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Self-Hosting like it's 2025

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41–50 of 240 posts

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#41

I am actually worried about the self-hosting pandemic. We self-hosters will stop flying under the radar. Wonder how long it will take until our matrix instances require to be backdoored, our immich are scanning our pictures with AI. On an unrelated note, an article of how to rent a VPS in China would be interesting :)

Why would you rent a VPS in China?

Jurisdictional arbitrage.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#42
post #10

Last thing I need is Kubernetes at home

It is still my opinion that most businesses do not need Kubernetes, and neither should anyone self-hosting a service at home.

I can see running something in a Docker container, and while I'd advise against containers what ships with EVERYTHING, I'd also advise against using Docker-compose to spin up an ungodly amount of containers for every service.

You shouldn't be running multiple instances of Postgresql, or anything for that matter, at home. Find a service that can be installed using your operating systems package manager and set everything to auto-update.

Whatever you're self-hosting, be it for yourself, family or a few friends, there's absolutely nothing wrong with SQLite, files on disk or using the passwd file as your authentication backend.

If you are self hosting Kubernetes to learn Kubernetes, then by all means go ahead and do so. For actual use, stay away from anything more complex than a Unix around the year 2000.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#44

I am going to continue to stan for dokku for hosting web apps, docker images included https://dokku.com/

coolify.io is also a great open-source alternative if someone wants a web interface.

Anyone with experience to compare Coolify vs. Dokku? (and maybe something else?)

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#45
post #17
post #10

Last thing I need is Kubernetes at home

Exactly. I am hosting 30+ services using docker compose and very happy. I don’t want to troubleshoot k8s in the early morning because home assistant is down and light dimmers are not working for some random k8s reason.

I am quite happy even without Docker, but I can see the appeal in some cases.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#46
post #10

Last thing I need is Kubernetes at home

I run Kubernetes on my homelab on 4x Raspberry Pi's then use Portainer to manage it. Works quite well, can use Helm charts when available, otherwise I use Portainer and deploy container apps manually. It's really not that bad.

I'm sure you find some joy in it or just like to explore what's possible. But just a reminder: Pieter Levels is running his million dollar businesses on a single VPS (if that's still correct). But yeah, if you like it, why not.

"Premature clustering is the source of all evil" - or something like that.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#48
post #10

Last thing I need is Kubernetes at home

It is still my opinion that most businesses do not need Kubernetes, and neither should anyone self-hosting a service at home. I can see running something in a Docker container, and while I'd advise against containers what ships with EVERYTHING, I'd also advise against using Docker-compose to spin up an ungodly amount of containers for every service. You shouldn't be running multiple instances of Postgresql, or anythi…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#49
I've been through just about everything to get where I am and I've ended up with Hashicorp Nomad and Consul with Traefik, managed by OpenTofu (open-source Terraform).

Things that haven't worked for me:

- Standalone Docker: Doesn't work great on its own. Containers often need to be recreated to modify immutable properties, like the specific image the container is running. To recreate the container, you need to store some state about how it _should_ work elsewhere.

- Quadlet: Too hard to manage clusters of services. Podman has subtle differences to Docker that occasionally cause problems and really tempting features (e.g. rootless) that cause more problems if you try to use them.

- Kubernetes: Waaaay too heavy. Even the "lightweight" distributions like k3s, k0s etc. embed large components of the official distribution, which are still heavy. Part of the embedded metric server for example periodically enumerates every single open file handle in every container. This leads to huge CPU spikes for a feature I don't care about.

With my setup now, I can more or less copy-paste a template into a new file, tweak some strings and have a HTTPS-enabled service available at https://thing.mydomain.mine. This works pretty painlessly even for services that need several volumes to maintain state or need several containers that work together.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#50

I am going to continue to stan for dokku for hosting web apps, docker images included https://dokku.com/

Is that really self hosting though ? Self hosting to me is, at the very least having physical access to the machines.

Yes, it's self hosting. You have access to the machine.
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