Why Self-Host? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Self-Host?

#91

Post by chronci739 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

R_Spaghetti wrote: post #58

You write: I'm fortunate enough to work at a company (enum.co) where digital sovereignty is not just a phrase. info.addr.tools shows [1]: MX 1 smtp.google.com. TXT "mailcoach-verification=a873d3f3-0f4f-4a04-a085-d53f70708e84" TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all" TXT "google-site-verification=TTrl7IWxuGQBEqbNAz17GKZzS-utrW7SCZbgdo5tkk0" This is not just a phrase, it is a DNS entry. Using the most evil in phrases…

> This is not just a phrase, it is a DNS entry. Using the most evil in phrases of digital sovereignty.

damn, this guy don’t fuck around. respect

Re: Why Self-Host?

#92

Post by trenchpilgrim » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

prism56 wrote: post #90

I selfhost only things that aren't critical, I'm not hosting passwords or photos. I'd rather pay for the redundancy offered by big datacentres. I do however choose platforms that are privacy first, ente.io/Proton for example. I do however selfhost FreshRSS, Audiobooks, Readeck, Linkding, YoutubetoRSS... Useful services that individually hosted playforms want £5 or so per month to use. The redundancy is significantly…

I self host photos, but my backups are cloud hosted. A cold rarely accessed backup is way cheaper and more fungible across providers than an entire photos app.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#93

Post by jdoe1337halo » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

Self hosting is awesome. I have been doing it for about a year since I quit my full time SWE job and pursued SaaS. I am using Coolify on a $20/month Hetzner server to host a wide variety of applications: Postgres, Minio (version before community neuter) for S3, Nuxt application, NextJs applications, Umami analytics, Open WebUI, and static sites. It was definitely a learning process, but now that I have everything set up, it really is just plug and play to get a new site/service up and running. I am not even using 1/4 of my server resources either (because I don't have many users xd). It is great.

https://coolify.io/docs/

Re: Why Self-Host?

#94

Post by npodbielski » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #40

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…

>... but I still worry about backups. For me, it's not just off-site backups, it's also the operational risks if I'm not around which I wrote about previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526863 In addition to changing my mind about self-hosting email, my most recent adventure was self-hosting Bitwarden/Vaultwarden for passwords management. I got everything to work (SSL certificates, re-startable container…

Bitwarden client works fine if server goes down, you just can't edit data. I am self hosting bitwarden for several years and I do not complain.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#95

Post by NoiseBert69 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

npodbielski wrote: post #62

thayne wrote: post #20

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

I would not use nuc like this guy. Had one and it was slow and it have limited capacity. Then I had my old PC and it was very good but I wanted more nvme disks and motherboard supported only 7. Now I am migrating to threadripper which is a bit overkill but I will have ability to run 1 or two GPUs along with 23 nvme disks for example.

I'm your opposite :-)

Intel n100 with 32GB RAM and single big SSD here (but with daily backups).

Eats roughly 10 Watts and does the job.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#96

Post by prism56 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #92

prism56 wrote: post #90

I selfhost only things that aren't critical, I'm not hosting passwords or photos. I'd rather pay for the redundancy offered by big datacentres. I do however choose platforms that are privacy first, ente.io/Proton for example. I do however selfhost FreshRSS, Audiobooks, Readeck, Linkding, YoutubetoRSS... Useful services that individually hosted playforms want £5 or so per month to use. The redundancy is significantly…

I self host photos, but my backups are cloud hosted. A cold rarely accessed backup is way cheaper and more fungible across providers than an entire photos app.

Yeah that's fair enough. Valid approach, I went away from this due to getting family on my ente plan. I didn't want to be responsible/trusted with their images. This way the images are pretty well protected in ente's infrastructure and we can share in the same platform.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#97

Post by chasd00 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

thayne wrote: post #76

therealfiona wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A mid-range gaming build without the GPU is capable of running a full saas stack for a small company let alone an individual.

https://pcmasterrace.org/builds

Re: Why Self-Host?

#98

Post by dizhn » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

throw-10-8 wrote: post #64

dizhn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's fine. Do you have any particular questions?

What does your usage look like? My use would be about 30 heavy daily users, another hundred sporadic. Mostly doc editing and video calls. What kind of hosting infra are you using? Hetzner seems popular. Any major recent security concerns, it seems to have a large attack surface.

We use it as primarily a file sharing thing. We do not use it for video calls (and I woulnd't recomment it for that purpose).Last time I tried integrating with an office suite server was also a pain in the ass. I do use its calendar and dav addressbook because it works fairly well.

The only security thing we've done is disable a few paths in the web configuration and only allow SSO logins. (Authentik). You can also put it behind Authentik's embedded proxy for more security. I didn't do it because of the use case with generic calendar/addresbook software.

Hetzner is good. Great even, in terms of what you get for the money. They do provide mostly professional service. You will not get one iota of extra service other than what they promise. VERY German in that regard and very unapologetic about it. And don't talk about them in public with your real identity attached. They ban people for arbitrary reasons and have their uber fans (children with a 4 dollar vps) convince other fellow users that if you got banned you must have been a Russian hacker trying to infiltrate the Hague.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#99

Post by trenchpilgrim » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

TuxSH wrote: post #80

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 t…

We used to host production websites this way as recently as 10-15 years ago just fine. These days you can do it with as few as two machines and a good router or two. The main risk is power outages due to non-redundant power outside of a colo (solvable with a battery backup) and non-redundant public internet links (potentially solvable with a cellular failover + a lot of caching at the CDN, depending on the application).

You generally still use a CDN and WAF to filter incoming traffic when you self host (even without abusive scrapers you should probably do this for client latency). You can also serve large files from a cloud storage bucket for external users where it makes sense.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#100

Post by Steltek » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

What I think is missed in self-hosting is WHAT you're self-hosting. In priority order, you should self-host:

1. Your Data. It is the most irreplaceable digital asset. No one should see their photos, their email, their whatever, go poof because of external forces. Ensure everything on your devices is backed up to a NAS. Set a reminder for quarterly offline backups. Backups are an achievable goal for everyone, not just the tech elite.

2. Your Identity. By which I mean a domain name. Keep the domain pseudonymous. Use a trustworthy, respectable registrar. Maybe give some thought for geopolitics these days. Pay for email hosting and point your domain at them.

3. Lastly, your Apps. This is much harder work and only reasonably achievable by tech savy people.