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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#261

Post by whatevaa »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #169
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…

Oh you can go a lot simpler than that. For 20 years I ran a web dev company that hosted bespoke web sites for theatre companies and restaurants. We ran FreeBSD, postgreSQL and nginx or H2O-server with sendmail. Never an issue and had fun doing it.

How interactive are those sites?

Re: Why Self-Host?

#262

Post by immibis »

auspiv wrote: post #135
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…

Email is the one notable exception for self hosting. I self host everything, but let email be handled by 3rd parties.

Self-host receiving email, even if you outsource sending it.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#263

Post by constantius »

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…

Do you run Yunohost in production? Did you consider Cloudron/Coolify/etc.? I use Yunohost for personal services, it's extremely robust, but has a few lacking features that you'd expect to have in more professional setups.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#264

Post by alance »

Felt like a ramble:

I've gone through a few different incarnations of self-hosting email and web over the years.

- Used to have a little rack machine sitting in a data center (that I would occasionally have to go and "fix" in the middle of the night, because flakey KVM). It was running Openvz (sort of a precursor to lxc/docker) to host my web projects and email. I think it was about $70 per month to host (this was maybe about 2009ish)

- At some point I moved things over to servers in Vultr, and then later, EC2 in AWS. And was quite happy for say, a decade or so. Accessing email meant ssh-ing over to a tmux session that was running mutt on the mail server. Email setup was postfix, procmail, bogofilter, mutt. Costs were more like $30-40 per month. I never liked having web-accessible servers "out there" that needed to be looked after, but I did my best to keep them locked down and actually, everything went fine. Ssh on a non-standard port with TOTP 2FA seemed to work very well.

- Recently my email has gone sort of "serverless" (big double-quotes there) and my web projects are now all AWS lambda functions sitting behind API Gateways + Cloudfront for static items. Email is AWS SES delivering to an S3 bucket which gets polled by a super basic script running in my local home network.

All my personal boxes (including my phone) are connected via wireguard (VPN) so I realised I don't actually need to have any globally accessible linux servers anymore (i.e. I can access email at home from anywhere via wireguard on my laptop/phone). The monthly bill is a couple of dollars (with billing alerts in AWS), and I like having less machines to worry about.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#265

Post by huksley »

Unfortunately, it is not realistic to have all the apps we frequently use as self-hosted. Mail, Instagram, etc, come to mind, all social apps.

I wish I could have a way to live sync between a cloud service and my own infrastructure, not only as a backup, and as a way to query that data.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#267

Post by jimangel2001 »

jopsen wrote: post #55
jimangel2001 wrote: post #44

My selfhosted stack includes: 1. immich 2. jellyfin 3. ghost 4. wallabag 5. freshrss 6. vaultwarden 7. nextcloud 8. overleaf/sharelatex 9. matrix server 10. pds for atproto

How do you upgrade to new versions? How do ship security patches? How do backup? And do you regularly test your backup? I feel like upgrade instructions for some software can be extremely light, or require you to upgrade through each version, or worse.

1. Watchtower

2. ?

3. ZFS duplicated pool with synced r-sync of snapshots on hetzner cloud

4. I don't really care about most of the upgrades because everything is behind a vpn.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#268

Post by pqs »

With Delta Chat nowadays you can easily host your own federated and secure chat service. It is great.
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