Why Self-Host? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Self-Host?

#201

Post by quesera » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #193

quesera wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall any of that narrative being why people didn't like snaps. One of the early sticking points was switching Firefox from deb to snap. That doesn't fit into your characterization.

Right, it got a bad rep on the desktop which tarnished its reuptation overall as a packaging format entirely

Isn't Ubuntu primarily a desktop distribution?

The numbers might favor server installs (no idea), but it seems like the decisions must be primarily desktop. (i.e. a server admin or business that installs a thousand Ubuntu instances is just a single decision).

Either way, if Canonical's goals for snaps included easing people into self-hosting their services, surely making the experience pleasant on desktop would be a priority?

I don't recall any positive changes brought by snaps. I was looking at it through a desktop lens at the time, but my general perspective is mostly server-side, so I might be biased in that direction.

I don't think the two perspectives are necessarily in conflict, but noted just for framing... :)

Re: Why Self-Host?

#202

Post by m463 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:34 PM UTC

oxalorg wrote: post #137

mikepurvis wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that gives me anxiety about this is the security surface area associated with "managing" a whole OS— kernel, userland, all of it. Like did I get the firewall configured correctly, am I staying on top of the latest CVEs, etc. For that reason alone I'd be tempted to do GHA workflow -> build container image and push to private registry -> trivial k8s config that deploys that container with the proper port…

I left my VPS open to password logins for over 3 years, no security updates, no firewalls, no kernel updates, no apt upgrades; only fail2ban and I survived: https://oxal.org/blog/my-vps-security-mess/ Don't be me, but even if you royally mess up things won't be as bad as you think.

I wonder about:

- silently compromised systems, active but unknown

- VPS provider doing security behind your back

Re: Why Self-Host?

#203

Post by esseph » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:34 PM UTC

Some people here really are truly terrified of self hosting.

Huh.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#204

Post by aborsy » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

udev4096 wrote: post #177

bean469 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Will tailnet lock be available in the near future?

Also several ports need to be opened. How is its history vulnerabilities?

Re: Why Self-Host?

#205

Post by manmal » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:39 PM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #161

virtue3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used digital ocean for hosting a wordpress blog. It got attacked pretty regularly. I would never host an open server from my own home network for sure. This is the main value add I see in cloud deployments -> os patching, security, trivial stuff I don't want to have to deal with on the regular but it's super important.

Wordpress is just low-hanging fruit for attackers. Ideally the default behavior should be to expose /wp-admin on a completely separate network, behind a VPN, but no one does that, so you have to run fail2ban or similar to stop the flood of /wp-admin/admin.php requests in your logs, and deal with Wordpress CVEs and updates. More ideal: don't run Wordpress. A static site doesn't execute code on your server and can't be…

A static site does run on a web server.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#206

Post by aborsy » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:40 PM UTC

esseph wrote: post #199

aborsy wrote: post #192

Self hosting is much more accessible today. The security issue has not been solved yet though. How do you make available your services to other people? People won’t install VPNs. They are usually okay with authenticating to a web server, so you can put authentication with something like Authentik in front of your reverse proxy. But can you configure this front end security correctly and patch it, and are you sure it…

front it with a cloudflare tunnel waits for the pitchforks and torches

CF terminated TLS and scans the traffic. It makes sense if you host your services on a VPS.

If I run my services at home, I don’t want to provide Cloudflare with access to my data.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#207

Post by aborsy » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #144

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. Ubuntu tried to fix this with snaps but the whole Linux community raged and pushed back at them. Yeah, snap has its faults but it was designed initially for server-side apps. Snap install xyz-selfhosted-app was the initial goal. You can install nextcloud as a snap right now. Instead the Linux community let perfect be the enemy of good and successf…

Nextcloud snap is really easy to install, and has been solid. Zero maintenance.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#208

Post by metalforever » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

authorfly wrote: post #129

jimmaswell wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so complicated? I'm currently on DigitalOcean but I've self-hosted before. My site is largely a basic LAMP setup with LetsEncrypt and a cron job to install security updates. Self-hosting that on one of my machines would only be a matter of buying a static IP and port forwarding.

LAMP with dynamic webpages (I assume your approach) works just like it ever did (besides SSL) But are you really keen to make a PHP dynamic webpage application where each page imports some database function/credentials and uses them to render html? Can you keep the behavior of fluent userflow (e.g. menu not rerendering) that way? Only with minimal design. When in 2006 most webpages had an iframe from the main content…

I was doing web development in 2006 and that's not how it was. Websites were not all in i-frames and they were not all insecure. Setting up a PHP dynamic website with Apache does not have to be insecure and didn't have to be back then, either.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#209

Post by FinnKuhn » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

ziml77 wrote: post #189

FinnKuhn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general definition (although it can be pretty loose) is that you need to control the computer/server your software is running on. If that is a VPS or a server in your basement really doesn't matter all that much in the end when talking about if something is self-hosted or not.

Why doesn't it matter? A VPS is still someone else's computer. They could be monitoring what you're doing on there because they run the hypervisor and they have physical access.

As I said, it's a loose definition, but the same could also be said, if I place a second computer at my parents place for example so I can have an offsite backup. They technically could also be monitoring it and have physical access. I don't think anyone would argue that this isn't self-hosting though.

For me at least self-hosting is mostly about having control of a computer/server software wise, not physically. That is probably an important differentiator from homelabbing, which is more focused on controlling the hardware. You can combine the two, but for self-hosting you don't need to physically control the hardware.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#210

Post by indigodaddy » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #59

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

Agreed. I was being generous to the CDN lovers :). Peope don't know how powerful static file servers like Nginx and Caddy are. You don't need no CDN.

For me, CDN is more valuable for avoidance of huge data transfer bills from the origin host, vs the endpoint getting overwhelmed. Obviously those are related and both could happen without a CDN, but the big bills scare me more at the end of the day.