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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#261

Post by olah_1 »

u2077 wrote: post #153

I don’t need a reason why to self host, I need nice, clear, up-to-date tutorials on how to self host various services. Self hosting should be easy enough for everyday people. Perhaps preconfigured servers that treat services just like apps. Once I have a server setup, I should be able to install (and uninstall) services in a single click. The OS can handle permissions and containers.

I am with you. I think the future is something like Umbrel[1].

Because frankly, I would rather have the server running on a little device in my home than having to mess around with things like SSH and a VPS. An app that is running on a little computer in my house is both more understandable and easier for me to maintain.

[1]: https://getumbrel.com/

Re: Start Self Hosting

#262

Post by Gigachad »

u2077 wrote: post #153

I don’t need a reason why to self host, I need nice, clear, up-to-date tutorials on how to self host various services. Self hosting should be easy enough for everyday people. Perhaps preconfigured servers that treat services just like apps. Once I have a server setup, I should be able to install (and uninstall) services in a single click. The OS can handle permissions and containers.

There are numerous projects which have attempted to create this.

https://sandstorm.io/ was the biggest one but as far as I can tell its largely unmaintained and most of the apps are outdated

https://yunohost.org/ probably has the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As well as security concerns about one insecure app giving access to the whole server.

Ultimately the problem is just extremely difficult / high maintenance. And no one wants to pay for this work.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#263

Post by Gigachad »

moonbas3 wrote: post #180
BonoboIO wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES! I think the single most important thing of any software is "how do i install this". Thats the first thing i search for on a github repo. And please no outdated tutorials, that sucks so bad ... that i give up and don't use it.

Most things offer a docker image, so maybe learn how to work with those.

It's not as easy as "just run the docker image". Maybe it is if you just want to run a single one. But as soon as you want to run multiple it becomes a very complex job of configuring nginx and lets encrypt. It took me several hours to work out how to host nextcloud and get the nginx config working.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#264

Post by lumost »

kodah wrote: post #98

Self-hosting is something that we should be constantly iterating on making easier; it's really the path forward for privacy centric folks. The main challenges are managing workload scheduling (SystemD is complicated for a layperson). Networking is another challenge; for instance, if you wanted all or part of these services to remain offline or on a Mesh VPN there's a lot of knowledge required. There's some projects t…

Having started my career in hosting, I would suggest that this world is unlikely to come back except for exceptionally small applications with minimal business impact. What does self-hosting provide which end-end encryption does not?

Self-hosting means:

- Needing to know how to configure your linux host across firewalls, upgrades, backups.

- Negotiating contracts with network service providers. While verifying that you have the right kind of optic on the network line drop.

- Thinking through the order of operations on every remote hands request, and idiot proofing them so that no one accidentally unplugs your DB.

- Making sure that you have sufficient cold spares that a server loss doesn't nuke your business for 6-12 weeks depending on how the hardware manufacturers view your business.

- Building your own monitoring, notifications, and deployment tools using both open source and in-house tools.

- Building expertise in all of your custom tools.

- A 6-20 week lead time to provision a build server.

- Paying for all of your hardware for 3-5 years, regardless of whether you will actually need it.

- Over-provisioning memory or CPU to make up for the fact that you can't get hardware fast enough.

- Getting paged in the middle of the night because the hardware is over-provisioned and something gets overwhelmed or a physical machine died.

- Dealing with the fact that an overworked systems engineer or developer is never making any component the best. And everything you touch will just passably work.

- Everyone will have their own opinions on how something should be done, and every decision will have long term consequences. Get ready for physical vs virtual debates till the heat death of the universe.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#265

Post by rglullis »

For those that avoid it on the grounds of "it is too hard to self-host", may I suggest a much simpler alternative? It takes two simple steps:

1) buy a domain name

2) Foment/patronize SMBs that can provide hosting for open source software alternatives.

That's it. By demanding open source alternatives, you are ensuring that the service vendor can not lock you in. By using your own domain, you get the freedom to port your services to anyone that offers better price/better support/better performance.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#266

Post by CommanderData »

evantahler wrote: post #183

The world of Synology products is fascinating in this regard. Take photos - They’ve got iOS and android apps that replace your photo app; a truly self-hosted server you run in your home with pretty easy to use DNS support tools. Even shared albums work without much fuss. I think they’ve invested in the UX in recent versions, and it shows. https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos

Photos is great but lacking. It seems like all of the other iterations of Synology's attempts to make a photos app.

It starts off great and then never receives any attention. I bet their working on Gallerys next.

Photos can be great but the facial recognition is extremely poor and not there yet..

Re: Start Self Hosting

#267

Post by throwaway684936 »

Not quite self-hosting, but in the same spirit I've slowly been working on a simple local archival system for anything I don't want to lose. It's changed my life.

Even across years of content, it's required less storage space than I expected. The more I archive, the less I need to rely on online search engines or worry about linkrot. It's also helped me cut down on how many tabs I keep open in fear of losing information.

If I can't recall some piece of information, I can do a fuzzy global search through the text of all articles I've saved in a specific category, for example. If I find some obscure fix for something deep in an old reddit or HN thread, you bet I'm archiving that so if I run into the same issue a year later I can easily fix it again without trawling through 50 Google results.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#268

Post by axlee »

throwaway684936 wrote: post #267

Not quite self- hosting , but in the same spirit I've slowly been working on a simple local archival system for anything I don't want to lose. It's changed my life. Even across years of content, it's required less storage space than I expected. The more I archive, the less I need to rely on online search engines or worry about linkrot. It's also helped me cut down on how many tabs I keep open in fear of losing inform…

What do you use to organize all of this unstructured data in a way that is searchable and retrievable?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#269

Post by devmunchies »

One thing I think would help the self-hosting community is a standardized method for tapping into repositories of scripts and functions. The next step is to build a UI on that platform and then I can do admin things from a self-hosted UI but it just runs several script for me behind the scenes. E.g. a button for check upgrade for my email server, a button for upgrading my email server, etc.

If administrative configuration became standardized, then it will become commoditized by hosting platforms.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#270

Post by treesknees »

kjs3 wrote: post #100
blenderdt wrote: post #35

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'm amused by the implications here that 1) the outsourced alternatives are better than you are at keeping up with the 'hard stuff', and 2) that in an outsourced scenario you can't "flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world". This thinking is why I can't tell you how many incident post-mortems I've done where I have to once again hear "...but, but, but...we outsourced this to them so this couldn't h…

Depends on whether you're referring to a SaaS provider or something more like a MSP.

I'd like to believe the engineers running Google Photos or iCloud are spending a lot more time on keeping my photos secure and available than I would be willing to put into a server running in my basement.

In the case of a business hiring an MSP to manage something complex like firewalls, Active Directory, server patching, then sure it's reasonable to assume that if they made a mistake, the impact would be equivalent to you making the mistake yourself.

It's possible you need to tell whomever you are reporting to for these post-mortems, they should be outsourcing to reputable service providers in order to free up time and man-hours, not necessarily just to save financially. I suspect that is the real problem.

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