Start Self Hosting

This article is a bit delusional and oblivious to market dynamics.

1. Privacy: Self hosting is not necessarily more private than cloud services. The security of self hosted services is only as good as the effort put into maintaining it. Who do you think invests more in security: the giant corporation or a free open source project? Even if the project is well maintained, there are many ways your server can be compromised. It’s only as safe as you’re willing to make it. The best way to be safe for me is not self hosting, but cloud hosting with E2E encryption.

2. Longevity: even though self hosting technically means nobody can discontinue your service, everything eventually gets discontinued. Your server will be out of date at some point. You will need to update it. You might be too busy to do it and your server will become a security risk. Again, middle path and ideal way for me here is: use cloud services, encrypted, AND save the data locally as well.

3. Usability & market dynamics: John Doe doesn’t have the time or knowledge to self host, which makes self hosting dangerous for him for the reasons mentioned above. If you’re going to self host, you need to know what you’re doing. If you do it half way, you’re better off staying with a cloud service. The cloud will always win because it’s easier for everyday people. And because it wins, there will always be more money and development happening in it. We need more cloud services that use encryption by default, and provide data migration tools. The more this becomes a standard, the more the “big cloud giants” will have to step up and match this new standard. For me, THIS is the way not just nerds but everybody benefits from a safer, more reliable Internet.

I explicitly do not want to be in control of my own data. I don't trust myself with it. A third-party is better equipped to manage it over time. This is both a common and rational position.

I've been thinking about buying rack space from a colo in my metro area.

Hosting at home is something I used to do religiously for over a decade, but I really don't like all the hackarounds and shitty ISP/DNS/port problems anymore.

It's definitely not cheap to do this, but there are a lot of fun upsides. Just having an excuse to get out of the house to badge in at a DC is a nice mix-up for me. Everything I do at work is cloud hosted, so I rarely get the visceral experience anymore.

When I have begun to install and manage servers, more than 20 years ago, I did not have any kind of prior experience and I did not have anyone whom I could ask.

So I have just read the handbook, but I have read it completely, which needs more than a day.

It is likely that there are also other operating systems and Linux distributions that have good documentation, but I can testify only about those that I have used in the beginning, the FreeBSD handbook and then the Gentoo Linux handbook.

Both handbooks were good enough to convert anyone into a system administrator.

Unfortunately, both handbooks are not as good in 2022 as they were e.g. in 2002, because they have not always been updated after every change, or the updates have not been as detailed as the original parts of the handbooks.

Even so, both handbooks remain reasonably good today.

Especially the FreeBSD handbook is good for someone who lacks experience, because FreeBSD is much more self-contained, i.e. there are a lot of choices that have already been made for you and you do not have to worry about them.

So for someone who is inexperienced, I believe that the fastest way to managing a server remains to read the complete FreeBSD handbook and install and configure a server based on that.

There are programs which are available only on Linux, but the administration of a Linux server requires much more work than for a FreeBSD server (even if much less than for a Windows server), so for a beginner I think that FreeBSD with its more complete documentation and less possible choices is easier to try.

What lay person does anything with systemd though? I have all my services in a docker-compose.yaml... Sure, I remember the days before systemd, I remember upstart, Gentoo's rc.conf. I still think it's useful I can find my way trough the internals of a Linux box, but for me all that stuff is far in the past. This is how it goes nowadays: Install the system in 20 min, clone the infra as code, put the data back, start the infrastructure... Where does the init system still play a role?