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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#251

Post by neoromantique »

tracker1 wrote: post #153
neoromantique wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's essentially what I do (with a little extra step of having a dedicated server in Hetzner peered with my homelab with wireguard to use as internet facing proxy + offsite backup server). Ah, also docker is managed with komo.do, but otherwise it is simple GUI over docker-compose

That's cool... I really should take a next step to bridge my home setup with my OVH server. It's a mixed bag, mostly in that the upgrade to "business" class from home is more than what I pay a month to rent the full server and IP block on OVH... But I've got a relatively big NAS at home I wouldn't mind leveraging more/better. Aside: I really want to like NextCloud, but as much as I like aspects of it, I don't like pl…

I don't mean proper L2 bridging, I do it with wireguard, as I am behind CGNAT at home.

It's mostly to unify VLANs and simplify management (i.e everything is routed through my main router, rather than loose tunnels on servers/vm's)

Re: Why Self-Host?

#252

Post by ikawe »

forever_frey wrote: post #241
ikawe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One tricky thing about maps, as they relate to privacy, is that the earth is large. Compare that to encrypted email: if I’m sending you an encrypted message, the total data involved is minimal. To a first approximation, it’s just the message contents. But if I want “Google Maps but private,” I first need access to an entire globe’s worth of data, on the order of terabytes. That’s a lot of storage for your (usually mo…

The entire planet's worth reverse geocoding data is ~120gb. The map tiles file for whole planet is also ~120gb, and they both are precompiled, so you don't need hundreds of gbs of RAM to run your local planet. It's easier than you probably think nowadays. Not mobile-size, but local server-size

I'd love it if it were easier than I think, because I spend a lot of time thinking about it! I host maps.earth, which is a planet sized deployment of Headway mapping stack (which I also maintain).

To first order, you're right on about the storage size of a vector tileset and an geocoding dataset based on OpenStreetMap. But Google maps is a lot more than that!

Headway uses Valhalla for most routing. A planet wide valhalla graph is about ~100gb of storage. It doesn't produce reasonable transit directions. Transit is an even tougher cookie.

OpenTripPlanner gives good transit routing, but it doesn't scale to planet-wide coverage. We've settled on a cluster of OTP nodes for select metro areas - each one being on the order of 5-10GB of RAM.

https://about.maps.earth/posts/2023/03/adding-transit-direct...

So, I'd say we have some of the pieces of a general purposes mapping tool that could replace Google Maps usage, which you could host yourself.

But we don't have satellite imagery, real time traffic data, global transit coverage, rich POI data (like accurate opening hours, photographs, reviews).

Do all people want all these features? Probably not, but a lot of people seem to want at least some of it and it's not obvious to me that they'll be quickly solved.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#253

Post by turtlebits »

mamcx wrote: post #216
turtlebits wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work for databases unless you stop the container. You'll likely end up with a corrupt backup.

? Any decent RDBMS can be backup live without issues. You only need to stop for restore (well without going with complex tricks)

Yes, but not by "simply" snapshotting the volume/disk as the previous poster suggested.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#254

Post by 63stack »

manmal wrote: post #246
mikepurvis wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s reasonable to understand that nginx/caddy serving static files (or better yet a public s3 bucket doing so) is way, way less of a risk than a dynamic application.

Of course, that’s true for those web servers. If kept up to date. If not, the attack surface is actually huge because exploits are well known.

What are these huge attack surfaces that you are talking about? Any links?

Re: Why Self-Host?

#255

Post by esseph »

aborsy wrote: post #233
esseph wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also makes sense if you run public services at home

Public in the sense that the actual content is public (like a blog), sure, anyone can access it, so does the reverse proxy). Since it’s public, I Would still take the trouble entirely out to a provider. Public in the sense that the front page is public, and the client still need to authenticate to the service at home, in this case, that does not make sense (the user authenticates to reverse proxy, which authenticates…

> I Would still take the trouble entirely out to a provider.

Frankly, because you don't trust your own abilities in that area, or you're simply not interested in taking responsibility for that piece - and that's totally fine.

> Public in the sense that the front page is public, and the client still need to authenticate to the service at home

Maybe your authentication doesn't live at home, or on the home network. It could be on a vps or a cloud radius/ldap/etc auth service.

Some people have been writing code for 30+ years. I've been running internet facing systems for 30+. Different backgrounds, different levels of comfort and enjoyment out of different things!

Re: Why Self-Host?

#256

Post by zwilliamson »

I think one major improvement in technology that allows self hosting in the year 2025 is mesh VPN’s like Tailscale.

Sure, you could run your own firewall and what not but the mesh VPN with it’s simple set up. Makes it a whole lot easier to access your home services.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#257

Post by pabs3 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #103
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…

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…

There are distros who keep up to date with CVEs for you, many of them are set up to automatically update packages, automatically restart processes and reboot after Linux kernel upgrades. Once every few years you'll need to upgrade to the latest version of the distro, thats usually pretty quick though.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#258

Post by nickthegreek »

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?

n150

Re: Why Self-Host?

#259

Post by azemetre »

j23n wrote: post #190

I've stepped back from self-hosting after realizing that 90% of my use case was to keep calendar/contacts/files/photos/passwords in sync between my laptop and phone. I'm now experimenting with a files-based approach, using syncthing for the p2p syncing, and it works really well. No VPS or home server to setup and maintain, no security worries, no database migrations, no extra backups, no tinkering with Caddy configs.

Could you explain how you handle P2P between mobile and web? That’s the one hurdle I can’t figure out.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#260

Post by whatevaa »

kijin wrote: post #57
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…

> No need for CDN etc unless you are talking about millions of requests per day. Both caddy and nginx can handle 100s of millions of static requests per day on any off-the-shelf computer without breaking a sweat. You will run into network capacity issues long before you are bottlenecked by the web server software.

Network capacity and geo-proximity are the issues, not number of requests.
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