211–220 of 625 posts
Self-hosting will have the same appeal as off-the-grid power: It's expensive and technically complex to implement, comes with it's own unique risks, and is way less convenient than sucking it down through the same pipe everyone else is. But it does provide a sense of empowerment.
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 love selfhosting. Right now I have this in my personal docker-compose.yaml: NextCould (3 installs, each their own MariaDB instance), HomeAssistant, Mosquitto, Vaultwarden, an Nginx served static website, Unifi controller, nzbget, Samba, librespeed, Wireguard, 4 MineCraft servers, AdGuard home, FoundryVTT and Traefik as reverse proxy for https (it's all 1 yaml file, everything! At least, excluding the HA config etc)…
> Btw, a nice podcast on Selfhosting Ironically, not self-hosted (served from fireside.fm).
I used to run an email server from my basement, now I also know that that is not something I want to self host anymore :)
If you can keep it local, Synology has good boxes that are reliable and largely plug and play. They require little to no maintenance.
If you really want mainstream adoption of self hosting then you need to stop calling it self hosting and rebrand to "personal cloud". The ease of use of cloud software includes zero install, zero management and consumption based pricing. Desktop and mobile had hardware packaged with software and a simple install mechanism with ease of use as a staple for mainstream users. Self hosting has zero standardisation around…
In theory you could probably find ways to rip and download everything you want to save, but it would require a massive amount of storage space just to be sure you never lose things that have a tiny chance of being missed.
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.