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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#11

Post by mohaine »

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…

IANAL but I believe another reason to true self host, at least in the US, is that rules for things inside your house have extra protection. Sure they can still get a warrant, but this is a totally different level than what they need to get the same data off of a VPS.

Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#12

Post by quaintdev »

stathibus wrote: post #6

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.

Good point. I use Photoprism to manage my pictures.

https://photoprism.app/

Re: Start Self Hosting

#13

Post by judge2020 »

What self hosting stories don't seem to focus enough on is backup and encryption, as these are the main issues with server-in-your-house hosting. Even disregarding fire/water damage it's not uncommon to have hard drives die outright, which is a problem if you didn't think to (or had the money to) set up zfs for data redundancy purposes.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#14

Post by ndneighbor »

This is an important call to action, in a world where your user experience of an application is determined by a Product Manager who may be stat-maxxing a graph, I hope that we can see a resurgence of self-hosted apps.

Selfishly speaking, I work at Railway and our community maintains a list of self-hosted apps (we call them starters) that people can deploy to our platform. You can checkout the list of apps here: https://railway.app/starters and we even accept submissions via our GitHub repo: https://github.com/railwayapp/starters (Just reply to me here and we can get it reviewed for ya.)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#16

Post by cube2222 »

No thank you.

I'll have to take care of backups, security, availability, updates, etc. I prefer to use a managed solution.

If you don't want to lose data on being banned, just do your own backups, which are by themselves much less time consuming to handle than full-blown self-hosting.

I'm fine with the occasional service being axed, I'll just migrate to another one. Often, somebody writes a migration script and open sources it, making that even easier.

It is good though to promote and vote with your wallet for services that give you good and dependable support.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#17

Post by ozim »

dlivingston wrote: post #10

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…

Even better do you really need "self hosting" many people will be good enough with external drive.

You can also setup something like Synology which is good enough for layman and if you keep it in your local network it is basically easier than configuring some old PC.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#18

Post by NelsonMinar »

Self hosting also implies building (or using) your own self hosted product. That's a significant requirement, particularly if you want social features.

I'm going through this dilemma with books. Goodreads lost my account of nine years. I've managed to recover most of the data from a backup and set up my own blog. I'm self hosting! But my blog is very spare and is not backed by a database of books, book covers, etc. Also it has no social features, no easy way to see other people's reviews or find related books or... I could imagine building all those things but that's like building a whole product! I could also imagine some self hosted book product I could just use (analagous to Picasa in the story) but it doesn't happen to exist.

Meanwhile there's a pretty great product for books in Goodreads, other than the crippling disaster of losing a user's account. Also some good cloud competitors like The StoryGraph. So maybe I should just use their product and hope my data is safe.

PS: I was at Google when Picasa was acquired. My memory is that the plan was always to focus on the hosted version. Maintaining a desktop standalone product was very much not in the Google business model.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#19

Post by inetknght »

dlivingston wrote: post #10

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…

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

It's a good place to start/test. But don't open your firewall: do all of your testing on your internal network. You really don't want to open your network to the kind of problems that can occur while you're learning.

When you're ready to really host things then you should rent a cheap shared instance, or maybe a low-priced dedicated server. You can pick up something decent for $10/mo. That's not much if you're skilled enough (eg, employable enough) to learn how to self-host.

For your internal network you can use a pi-hole to set up all of your DNS entries so you can even visit "http://example.com" and have it point to an IP on your LAN.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#20

Post by vbezhenar »

dlivingston wrote: post #10

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…

If you need mail, you need VPS with good reputation. Otherwise hosting from your basement is an option if you've got accessible IP address.
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