Something pikapods looked neat at first then soon I realised the costs add up and add up a lot. One day I was calculating it at pikapods at I realised I had crossed 27 USD/m and I wasn't even finished. Like those streaming services - everything on a new streaming service i.e a new pod and they cost separately. I wish there was a service which would take away the pain of installation and maintenance away from me but let me host a lot of absolutely single user (i.e. only I'd access that of course) and as light weight as it can get and as low in usage at it gets on one single "pod" or "instance" or "box" and charge for that. Also, it's not a pikapods or pikapods' problem, it's a general problem I believe.
What I Self Host
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: What I Self Host
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.
I do have backup storage, of course. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync. And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for l…
> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS
Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
Re: What I Self Host
#103> I pay for a cheap droplet at DigitalOcean, about $5 per month, and an additional dollar for backup. Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.
No, it just means running the software on a server you control. That can be a physical server at home, or it can be something like DigitalOcean.
Re: What I Self Host
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [Paraphrased] Words mean different things to different people! Anyone can choose any definition they want! No, words have quite definite meanings. Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.
> No, words have quite definite meanings. Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally Words change meaning frequently throughout history, depending on how they are (mis)used. Or they can change meaning depending on context or part of the country/world. https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-...…
> Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite.
It doesn't mean the opposite. People misuse it a lot in that way, but they are quite wrong.
Re: What I Self Host
#105I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…
Self hosting does not, and never did, mean solely running a physical server yourself. It means that you are running the services from a server you control. That can be a physical server, but a VPS fits the bill just fine. You're correct that terms have meanings, but this term has never meant what you're trying to constrain it to.
Re: What I Self Host
#106How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
I agree. Good software should be configurable, not opinionated. It's fine to have defaults, but if you can't change the defaults to suit you then the software isn't very good.
Re: What I Self Host
#107Side note - Grafana actually looks quite a lot better in light mode.
Re: What I Self Host
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere. Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hos…
What you describe is an unfortunate result of the terrible bandwith situation at your (and others’) location. It is not, however, a compelling argument to redefine a term to suit your liking. (Also, with 4G, 5G, and satellite-based Internet, an alternate (albeit low-bandwith) route for emergency access is fairly straightforward to set up.)
Sorry, but nobody chose you as the arbiter of terminology. You can call your option home-hosting if you'd like, but we'll keep considering our scenarios to be self-hosting.
Re: What I Self Host
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home. My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.
It depends of your needs and resources of course but you can keep in some drawer or basement some old or small PC and you basically do not have to spend money on this, but for paid servers you have to spend 20-50$/month for something sensible. 1tb of backup in some s3 service costs like 120$ per year, and 1TB is not that much. In reality paid servers will be close to 1k$/year and in that price you can have sensible m…
Sure, I could get a server at home, but then I have to figure out how to make it quiet enough that I don't notice it while keeping it from overheating - something that's hard enough to do with the equipment I already have. And then I have to worry about what happens if somebody decides to have fun trying to DDOS something on my home connection. Again, easier to rent a dedicated server so I don't have to worry about it.
Re: What I Self Host
#110How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
>I want it to do what I tell it.
Me too, but writing software that does whatever user tells it to do, in a consistent and robust way, is very hard. Making it accessible and developing good UX for that kind of software is even harder. This is why a lot of heavily-customizable software, IMO, is so hard to use and maintain in the long run.
On the other hand, if the developer, who is by definition immersed in the domain, can use their experience to make good decisions and enforce them with limitations, the resulting software has a higher chance to be easier to use and easier to maintain.
I tend to gravitate towards "opinionated" software with very limited customizability because in my experience that kind of software is of better quality, on average.