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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#221

Post by MaKey »

benou wrote: post #187
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I really will give people a pass here. The state of email is one of the worst collective mistakes I think we've made. You can literally be an expert in everything relevant - and your mail will still not get delivered just because you're not google/mailgun/etc. I was trying to do a very simple email-to-self use-case. I was sending mail from my VPS (residential IP not even allowed at all) which was an IPv4 i'd had…

I'm self-hosting for 17 years and counting. In my opinion, the pragmatic solution I use is: 1) use a specialized distribution (I use yunohost but there are others). This makes configuring SPF, DKIM, TLS and more a breeze 2) use a reputable relay to send your emails (I use OVH but again there are plenty of other choices) Of course it means you are not "pure" because emails you send will go trough a 3rd party (the rela…

I'm self-hosting my mail server without a relay. It is still possible, you just need to be persistent. In the beginning Microsoft might just let your mails vanish and while they won't confirm this when you contact them doing so eventually resolved my delivery issues with their mail servers. With Google I didn't have any issues.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#222

Post by mikepurvis »

m463 wrote: post #202
oxalorg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd be worried about this too. Like there must be AI bots that "try the doors" on known exploits all over the internet, and once inside just do nothing but take a look around and give themselves access for the future. Maybe they become a botnet someday, but maybe the agent never saw the server doing anything of value worth waking up its master for— running a crypto wallet, a shard of a database with a "payments" table, an instance of a password manager like Vault, or who knows what else might get flagged as interesting.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#223

Post by esseph »

aborsy wrote: post #206
esseph wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also makes sense if you run public services at home

Re: Why Self-Host?

#224

Post by zertrin »

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 describe can be done with self-hosted dawarich instance + the owntracks app. It records location history and lets you visualize it in a web interface.

https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Re: Why Self-Host?

#226

Post by noduerme »

codegeek wrote: post #21

"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…

Are you talking about the VPS just serving as a reverse proxy and running the server on-prem or at home? Or are you having a reverse proxy on some VPS with a static IP send connections to other VPSs on a cloud service? I've self-hosted toy apps at home this way, with a static IP VPS as a reverse proxy in the middle, and it is indeed easy. With Tailscale you don't even need a static IP at home. A gigabit connection and a $100 box can easily handle plenty of load for a small app or a static site. To me, the reason I would never put something like that into production even for a very small client is, even in a fairly wealthy city in America, the downtime caused by electrical outages and local internet outages would be unacceptable.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#227

Post by npodbielski »

LTL_FTC wrote: post #156
npodbielski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also have a threadripper pro with tons of pcie lanes. Just wish there was an easier way to use newer datacenter flash and that it wasn't so expensive. Hoping those servers that hold 20 something u.2/3 drives start getting decommissioned soon as I hope my current batch of HDD's will be my last. Curious to know how you're using all those nvme drives?

Asus and Acer motherboards supports bifurcation on pcie slots. So for example you can enable this in BIOS and put Asus hyper extension card to put 4 nvme disk into pcie slot https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1037507/

There are other cards like that i.e. https://global.icydock.com/product_323.html This one have better support for smaller in size disks, much easier to swap disk but costs like 4 times more.

I think it could put even more drives in my new case I.e. using pcie to u2 card and the using 8 drives bays. But this would cost me probably like 3 times more just for the bay with connectors. and I do not need that much space.

https://global.icydock.com/product_363.html

If you like u2 drives then icydock provides solution for them too. Or if you want go cheaper there are other cards with slim-sas or mcio https://www.microsatacables.com/4-port-pcie-3-0-x16-to-u-2-s...

But u2 disks are at least 2 times more costly per GB. Like 40tb costs 10k$. This is too much IMO.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#228

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

A VPS provider that allows the customer to upload and boot their own custom kernels

These kernels could be for _any_ operating system that runs on the hardware, e.g., NetBSD

A. This already exists

B. This does not exist

Re: Why Self-Host?

#229

Post by perilunar »

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…

You can make modern single-page web apps with a LAMP back-end if you want. PHP is perfectly capable of serving database query results as JSON, and Apache will happily serve your (now static) HTML and JS framework-based page.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#230

Post by jraph »

throwzasdf wrote: post #167
singron wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.

> For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Been selfhosting personal low traffic email since the 1990's, I don't have that problem.

Me too, since 2016. I had issues with Microsoft, but it has been otherwise flawless.
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