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Why Self-Host?

romanzipp.com

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: Why Self-Host?

#171
post #41

"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…

A small business should onlyself host if they are a hosting company. everyone else should pay their local small business self hosting company to host for them. This is not a job for the big guys. You want someone local who will take care of you. They also come when a computer fails, ensuring updates are applied to them. Not by come I mean physically sending a human to you. This will cost some money but you should be…

> A small business should onlyself host if they are a hosting company.

OK that's your opinion, in my view a business should selfhost if they want to maintain data sovereignty.

> everyone else should pay their local small business self hosting company to host for them.

That assumes all small business have at least one "local small business self hosting company" to choose from.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#172

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…

Hi R_Spaghetti, Founder of enum here. That's a fair point, and a good catch. Honestly, using Google Workspace for our internal email was a pragmatic choice early on to let us focus on building our core product. It's a classic startup trade-off, and one we're scheduled to fix in the coming weeks. I want to be clear, though: our customer-facing platform and all its data are and always have been 100% sovereign. Our infr…

That’s fine. But as R_Spaghetti has kindly pointed out maybe you could try and convince your colleague to change the post to rather accommodate “… digital sovereignty is still just a phrase …” and then possibly add something like “and we are working to change that” :) Just a thought. Of course we all are free to talk anything we want, do anything we want, and definitely write and post anything we want.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#173

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…

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#174
post #43

Another sort-of-recent development in the space has made self-hosting dramatically more accessible: even though hardware costs were reasonable before, they're now _very_ reasonable and also resource-efficient. Repurposing an old tower would offer you enough compute to self-host services back in the day, but now an Intel NUC has plenty of resources in a very small footprint and branching out into the Raspberry Pi-adja…

Hardware's hasn't been the issue (at least for the 15 or so years I've been doing server tinkering). The problem is ISPs. They don't want to give me a static IP address, and they don't want to give me even half-decent upload bandwidth.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#175

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…

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

Instead of Tailscale, I can highly recommend self-hosting netbird[1] - very active project, works great and the UI is awesome!

1. https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

Re: Why Self-Host?

#176

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…

Hi R_Spaghetti, Founder of enum here. That's a fair point, and a good catch. Honestly, using Google Workspace for our internal email was a pragmatic choice early on to let us focus on building our core product. It's a classic startup trade-off, and one we're scheduled to fix in the coming weeks. I want to be clear, though: our customer-facing platform and all its data are and always have been 100% sovereign. Our infr…

> Our infrastructure is totally independent of Big Tech

That's wishful thinking. You cannot be truly independent from them, no one can. They control major BGP routes, major ASN, big fiber cables, etc. It's just impossible

Re: Why Self-Host?

#177

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…

> Tailscale and Pangolin are godsends to easily and safely self-host from your home. Instead of Tailscale, I can highly recommend self-hosting netbird[1] - very active project, works great and the UI is awesome! 1. https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

I would rather use headscale than netbird. Headscale is well established and very stable. netbird has a lot of problems and the fact their issue list is hardly looked at by the devs is more concerning

Re: Why Self-Host?

#178
post #46

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)

It's really frustrating how every single compose file publishes on 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1

Re: Why Self-Host?

#179

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…

Those things would hardly take an hour to set up, it's the cost of freedom and control. Don't want to put any effort? Might as well be a cloud slave and complain about lack of digital sovereignty while using gdrive like a fucking normie

Re: Why Self-Host?

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

For my case, and my workload, the answer has always been "RAM is cheap, and swapping sucks" -- but there are folks using Rpi as a NAS platform so really... my anecdote actually sucks upon reflection and I'd retract it if I could.

For every clown like me with massive RAM in their colo'd box, there is someone doing better and more amazing things with an ESP32 and a few molecules of RAM :D

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