Why Self-Host?

This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >$500k / year on our cloud stack

Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +$40 / m cloud service.

Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere that a page is taking 10 seconds to load, but you can't replicate it. +$300 / m cloud service.

Then, if you ever want to aggregate data into a dashboard to present to customers -- Looker / Tableau / Omni +$20k / year.

Data warehouse + replication? +$150k / year

This goes on and on and on. The holy grail is to be able to run ALL of these external services in your own infrastructure on a common platform with some level of maintainability.

Cloud Sentry -> Self Hosted Sentry

Datadog -> Self Hosted Prometheus / Grafana

Looker -> Self Hosted Metabase

Snowflake -> Self Hosted Clickhouse

ETL -> Self Hosted Airbyte

Most companies realize this eventually and thats why they eventually move to Kubernetes. I think its also why often indie hackers can't quite understand why the "complexity" of Kubernetes is necessary, and just having everything run on a single VPS isn't enough for everything.

Fully agreed that any rough edges/onboarding can be solved (with a lot of work, care, etc.).

I just have one main question: what would you like to self-host? Limewire was about file sharing, so the "value proposition" was clearly-ish defined. The "what does Limewire do" was clear.

Are you interested in hosting your own web site? Or email? Or google cal/drive/photos-equivalent? Some of it, all of it?

I'm genuinely curious, and also would love to know: is this a 80% of people want X (self-hosted file storage? web serving?), and then there's a very long tail of other services? Does everyone want a different thing? Or are needs power-law distributed? Cheers

>Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer.

I’m a regular engineer, non-software, my coding knowledge is very basic, I could never be employed even as a junior dev unless I wanted to spend evenings grinding and learning.

Still I was able to set up a NAS and a personal server using Docker. I think a basic and broad intro to programming class like Harvard’s CS50 is all that would be required to learn enough to be able to figure out self-hosting.

> 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.

No, you couldn't, and no, you wouldn't.

To build a swarm you need a lot of fiddling and tooling. Where are you keeping them? How are they all connected? What's the clustering software? How is this any better than an old PC with a few SSDs?

Raspberry Pi with any amount of RAM is an exercise in frustration: it's abysmally slow for any kind of work or experimentation.

Really, the only useful advice is to use an old PC or use a VPS or a dedicated server somewhere.

I'm currently self hosting my notes/journal/knowledge base with Trilium, photos with Immich, and files with File Browser, very happy with that setup so far. I just like the feeling of knowing I own my important data and that it won't go away because some third party company goes out of business or sunsets an app.