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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

den.dev

21–30 of 270 posts

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#21
post #6

This is good advice for people whose livelihood depends on the attention of anonymous strangers. For everyone else, it’s probably ok to ignore.

It's also just kind of cool and fun to hack together a personal website

Totally. If I would tell 10-year-old me that I have my own website on my own domain, it would be seen as a shocking development. I find it really cool to be able to have a corner of the internet that is just mine.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#22

This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.

It's all fun and games until you need to deal with the right of way

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#23

This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.

You forgot the steps of pressing your own silicon wafers in the garage, followed by soldering motherboards from zero, and of course, having a steel mill to build racks and computer cases. The only way to ensure true independence.

In all seriousness, I am a big advocate for hosting your own infrastructure as much as you can, but that requires you to be REALLY into doing it. Otherwise, it's just a completely unnecessary chore.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#24

This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.

It's all fun and games until you need to deal with the right of way

or boats with dragging anchors

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#26
post #12
post #2

tl;dr: - Don't depend on other people's software services. - Buy a domain and host your own website. - Don't pick a sketchy TLD or registrar. - Mailing lists beat social media accounts. - It's okay to depend on a cloud. I had the belief that the article was going to say the exact opposite wrt. cloud hosting. You're literally renting space, and if your stuff gets any heat, your cloud provider may simply shut you down…

Ultimately you're on the Internet and you don't own the Internet. At that point, you're making decisions about the level of control you want to have and the types of events you may be subject to and the answer is almost certainly "it depends."

Exactly this. At some point, you need to delegate. Make it portable, don't get locked into a proprietary architecture, and you'll be good. Not everyone will be able (or has any desire) to run their own rack.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#27
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog,DNS, mail. I have 3 Lenovo ThinkCentre Mini PCs running Proxmox VE in HA mode off my basement. Picture at https://devops.science/

> A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog, DNS, mail. I always felt like you are painting target on your homelab when you allow outside access.

You are. I'm tunneling a /23 which I let Vultr announce via BGP over WireGuard to a local router VM. I have a nftables firewall in place before routing the traffic through the tunnel. I block everything except for exposed IPs and ports/protocols just to keep my limited bandwidth free of noise.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#28
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog,DNS, mail. I have 3 Lenovo ThinkCentre Mini PCs running Proxmox VE in HA mode off my basement. Picture at https://devops.science/

> A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog, DNS, mail. I always felt like you are painting target on your homelab when you allow outside access.

You do. That's why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they absolutely know what they're doing. Can't tell you how many friends I had to have a talk with who had plain vanilla port forwarding done on their home router, exposing their entire home network to the web.

Nowadays, I recommend them use Tailscale as an out-of-the-box Wireguard-based VPN to safely connect to their home servers from remote locations.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#29

This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.

Step 1: Simply create your own Starlink.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#30
post #23

This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.

You forgot the steps of pressing your own silicon wafers in the garage, followed by soldering motherboards from zero, and of course, having a steel mill to build racks and computer cases. The only way to ensure true independence. In all seriousness, I am a big advocate for hosting your own infrastructure as much as you can, but that requires you to be REALLY into doing it. Otherwise, it's just a completely unnecessar…

Don’t forget creating a society capable of supporting industry and science. On a planet producing enough of the raw materials. In a Universe with appropriate fundamental physical constants etc etc.
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