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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#71

Post by BinaryIgor »

"Many many years ago I was running an Android phone with Google services like Google Maps. One day I was looking for a feature in my Google account and saw that GMaps recorded my location history for years with detailed geocoordinates about every trip and every visit.

I was fascinated but also scared about that since I've never actually enabled it myself. I do like the fact that I could look up my location for every point in time but I want to be in control about that and know that only I have access to that data."

This made me thing whether there are any services (or ideas thereof) that would provide this kind of functionality but story encrypted in a similar way as proton does for email; in theory, you can use this pattern - data stored but encrypted on the server, but decrypted only by the client - to rebuild many useful services while retaining full sovereignty of your data.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#72

Post by dvdgsng »

dizhn wrote: post #46
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

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 TL…

Self hosting involves 3 steps in my life. 1) Find the docker compose file. 2) Change the expose line to make it specific 10.0.10.1:9000 instead of the default 0.0.0.0:9000 . 3) Connect via wireguard. (Answers the "security" point a sister comment brought up too)

Not to mention the 100 steps you have to do to get their, of course...

Re: Why Self-Host?

#73

Post by igor47 »

Thank you for writing this! I've been playing around with writing something similar and I getting lost going way too far up the concept chain. Like, ultimately, I self host because... Capitalism?

In my ideal world, one tech savvy person would run services for a group of their friends and family. This makes the concept more mainstream and accessible, while also creating social cohesion for that group. I think we've monetized too many of our relationships, and often have no real reason to be in community. This is a big change from most of human history, where you depended on community for survival. Building lower-stakes bonds now (I run your email, you help me fix my car) helps avoid the problem later when you really need help (old, sick) but have never practiced getting anything you need except by paying for it

Re: Why Self-Host?

#74

Post by neoromantique »

arich wrote: post #45
neoromantique wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Security. As an avid self-hoster with a rack next to my desk, I shudder as I read your comment, unfortunately.

The core point is valid. As someone who self hosts, it's become so complicated to get the most basic functionality setup that someone with little to no knowledge would really struggle whereas years ago it was much simpler. Functionally now we can do much more but practically, we've regressed.

The point to an extent is to make it have friction.

If you don't care enough to figure it out, then you don't care enough to make it secure and that leads to very very bad time in modern largely internet-centric world.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#75

Post by npodbielski »

schmookeeg wrote: post #26
thayne wrote: post #20

I wish articles like this would include recommendations on how to choose hardware to run your self-hosted services on.

"More RAM than you think you'll need" -- particularly if you virtualize. :)

Why? I was running like 15 containers on a hardware with 32gb of ram. You could probably safely use disk swap as additional memory for less frequent used applications, though I did not check.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#76

Post by thayne »

therealfiona wrote: post #53
thayne wrote: post #20

I wish articles like this would include recommendations on how to choose hardware to run your self-hosted services on.

What ever you have laying around is a great starting point. It all comes down to what you want to spend vs what you want to host and how you want to host it. You could build a raspberry pi docker swarm cluster and get very far. Heck, a single Pi 5 with 4gb of memory will get you on your way. Or you could use an old computer and get just as far. Or you could use a full blown rack mount server with a real IPMI. Or you…

And what if I don't have anything lying around?

Re: Why Self-Host?

#77

Post by BinaryIgor »

dlisboa wrote: post #63
BinaryIgor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly; but I would rather say that you don't need CDN unless you have tens of thousands of requests per second and your user base is global; single powerful machine can easily handle thousands and tens of thousands of requests per second

Issue is network saturation. Most VPSs have limited bandwidth (1Gbps), even if their CPUs could serve tens of thousands of req/s.

You can always host your stuff on a few machines and then create a few DNS A records to load balance it on the DNS level :)

Re: Why Self-Host?

#78

Post by abdullahkhalids »

neoromantique wrote: post #32
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

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 TL…

>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. Security. As an avid self-hoster with a rack next to my desk, I shudder as I read your comment, unfortunately.

It's in fact the opposite. If the user has to manually write/fix endless configuration files, they are likely to make a mistake and have gaps in their security. And they will not know because their settings are distinct from everyone else.

If they `apt-get install` on a standard debian computer, and the application's defaults are already configured for high-security, and those exact settings have been tested by everyone else with the same software, you have a much higher chance of being secure. And if a gap is found, update is pushed by the authors and downloaded by everyone in their automatic nightly update.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#79

Post by floundy »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #71

"Many many years ago I was running an Android phone with Google services like Google Maps. One day I was looking for a feature in my Google account and saw that GMaps recorded my location history for years with detailed geocoordinates about every trip and every visit. I was fascinated but also scared about that since I've never actually enabled it myself. I do like the fact that I could look up my location for every…

What you’re describing is essentially how Apple Maps works.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/

Re: Why Self-Host?

#80

Post by TuxSH »

For self-use author has a point, but for public-facing sites not so much, because:

- infra work is thankless (see below)

- outages will last long because you're unlikely to have failovers (for disk failures, etc.), plus the time to react to these (no point in being paged for hobby work)

- more importantly, malicious LLM scrapers will put your infra under stress, and

- if you host large executable you'll likely want to do things like banning Microsoft's IP address because of irresponsible GH Actions users [1] [2] [3]

In the end it is just a lot less stress to pay someone else to deal with infra; for example, when hosting static sites on GH Pages or CF Pages, and when using CF caching solutions.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/microsofts_github_gmp...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36380325

[3] https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/7901

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