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Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

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Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#81

Post by arjie »

Tooling for self-hosting is quite powerful nowadays. You can start with hosted components and swap various things in for a self-hosted bit. For instance, my blog is self-hosted on a home-server.

It has Cloudflare Tunnel in front of it, but I previously have used nginx+letsencrypt+public_ip. It stores data on Cloudflare R2 but I've stored on S3 or I could store on a local NAS (since I access R2 through FUSE it wouldn't matter that much).

You have to rent:

* your domain name - and it is right that this is not a permanent purchase

* your internet access

But almost all other things now have tools that you can optionally use. If you turn them off the experience gets worse but everything still works. It's a much easier time than ever before. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, there was nothing like this. It is a glorious time. The one big difference is that email anti-spam is much stricter but I've handled mail myself as recently as 8 years ago without any trouble (though I now use G Suite).

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#82

Post by sunshine-o »

AstroBen wrote: post #39
kilroy123 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share the bash alias? I would love this too.

https://srcb.in/nPU2jIU5Ca Unfortunately it doesn't work well on single page apps. Let me know if anyone has a good way of saving those

The only way I know of is prepossessing with a web browser and piping it to some thing like monolith [0]

So you end up with something like this [1]:

> chromium --headless --window-size=1920,1080 --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --virtual-time-budget=9000 --incognito --dump-dom https://github.com | monolith - -I -b https://github.com -o github.html

- [0] https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith

- [1] https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith?tab=readme-ov-file#dynamic-c...

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#83

Post by cherryteastain »

kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

Yes but arguably anything below the equivalent of RAID6/RAIDZ2 puts you at a not inconsiderable risk of data loss. Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports so you will need new hardware if you want the resilience offered by RAID. Ideally you will want that twice on different machines if you go by the "backups in at least 2 different physical locations" rule.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#84

Post by sunshine-o »

zdw wrote: post #26
aucisson_masque wrote: post #15

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want. Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky. I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be fir…

> docker There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I would agree with that.

Docker has a lot of use cases but self hosting is not one of them.

When self-hosting you wanna think long term and the fact you will loose interest in the fiddling after a while. So sticking with software packaged in a good distribution is probably the way to go. This is the forgotten added value of a Linux or BSD distribution, a coherent system with maintenance and an easy upgrade path.

The exception are things like Umbrel which I would say use docker as their package manager and maintain everything, so it is ok.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#85

Post by larodi »

sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I self-host most of what I need but I recently faced the ultimate test when my Internet went down intermittently. It raised some interesting questions: - How long can I be productive without the Internet? - What am I missing? The answer for me was I should archive more documentation and NixOS is unusable offline if you do not host a cache (so that is pretty bad). Ultimately I also found out self-hosting most of what…

having a .zip of the world, also helps, even though being a lossy one. i mean - always have one of the latest models around, ready for spin. we can easily argue llms are killing the IT sphere, but they also are a reasonable insurance against doomsday.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#86

Post by kassner »

Onavo wrote: post #76
anotherpaul wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I am not alone in this. Old laptops are much better than Raspberry pies and often free and power efficient.

> free and power efficient Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.

My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#87

Post by kassner »

cherryteastain wrote: post #83
kassner wrote: post #73

Warning: shameless plug ahead Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade. Laptops are…

Yes but arguably anything below the equivalent of RAID6/RAIDZ2 puts you at a not inconsiderable risk of data loss. Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports so you will need new hardware if you want the resilience offered by RAID. Ideally you will want that twice on different machines if you go by the "backups in at least 2 different physical locations" rule.

Absolutely!

> if you want the resilience offered by RAID

IMHO, at that stage, you are knowledgeable enough to not listed to me anymore :P

My argument is more on the lines of using an old laptop as a gateway drug to the self-hosting world. Given enough time everyone will have a 42U rack in their basements.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#88

Post by motorest »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #68
aucisson_masque wrote: post #15

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want. Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky. I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be fir…

Why do you need to update docker? I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker. I upgrade my images but it hardly takes 15 minutes for me, in let's say a month. >>> if the company is respecting privacy It's very rare to see companies doing it, and moreover it is hard to trust them to even maintain a unique stance as years pass by.

> Why do you need to update docker?

For starters, addressing security vulnerabilities.

https://docs.docker.com/security/security-announcements/

> I kept my box running for more than 1 year without upgrading docker.

You inadvertently raised the primary point against self-hosting: security vulnerabilities. Apparently you might have been running software with known CVEs for over a year.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#89

Post by motorest »

kassner wrote: post #86
Onavo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free and power efficient Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.

My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.

> My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs.

some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load.

Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.

Re: Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

#90

Post by motorest »

zdw wrote: post #26
aucisson_masque wrote: post #15

I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want. Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky. I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be fir…

> docker There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates. If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

> There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

None of your points make any sense. Docker works beautifully well as an abstraction layer. It makes trivially simple to upgrade anything and everything running on it, to the point you do not even consider it as a concern. Your assertions are so far off that you managed to.l get all your points entirely backwards.

To top things off, you get clustering for free with Docker swarm mode.

> If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I have news for you. In fact, you should be surprised to learn that nowadays that today you even get full blown Kubernetes distributions up and running in Linux distributions after a quick snap package install.

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