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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#2

Post by spansoa »

I haven't tried it, but Piwigo[0] looks promising for photo albums & management. That or Ente[1] although Ente doesn't have a self-hosting option like Piwigo.

If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the hard-drives corrupted, etc

That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped, so having /BOTH/ a VPS and an in-house on-prem solution means you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and you have a contingency plan in place, which one day may be worth it. It buys you peace of mind because of the redundancy.

[0] https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo

[1] https://ente.io/

Re: Start Self Hosting

#3

Post by cubesnooper »

spansoa wrote: post #2

I haven't tried it, but Piwigo[0] looks promising for photo albums & management. That or Ente[1] although Ente doesn't have a self-hosting option like Piwigo. If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the h…

> That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped

Well, there are other reasons to prefer using external hosting. Home connections are typically port‐filtered, have dynamic IP addresses, and have a low IP reputation, and your ISP selection is very limited. Whereas if using a VPS there are so many options that it’s easy to shop around.

But you can still self‐host while getting the benefits of a VPS. Just forward ports from the VPS over a WireGuard tunnel to your real machine. Then all the actual infrastructure is on hardware you control, and the cloud provider has no access to your TLS private keys.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#6

Post by stathibus »

The author mentions but doesn't address the Picasa problem, which incidentally is the one I care most about.

What do I do when all the useful software is cloud based and requires me to store my data with the service provider in order to use it? Self hosting is not a solution.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#7

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

Self-hosting is not always the answer for a lot of people.

Self-hosting are not easy for laypeople (someone who are not familiar with it) to try to get their feet wet with it. For myself, I am on the level of beginner and I do struggle to stay on self-hosting path. When I set it up, I learn there is more steps that I have to do because the documentations and guides did not bother to explain those step and expect me to research more to find the information about it.

My biggest beef with self-hosting is that they expect us to set up the SSL/TLS certificate without explaining the step to set it up. Some guides does have section about it but never provide the details about creating CA for my self-hosting needs. I turn to Google/DDG to find information about it and they are all over the place or leading into dead-end.

There are few others thing I have gripes with self-hosting. I like self-hosting and they are pleasing for me as I don't need to rely on third party solution. The gripes I have is the documentations that are over the place or sparse information about it.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#9

Post by themodelplumber »

That's a good post on the topic, thanks. Like a lot of others I'm a hybrid-self-hoster. I do rely on some third-party, third-party-hosted or other cloud services, but I also spend a lot of time bringing things back home when I can.

It's tricky to be in that hybrid-box since the conversation in this area is very dichotomous--cloud things OR my own thing--but overall I like keeping my options open and swimming with the herd ;-) in making sensible use of cloud services when it seems appropriate.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#10

Post by dlivingston »

Follow-up question:

Should someone interested in self-hosting do it from a literal PC in your basement, configured as a server?

Or is self-hosting on AWS / DreamHost / whatever good enough?

I ask because I like self-hosting a lot, especially when market solutions don’t really do what I need them to.

But security, man, that worries me. I can’t tell you what a three-way handshake truly is, or what a signed certificate really means: so self-hosting my own email / web server / etc. from my basement gives me a fear that someone, somewhere will take advantage of a vulnerability in some system component that I’ve never even heard of.

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