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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#21

Post by dna_polymerase »

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…

For some things your local network is enough, like personal pictures and other private files. E-Mails I would suggest to host in a datacenter. Not necessarily in AWS but a local company offering hosting.

For those who feel unable top securely self host I'd suggest looking into smaller providers of hosted E-Mail solutions. A large number of federated services is better than everyone being on Google Workspace or MS360.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#22

Post by erulabs »

We're not quite publicly launched yet, but I've been working on making self-hosting easier for several years now. People often ask "why would I self-host?" and it's hard to pin down one answer - instead the answer depends on your values - but there is an answer. This post is excellent because it's not "do it for security" or "do it to see fewer ads" or "do it to fight big tech" or "don't give photos of your infant to Facebook". It's all of those reasons, but it's also more broadly (and deeper in the kool-aid), because it helps fix the internet itself.

> This engineering talent is supposed to be solving world’s problems but instead they are ensuring how everyone wastes their time

Agreed! If software was sold for its utility instead of its addictive properties - this might start to change. Self-hosted / open-source software does need plenty of "hosted" accoutrements though: backups, remote access, etc. Shameless self-promo: we're trying to solve this over at https://kubesail.com

Re: Start Self Hosting

#23

Post by wolpoli »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #7

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 t…

It sounds like part of the difficulty has to do with the general poor quality of online tutorials. There is a need for properly written guide books and magazines, but unfortunately, it seems like there is no way to pay for people to write them.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#24

Post by aww_dang »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

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. A…

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

Re: Start Self Hosting

#25

Post by LeSaucy »

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…

I am comfortable re-building my self hosting setup from scratch/backup. I enjoy the sense of agency being able to fix something myself vs wait for a cloud service to return. As I rely on my self hosted setups more, I also build in the appropriate amount of high availability features required. You will learn a TON of skills that are sideways related to software engineering. It's very empowering to be nearly entirely self sufficient with your profession. I can write/test/deploy software (ie pay the bills) and never have some critical service or infrastructure carpet pulled out from underneath you(ie dockerhub,github) and prevent you from doing your work.

This is such a niche attitude/market but it has been incredible to see the surge of self-hosted applications/services over the last 5 years.

It is also relatively easy these days with modern ci/cd tools to have a "portable" enough stack that in the event of an emergency you could purchase a few linode instances and be migrated to a vps environment in an afternoon.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#27

Post by gen220 »

judge2020 wrote: post #13

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.

I agree coming up with a good backup strategy is an essential ingredient to long-term-sustainable self-hosting.

Speaking for myself, I don't have the goal of 100% detaching myself from "the grid", so to speak. I still want to pay an ISP to act as a gateway to the internet, and want to pay the local electric company to power my house.

To me, "backups" are a commodity service, like internet service and electricity.

Dumb file servers are offered by any number of places for a price lower than the cost of in-housing that service, and with a negligible switching cost at for my workload.

I'm personally OK with having one relatively shitty local mirror, and a background task that rsync's to backblaze. If BB makes noises about going under, I can migrate aws s3, rsync.net, digital ocean, whatever entity wants to charge me the least for my workload.

I don't think NAS's or ZFS are strict requirements, although playing with them can be fun.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#28

Post by nfriedly »

I've been pretty happy with my local Unraid server. I have a few things running on it, including Plex for my music library and Nextcloud for notes, file storage, and automatic photo uploads from my phone.

The software and Nextcloud data are all on an SSD, but the Nextcloud data gets a nightly backup to a mechanical hard drive. The music doesn't have any backup, but I could always re-rip the CDs if I had to.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#29

Post by ndneighbor »

themodelplumber wrote: post #9

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…

I think the granularity of control is just as important as where the app is hosted imo. Its perfectly valid to make a fair compromise on ease of management vs. being able to vendor your own versions. And especially with how great Tailscale/Wireguard networking is nowadays, you really can make that line blur between your own network + a cloud provider.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#30

Post by rank0 »

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 colo as well? Do I get physical access to the data center?

Wish I could find some guides on this topic. 95% of blog post tutorials are just ads for the latest trendy cloud startup/language framework.

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