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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#21

Post by codegeek »

"start self-hosting more of your personal services."

I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think.

Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy NextJS or whatever static website or even netlify. You can setup Nginx or Caddy (my favorite) on a simple VPS with Ubuntu etc and boom. For majority of projects, that will do.

90%+ of projects can be self hosted with the following:

- A well hardened VPS server with good security controls. Plenty of good articles online on how to do the most important things (remove root login, ssh should only be key based etc).

- Setup a reverse proxy like Caddy (my favorite) or Nginx etc. Boom. Static files can now be served. Static websites can be served. No need for CDN etc unless you are talking about millions of requests per day.

- Setup your backend/API with something simple like supervisor or even the native systemd.

- The same Reverse proxy can also forward requests to backend and other services as needed. Not that hard.

- Self host a mysql/postgres database and setup the right security controls.

- Most importantly: Setup backups for everything using a script/cron and test them periodically.

- IF you really want to feel safe against DOS/DDOS etc, add cloudflare in front of everything.

So you end up with:

Cloudflare/DNS=>Reverse Proxy (Caddy/Nginx)=>Your App.

- You want to deploy ? Git pull should do it for most projects like PHP etc. If you have to rebuild binary, it will be another step but possible.

You don't need Docker or containers. They can help but not needed for small to even mid sized projects.

Yes, you can claim that a lot of these things are hard and I would say they are not that hard. Majority of projects don't need the web scale or whatever.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#22

Post by npodbielski »

sksksk wrote: post #10

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect... What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending. It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my e…

I did all of those DNS shnigannas with spf, dmarc and others ones like 6 years ago.

I think I had problems with my emails like 2 twice , with one exchange server of some small recruitment company. I think it was misconfigured.

Ah there were also some problem with gmail at the beginning they banned my domain because I was sending test emails to my own account there. I had to register my domain on their BS email post master tools website and configure my DNS with some key.

In overall I had much more problem with automatic backups, services going down for no reason, IPs being dynamic and etc. Email server just works.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#24

Post by turtlebits »

Self hosting is great and I'm thankful for all the many ways to run apps on your own infra.

The problem is backup and upgrades. I self host a lot of resources, but none I would depend on for critical data or for others to rely on. If I don't have an easy path to restore/upgrade the app, I'm not going to depend on it.

For most of the apps out there, backup/restore steps are minimal or non existent (compared to the one liner to get up and running).

FWIW, Tailscale and Pangolin are godsends to easily and safely self-host from your home.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#25

Post by isodev »

codegeek wrote: post #21

"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…

And there is an extra perk: Unlike cloud services, system skills and knowledge are portable. Once you learn how systemd or ufw or ssh works, you can apply it to any other system.

I’d even go as far as to say that the time/cost required to say learn the quirks of Docker and containers and layering builds is higher than what is needed to learn how to administer a website on a Debian server.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#27

Post by abdullahkhalids »

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD!

Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TLS and generate certificates, Perform maintenance updates, check backups, and million things that are automatable.

No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget. Just like Limewire. But that's the reason no one self-hosts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Re: Why Self-Host?

#28

Post by singron »

jraph wrote: post #14
sksksk wrote: post #10

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect... What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending. It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my e…

Why not also do the sending? Deliverability concerns?

Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#29

Post by PhilipRoman »

xoa wrote: post #13

This list of "why self host" focuses almost entirely on privacy/sovereignty which, as the author admits, has come to be a pretty standard reason given. But I think there are plenty of purely practical ones as well, depending on your specific situation. There's a spectrum here from self-hosting to leaving it all to 3rd parties, and you can mix and match to get the most value out of it. But I'd add: - Use case/cloud bu…

Performance is definitely a big factor. I used to think CI was inherently slow and nothing could be done there until I started to self host local runners.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#30

Post by fundatus »

cls59 wrote: post #4
simonw wrote: post #3

The existence of Tailscale has made me a lot less scared of self-hosing than I used to be, since it provides a method of securing access that's both robust and easy to setup. ... but I still worry about backups. Having encrypted off-site backups is essential for this to work, and they need to be frequently tested as well. There are good tools for that too (I've had good experiences with restic to Cloudflare B2) but a…

The control plane of Tailscale can even be self-hosted via the Headscale project: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale As for backups, I like both https://github.com/restic/restic and https://github.com/kopia/kopia/ . Encryption is done client-side, so the only thing the offsite host receives is encrypted blobs.

For anyone looking for a convenient way to set restic up: Backrest[1] provides a docker container and a web interface to configure, monitor and restore your restic backups.

[1] https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest

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