Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Start Self Hosting

rohanrd.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 625 posts

Re: Start Self Hosting

#101

Post by core-utility »

mrmattyboy wrote: post #77
blenderdt wrote: post #35

Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.

I'd love to see a blog post that says, this is how to setup X (I dunno.. mediawiki, owncloud, whatever).. and then go fully in-depth into _everything_ surrounding it.. security, backups, logging, alerting, monitoring, backup testing/restoration etc.. a blog post that really covers everything for a well-protected 21st century hosted application that won't leave the owner in tears after a year! There's honestly so many…

I think the hard part is that would be largely dependent on specific implementation, which itself is very opinionated. I could write a post on how I run, maintain, and secure Docker Container X on Ubuntu Y using vSphere with Synology and get 100 comments on why CentOS is better and I'm wasting time/money with vSphere over Proxmox, etc. Cloud doesn't have quite this problem. Once you've chosen a cloud provider, you have significantly fewer options in each category, minimizing this option-overload.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#102

Post by [deleted] »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #65

Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. If you're actually interested in self-hosting, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great resource for self-hosted apps. Roll up your sleeves, get prepared to get lost in documentation, and have some fun! You'll realize the tradeoffs of what to self-host and what not-to quickly as you start playing around with actual te…

[deleted]

Re: Start Self Hosting

#103

Post by kjs3 »

rank0 wrote: post #30

I run a few services from my home but still have to rely on aws/fly.io for some portions of my infrastructure. I really want is to learn how to rent rack space from a colocation. The documentation available does not make it easy to learn. Can I just buy an old 1U blade, throw xen on it and show up at my nearest colo? What do I need to preconfigure to ensure I have remote access without giving remote access to the col…

I've never worked with a colo vendor that once you contacted them didn't have exhaustive support for "how to we get to the point where we can start billing you", usually including an actual human that you can ask questions.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#104

Post by xwdv »

Although I once loved the idea of self-hosting, my opinion nowadays is that life is too short to self-host. Yea platforms will come and go and sometimes it sucks, but what we really need is easy ways to move data from one place to another, more than we need self-hosting.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#105

Post by JoshTriplett »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #78
yewenjie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That blog post literally mentions that link.

I know. Now I made a comment that helps self-hosters just as much as the OP with much less text and much less moralizing.

Your comment doesn't convince anyone to self-host who isn't already doing so, unlike this blog post. It's absolutely possible to write more concisely if you have a narrower target audience of people who already agree with you.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#106

Post by zozbot234 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #36
aww_dang wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this, I think they have some covers as well as other meta data. It has been years since I used it. https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps

Maybe I didn't explain myself well. Yes, I could get a data dump from many sources. It is a lot of work to turn that dump into a product that I self host.

You don't have to write that stuff. There is a fairly well-known project licensed under AGPL3, that's fine for self-hosting if perhaps not commercial use. Just search around.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#107

Post by Karrot_Kream »

haswell wrote: post #94
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. Now I made a comment that helps self-hosters just as much as the OP with much less text and much less moralizing.

One of the most important aspects of choosing a solution is understanding the problem first. There's a place for both: 1. Blogs that moralize and talk about a much larger philosophical underlying problem. These help the reader understand a problem that they may not have fully understood. Before, the problem was: "I need a place to host my photos". If that's your only problem, there's no reason not to choose something…

If you're trying to frame the problem in your mind like that, I suggest doing an HN search like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... to give you a good idea why people self-host. There's lots of prior art.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#108

Post by quesera »

bsder wrote: post #86
mhitza wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's E…

> If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's Encrypt certbot can automatically pull in a certificate Yeah, but don't have a mistake too many times, or Let's Encrypt will block you for a week until your rate limit times out. I hit this. I understand why Let's Encrypt has to do this, but it's very annoying and you have no choice but to do nothing for a week. There needs to be something in between Let…

Use the LetsEncrypt staging server for testing. When you have a process that works, switch to prod.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#109

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dvtrn wrote: post #93
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #65

Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. If you're actually interested in self-hosting, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great resource for self-hosted apps. Roll up your sleeves, get prepared to get lost in documentation, and have some fun! You'll realize the tradeoffs of what to self-host and what not-to quickly as you start playing around with actual te…

Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. not the first time I’ve seen such comments or sentiments close to it regarding the content of developer blogs, when one gets shared here. I ask most sincerely: isn’t that just one of the many reasons people chose to launch a personal blog in the first place?

It surely is. I prefer less of it which is why I made my comment.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#110

Post by sgt »

romanzubenko wrote: post #91

Self hosting can also be a great option to protect against authoritarian regimes. After my family’s VPN was banned in Russia a few weeks ago, it took me an hour to set up Wireguard server with Algo VPN on digital ocean. Now I’m supporting uncensored internet access for 3 families back home, while Russian authorities playing cat and mouse games with popular VPN providers.

Good luck on that side. Russians are great people and not everyone supports Putin.
Post reply on HN