Live data from Hacker News

Self-Hosting like it's 2025

kiranet.org

81–90 of 240 posts

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#81

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 :)

I suspect you would have trouble hosting long term in China. I don’t recall the specifics now but IIRC every website hosted in China needs a special government ID which requires getting approval. My memory is hazy but it does feel like one of the poorer choices to host unless you live in mainland. There are many better options in the world that both do not restrict information as well as not requiring paperwork.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#82

If any self hosters are burnt out by the state of config management tools and YAML, consider giving Etcha a shot ( https://etcha.dev ). It's stateful (cleans up things when they're no longer in your config), procedural (you control the flow and can trigger things as needed), and supports flexible deployment models (push or pull). Full disclosure, I created it and use it across my business and personal devices.

> It's started (cleans up things when they're no longer in your config)... Would you please call this something else? "It automatically reconciles", perhaps? I know that a multi-word phrase isn't nearly as snappy, but not only are "it's started" and "started" overloaded with a bunch of meanings, approximately zero of them mean what you want them to mean in this new context.

Sorry, autocorrect changed stateful to started.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#83

I host tons of web-facing apps behind a reverse proxy. I used to have it all running in a swarm cluster with several underlying vms but decided to move everything to Unraid a while back for simplicity. Would highly recommend. https://unraid.net

As mentioned in another comment, I'm currently still happy with (single node) Docker Swarms (with the reverse proxy as described on https://dockerswarm.rocks/ ). I like that I can basically use the docker compose files published by a lot of project to deploy. How does Unraid compare in your experience?

And I like that I can deploy images which basically don't have any requirement to be deployable to Docker Swarm. Is that also the case with Unraid?

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#85

The only thing that holds me back for self hosting is Postgres. Has anyone managed to get a rock solid Postgres setup self managed? Backups + tuning?

Put it on a zfs dataset and back up data on the filesystem level (using sanoid/syncoid to manage snapshots, or any of their alternatives). It will be much more efficient compared to all other backup strategies with similar maintenance complexity.

Filesystem backups may not be consistent and may lose transactions that haven't made it to the WAL. You should always try to use database backup tools like pgdump.

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#86

The only thing that holds me back for self hosting is Postgres. Has anyone managed to get a rock solid Postgres setup self managed? Backups + tuning?

I've got an openbsd server, postgres installed from the package manager, and a couple of apps running with that as the database. My backup process just stops all the services, backs up the filesystem, then starts them again. Downtime is acceptable when you don't have many users!

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#87
post #66
post #51

I love the idea of self-hosting, especially since I keep a number of very tiny websites/projects going at any given time, so resources would not really be too much of an issue for me. What stops me is security. I simply do not know enough about securing a self-hosted site on real hardware in my home and despite actively continuing to learn, it seems like the more I learn about it, the more questions I have. My identi…

I agree with this: I personally don't need tutorials for hosting stuff, rather tutorials about securing it properly.

Could you give an example of a guide that helped you self host a system or service by telling you how to do the security? One that shows what information would be missing from a regular setup tutorial?

I'm a security consultant so this is not a problem I have. To me it seems very straightforward and like most things are secure by default (with the exceptions being notorious enough that I'd know of it), so I'm interested in the other perspective

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#89
post #10

Last thing I need is Kubernetes at home

Exactly, my first reaction was "I should write a blog post about why I still use Docker Swarm". I deploy to single node swarms, and it's a zero boiler plate solution. I had to migrate services to another server recently, and it was really painless. Why oh why doesn't Docker Swarm get more love (from its owners/maintainers and users)?.... Edit: anyone actually interested in such a post?

I just want to add that I also have a Docker Swarm running, with four small nodes for my personal stuff plus a couple of friends' companies.

No issues whatsoever and it is so easy to manage. It just works!

Re: Self-Hosting like it's 2025

#90
Still running everything from my basement using FreeBSD jails and shell scripts.

Sacrificing some convenience? Probably. But POSIX shell and coreutils is the last truly stable interface. After ~12 years of doing this I got sick of tool churn.

Post reply on HN