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Self-Host All the Things?

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#31

Post by lucb1e »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #2

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

It doesn't suit everything, but 10mbps can already be plenty for self hosting. Apparently youtube's 1080p stream is ~6 mbps¹. Count on some overhead, but I would say that 10 mbps upload should be enough for most types of content so long as it's just you and your friends using it. If it's a text blog (with css, site logo, etc. of course), 10mbps will easily survive the HN homepage at #1 position.

Perhaps a photography blog, where you don't want to drag the jpg quality down to "looks fine without zooming" levels, might be more of a struggle. Or if your goal is to share flashable images for a raspberry pi or so (that can easily be gigabytes), yeah then this is not going to be a good experience even without concurrent users.

Definitely you'll be fine to host things like:

- email

- a website (blog, CV, hobby, link shortening... can be anything) if you don't overload it with huge CSS/JS bundles

- chat server, such as Matrix or an IRC bouncer

- live editing notepad like etherpad, cryptpad, codimd

- software development stuff, like a unit test server or a git server (maybe not if you're the Linux kernel with gigabytes of history), perhaps a build server depending on the size of the binaries (CLI vs GUI)

- game servers: most real-time games (e.g. shooters) will run fine at low bandwidth if your latency is stable (let alone turn-based games), presuming it's just you and some friends playing, maybe not if you want to provide commercial game hosting services

- backup server if are fine driving home for doing restores, especially if you mostly backup when you're at home anyway

- "client" services like web scraping, e.g. I fetch some game's leaderboards regularly (with permission) and provide statistics for them, and monitor a river for giving me notifications in certain cases, which take negligible amounts of bandwidth

- home automation that needs to talk to third-party services or you want to use outside of the house

Probably there are more uses to be thought of. I can only say to not let your dreams be dreams :D

¹ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is...

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#34

Post by contradictioned »

margorczynski wrote: post #29

As for hosting your own apps I found Hetzner VPS or something similar to be very good. Just pack them up into a docker-compose with your CI/CR pushing an image into a repository and you can host a lot of low-medium traffic solutions on a single box with the cost being a fraction of "the Cloud" (especially PaaS). On the box there is a single Nginx acting as a reverse proxy to the exposed compose ports offloading SSL.…

I have something similar, but with traefik instead of nginx. Traefik integrates very nicely with docker using labels, such that the labels configure e.g. domain, path, http-auth etc for the web service running in a container.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#35

Post by locustous »

gwbrooks wrote: post #10
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

You can get high deliverability -- the keys, whether you're using your own servers or someone else's come down to a clean list that won't generate complaints and staying within the TOS of your mailserver host or third-party SMTP service. Host your mail-creation/list-management/analytics stack yourself (I like Mautic and MailWizz but there are other options) and use a third party for SMTP services. Amazon SES charges…

I've had really poor deliverability from SES. Our emails went straight to spam on many providers. Just trying to do email verification on new signups.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#36

Post by lucb1e »

dijit wrote: post #7
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #2

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

I guess that depends on where you live, I have almost the same upload vs download speed on my ISP Bahnhof in Sweden. Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.

> I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.

I've hosted a Tor exit node and other questionable stuff as a teenager, going from 1mbps upload to 50 mbps today. The site has been on the HN homepage, sometimes get featured on news sites like zdnet (that article gave me clicks for years on end), plus I run a file sharing service where anyone can post literally anything but the links are valid for one day. It has definitely hosted links to phishing and malware in the past (and I combat that when I see it, like replacing the short link with an info page "this was a phishing page" + infos).

In ~15 years, I never noticed anyone trying to take down the site. But your sentiment keeps being echoed in places like r/selfhosted and moves people to put their services behind some traffic inspection service, reducing the decentralized to a few places where all traffic passes through (often with decryption keys made available to them). It's still good to self host even if you do that, but I do feel a bit conflicted about that and wouldn't do it myself.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#37

Post by nitnelave »

justin_oaks wrote: post #19

I thought this article would go into more than a handful of apps. What apps do you think work well for self-hosting, even if it limited to us tech folk? I've self-hosted Grafana and InfluxDB for monitoring and metrics and found them OK to self host. The authentication and TLS setups were the most annoying. I've self hosted a few kinds of wiki software, but I eventually settled on a combination of a single Tiddlywiki…

I got fed up installing OpenLDAP for user management, so I made LLDAP, targeting the Goldilocks zone of the article: simple to setup/manage, but powerful enough for most self-hosting needs.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#38

Post by dijit »

rationalist wrote: post #23
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails? If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that business I never had any business with starts spamming me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask for permission. Unfortunately I…

> How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong address, and thus a random person receiving your emails?

Double opt-in.

You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used to send you an email with a link to click to complete the process.

For transactional email this would be handled by getting people to either create an account or use Paypal for guest checkout. (this was 2012)

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#40

Post by linsomniac »

Self-hosting is a big operations problem, with few tools to automate it.

Long ago, I had an associate tell me that he was having some success with setting up Wordpress sites for local political organizations. I said to him: "Oh, that's really neat! What are you doing to ensure that the sites stay up to date with security patches?" His response was completely unrelated to my question, which I figured was my answer and was why there are so many hacked sites out there.

Anything I deploy needs to have an upgrade plan. Ideally, something that provides a package (either on distro or a repo the package provides), so "apt update" will resolve it. Docker can be a good way as well, Sentry does a pretty good job at this.

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