Basic question: If I wanted a simple self hosting solution for a bot with a database, what is the simplest solution / provider I can go with. This bot is just for me doesn't need to be accessible to the general public. Thanks
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CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
121–130 of 570 posts
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Inter…
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale. Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code th…
> It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that.
Sure, but opening up one port is a much smaller surface than exposing yourself to a whole cloud hosting company.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#123Tailscsle was never the unlock for me, but I guess I never was the typical use case here. I have a 1U (or more), sitting in a rack in a local datacenter. I have an IP block to myself. Those servers are now publicly exposed and only a few ports are exposed for mail, HTTP traffic and SSH (for Git). I guess my use case also changes in that I don’t use things just for me to consume, select others can consume services I h…
Curious how long you've been sitting on the IP block. I've been nosing around getting an ASN to mess around with the lower level internet bones but a /24 is just way too expensive these days. Even justifying an ASN is hard, since the minimum cost is $275/year through ARIN.
Is that the minimum for an ASN? /24 is a lot of public IP space! I'd expect just to get a static IP from and ISP if I were to coloc like this
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy. I’ll bite. You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor. I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending bran…
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Yeah, they’re amazing value. I paid $125 CAD for a 4th gen i7 with 16GB of RAM about 5 years ago. It’s been running almost 24/7 ever since with no issues.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#125What I’d really like is to run the admin interface for an app on a self hosted system behind firewalls, and push read replicas out into the cloud. But I haven’t seen a database where the master pushes data to the replicas instead of the replicas contacting the master. Which creates some pretty substantial tunneling problems that I don’t really want on my home network. Is there a replica implementation that works in t…
Tailscale will take care of the networking if you install it in both locations.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#126I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby.
I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#127I started self-hosting after noticing that my AWS bill increased from like $300 per month to $600 per month within a couple of years. When looking at my bill, 3/4 of the cost was 'AWS Other'; mostly bandwidth. I couldn't understand why I was paying so much for bandwidth given that all my database instances ran on the same host as the app servers and I didn't have any regular communication between instances. I suspect…
The most likely culprit was talking to other nodes via their public IP instead of their local ones. That gets billed as interent traffic (most expensive). The second culprit is your database or other nodes are in different AZs and you get a x-zone bandwidth charge.
Bandwidth inside the same zone is free.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#128idk exposing your home network to the world and trusting AI will produce secure code is not a risk I want to take
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could read man pages, ask people for help, read books... all of which are more closely aligned with self-hosting than outsourcing the whole process. I agree you could use LLMs to learn how it works, but given that they explain and do the actions, I suspect the vast majority aren't learning anything. I've helped students who are learning to code, and very often they just copy/paste back and forth and ignore the…
Sure, you could. But this isn't my job, it isn't my career. I just want Nextcloud running on a machine at home. I know linux and docker well enough to validate the ideas coming out of Gemini, and it helps me find stuff much faster than if I had to read man pages or read books. And I find the stuff that the average self hoster needs is so surface level that LLMs flawlessly provide solutions.
My push back isn't really on the possibility, it's on the irony. Self hosting is for many an ideological act that's about reducing dependencies on big tech, removing surveillance, etc. LLMs are essentially the antithesis of this.
If you're self hosting for other reasons then that's fine. I self host media for various reasons, but I also give all my email/calendar/docs/photos over to a big tech company because I'm not motivated by that aspect.
Re: CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
#130I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby. I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off thin…
Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.