agreed google's customer and creators support is awful. I avoid them as much as possible.
Screw it, I’ll host it myself
231–240 of 495 posts
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#232I’ve been running Nextcloud on a DigitalOcean droplet, backed by S3 compatible storage from Wasabi for about 3 years now - it’s been pretty seamless. I think the old Nextcloud client syncing issues are a thing of the past (unless you work will really big files). Costs me $15/mo total. My Nextcloud instance gets one-way synced using rclone to a NAS once daily, and one-way synced weekly as a tar archive to Onedrive (1T…
Oh and I should mention, email hosted with Fastmail. Been super happy with it.
All the DNS setup etc is Terraform’d in the repo
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#233The problem I have always had when building elaborate home server setups is the "set it and forget it" nature of the systems I've installed bites me in the ass. Since it's not my full-time job to manage these systems, I'm really not familiar with them the way I might be with the systems I manage at work. These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it u…
Agree that documentation is key here. Anything you do that is beyond the vanilla "pave the install and plug it in" should be written down.
It doesn't need to be perfect - I have a onenote notebook that has the customizations that I've done to my router (static IP leases and edits to /etc/config/network), and some helper docs for a local Zabbix install in docker that I have. I recently how to migrate a database from one docker image to another and there is no way I would remember how to do that for the next time, so I wrote everything I learned down.
Just a simple copy/paste and some explanatory text is usually good enough. Anything more complex (e.g., mirroring config files in github) still (IMO) needs enough bootstrap documentation because unless you're working with it daily you're going to forget how your stuff works.
Additionally a part of my brain is worried that if I get hit by a bus my wife/kids will have a hell of a time figuring out what I did to the network. Onenote won't help them there but I haven't figured out the best way of dealing with this.
(I recognize the irony in a "I'll host it myself" post in storing stuff in onedrive with onenote but oh well)
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#234Y'know what, Although I'm currently self hosting my email, my websites, my storage, my SQL, my Active Directory etc., I'm also in the process of migrating the whole lot to Azure and/or independent hosting. Why? It's just too much hassle these days; I want my down-time to be no longer dictated by my infrastructure. I don't want to have to spend off-work hours making sure my boxes are patched, my disks are raided, my o…
Did you ever receive complaints that your emails are ending up in spam folder for Gmail/Outlook/ ? How about you receiving a lot of spam emails?
Not OP, but hosting my own mail as well (postfix, dovecot, spamassassin) for six seven now.
Had one issue with outgoing mails to Microsoft (hotmail I think) bouncing. The IP of my dedicated server had been blacklisted from before it was used by me, but I got them to remove it. No other issues I can think of.
I'm getting about 1-2 spam mails a month delivered to my inbox, usually french SEO spam. Not worth investigating.
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#235The diagram alone is more than enough of an argument to dissuade me from giving this a shot right now - it's simply too complicated and too much to manage for the amount of time I can dedicate to it. BUT - I'm really thankful for people who keep posting and sharing these sorts of projects; they're the ones iterating the process for the rest of us who need something a bit more turn-key. I'm excited to see this eventua…
i've actually daydreamed about starting a computing appliance company that would make a variety of services plug and play for consumers and small businesses, from email to storage, to networking, to security, and to smart home. it's actually the direction apple is headed, but they're encumbered by the innovator's dilemma, which leaves an opportunity for an upstart. google and facebook are similarly too focused on adt…
in the late 90's there was whistle, that partnered with isp's and delivered pretty much this - router, email, web host, storage space, calendar, firewall, and easy to configure with an isp.
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#236As a middle ground, you can also simply use Hetzner's hosted Nextcloud offering, which is likely (a) more reliable and (b) cheaper than a self-hosted setup on a VPS.
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#237I said "screw it" after my Oracle Cloud "always free" account was terminated with no recourse, a few days after having activity on the database building an application prototype, well under the resource limits. I'm now running a libvirt VM on my laptop to develop the prototype. Others have complained about Oracle Cloud's draconian practices. Doesn't sound like a company that wants to build a cloud business. Cheers
Oracle is extra slimey with their "always-free" stuff though. It's free in the sense that you'll have salesmen after you and always as in maybe two months.
GCP on the other hand...have been running on their always-free tier for years no. (One of those 1/4 cpu wordpress VMs)
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#238> I’m living in Germany, so the obvious choice was to spin up my instances in Vultr‘s* data center in Frankfurt, as ping is the lowest to that center for me. The author is probably aware of this, but just in case they aren't: Hetzner is an amazing company with two or three datacenters in Germany. I don't remember if any of them are in Frankfurt, but given they offer VPSs and beefy dedicated machines, I'd be fine trad…
I'm running a few bare-metal Hetzner servers (Falkenstein and Helsinki). Can recommend. Reliable, comparatively cheap and tickets are usually responded to within 24 hours. One time I even got through to the guy swapping defective hard drives on one of the servers in the data center by phone, since there was some other issue.
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#239The problem I have always had when building elaborate home server setups is the "set it and forget it" nature of the systems I've installed bites me in the ass. Since it's not my full-time job to manage these systems, I'm really not familiar with them the way I might be with the systems I manage at work. These systems cruise along for years, and when something finally does go belly-up, I can't remember how I set it u…
Oh and don't forget that now maybe you make everything work, but in two years time your setup won't be reproducible, because chances are the original images are not available any more, they got deleted from Docker Hub some months after you used them. Yeah, you should update them anyway for security... but the setup itself is not reproducible, and being forced to use the latest version of something, with the new idios…
Maybe, but when the original docker image is no longer available on docker hub, chances are there will be something better and even easier to setup. And with docker you don't care about installing / uninstalling apps and figuring out where that obscure setting was hidden - all you need is just a stock distro and a bunch of docker-compose.yml files, plus some mounted directories with the actual data.
Re: Screw it, I’ll host it myself
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am perpetually confused about why people think that self-hosting on a VPS solves their privacy and security problems. While I'm sure there are controls in place at reputable VPS providers, it wouldn't be too difficult for them to grab absolutely anything they want. Even disk encryption doesn't save you. You're in a VM, they can watch the memory if they need to. Using a VPS can also make you more identifiable. Your…
VPS doesn't solve privacy and security, it solves getting locked out of your account because some algorithm decided you were peddling child porn. If you want privacy and security and you don't trust your provider, then you have to build your own hardware and compile everything you run on it from vetted source, including your kernel. You can do it, but most people decide that on balance its better to trust someone.
Howso? The VPS can shut you down as well? You might say the migration path is easier, but there will be a weak link somewhere. Even if you put up a datacenter in the basement you need to connect to the internet somehow which can be taken away.