party probably wouldn't be too expensive if you did want to).

* If you start sending 100s-1000s of emails/day, I guess some third party solution would make sense, since running dedicated IPs/domains and servers just for sending emails might not be beneficial.

* As you go to sending 100K+ emails a day, personally, I think setting up servers starts making more sense

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#45

Post by ChainOfFools »

dijit wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact on spam filtering algorithms.

They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works and just assume that the purpose of marking something is spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it, personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that their preference thus exerts a small influence over the experience of potentially millions of other people.

In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users, the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the spam button. But today that definition is something closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I am fairly certain few if any other people are interested in seeing, either."

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#46

Post by oaththrowaway »

I self host most everything through unRAID. I spent a good amount of money getting a good server setup. The only thing I rely on the cloud for is email.

I've gone through several iterations of hardware and hard drive capacity over about 7-8 years now. Hard to imagine I'll ever go back.

It's not even about the monthly subscriptions, I've spent more on hardware I'm sure, plus my monthly VPN and Usenet fees. It's really an exhaustion of SaaS becoming essentially keyloggers of our entire lives. I guess self hosting is the closest we have of opting out, but even then it's not enough.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#47

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

fabianhjr wrote: post #43

Its better to design, implement, and use local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

I'm developing such an app. I'm excited to get to the network connectivity part so I can see how much I've saved by making the client smart.

I think I'm going to be able to get away with just running the server for 36 minutes a day (three minutes every hour). The client will know to sync data during those time windows. 1hr of latency is fine for a lot of things if the client is smart about what it caches.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#48

Post by nkrisc »

dijit wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

> 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.

You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t know what it is or can’t remember why I’m getting it, it’s spam.

Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours it’s either spam or you tricked me into signing up for it, so it’s also spam as far as I’m concerned.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#49

Post by justin_oaks »

nitnelave wrote: post #37
justin_oaks wrote: post #19

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…

I got fed up installing OpenLDAP for user management, so I made LLDAP, targeting the Goldilocks zone of the article: simple to setup/manage, but powerful enough for most self-hosting needs.

Awesome! Next time I'm looking to set up some user management stuff, I'll have to try it out. I especially appreciate the sample configurations you give for each service you are trying to integrate with.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#50

Post by kshacker »

nkrisc wrote: post #48
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

> 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. You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much spam I’m not going to try to figure out what is actually spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking “unsubscribe” links in emails I assume are malicious spam anyway. If it looks automated and I don’t…

I do this. And what would help (hey google) is if gmail would remember I requested an unsubscribe and then offer to mark as spam 72 after my request to unsubscribe. As of now, I need to remember who all I tried to unsubscribe and when I get their email 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months later, I don't want to remember my unsubscribe list.
Post reply on HN