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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#321

Post by aetherspawn »

My business just started self-hosting, but we severely underestimated the cost of air conditioning (installation), SFP adapters, enterprise Ethernet and electrical infrastructure and ended up spending as much on peripheral stuff as servers.

So far the whole operation has cost around $30k (small business). We stand to save $1-1.5k per month at the moment, less the cost of symmetrical fiber about $500/mo.

Next year it will pay off but this year we definitely won’t break even on the servers.

How has this has changed our culture? Well, what I have enjoyed about the whole process is now we have a bunch of spare capacity, so we can spin up demo servers for SMB clients for even a few months and it “costs us nothing”. Then we can arrange payment later when they fully appreciate the service. We don’t take any risks anymore with bills that need to be settled to cloud providers. This has changed how “generous” we are in the outset with our clients. It feels really healthy to be able to do this.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#322

Post by thoughtfunction »

I've been using an app called Mylio as a replacement to Picasa. Everything is locally hosted, the apps are very fast with large libraries and you can have peer to peer syncing between multiple devices for the same library, including your phone. I like it a lot!

Re: Start Self Hosting

#323

Post by remram »

roydivision wrote: post #201
sylware wrote: post #171

Bringing self hosting to lambda users is _REALLY_ hard and Big Tech won't let you do it too easily. Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus), or won't support no-DNS email address and servers (which is RFC from the start) or won't have the decency to handle grey listing or will send all your emails to their spam boxes (gogol) even though ppl did remove your emails from the…

"lambda users"? I've not heard that term before.

It is a French idiom, meaning a random or ordinary user.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#324

Post by hsn915 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #247
kodah wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson , no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works . Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd…

>For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson, no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works. In comparison to system V initd startup files, systemd unit files are, arguably, less complicated. I'd say the "complexity" of systemd unit files is mostly irrelevant to end users. For a relatively non-technical user, i…

I'd go a step further: programs aimed to make self-hosting easy should not even need a package manager. They should be self contained (statically linked) binaries. Luckily we have Go which makes this very easy to achieve, and to make things better, Go is designed for web servers. I believe we've had this ability for almost a decade, and still no one is harnessing it to make self-hosting easy and reliable.

Further more, they should require absolultely zero configuration to get up and running. We've had SQLite for many years now, so it's easy to make a webserver that does not require a separate sql server to be installed and configured in order to get going. (There are also non-sql embedded data storage engines, many of them written in pure Go, eliminating the CGO problem).

Ideally the user will download a program for their own operating system (say, windows). They will run this program, provide it with the ip and root password of their linux server which they rented from some provider, and this program will then upload the actual server program to the host machine and launch it.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#325

Post by itsjloh »

gcommer wrote: post #234

Lots of good points about the challenges of self-hosting throughout this thread, especially maintenance, security, and time-investment. Here's my solution to all of them: Invest in your common infra. Docker provides stable images configured primarily with env vars. I have a docker-compose host with logging/monitoring/alerting. All service-specific files are mounted from a NAS that has backups. All network access is c…

How'd you go getting docker + IPv6 going? I spent hours trying to get docker containers to get native IPv6 IPs and eventually gave up because it was to painful.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#326

Post by xanaxagoras »

kesslern wrote: post #173
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.

Unraid can do something extremely similar to this. There's a plugin that provides a repository of Community Applications that are essentially docker configuration templates designed specifically for Unraid. You can search for say, HomeAssistant and install it with just a few clicks.

Unraid is great, but be warned, it can spiral out of control. I started with unraid and a gazillion containers, now I have that, 2 mini PCs, and some networking equipment that I never thought I'd want or need. It's a lot of fun.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#327

Post by xanaxagoras »

olah_1 wrote: post #261
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/

Umbrel looks really cool. Is it possible to deploy without maintaing your own copy of the bitcoin blockchain yet?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#328

Post by dangus »

rank0 wrote: post #130
eddieroger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this once. Don't overthink it too much - yes, it is as simple as finding a rack with sufficient space, power and network, plugging it in and going. You'll most likely get a public IP and have no access to your neighbors, so they won't really care what you do with it as long as it's not illegal or against the Terms of Service for your host. So yeah, if you want to do it, just do it. Get an OS you know, install a…

Thanks for the response! I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where I live is like $50/month for 1U and gets much cheaper/machine as you scale up. $50 on aws will get me maybe 1 medium ec2 instance and an s3 bucket. With a used blade I get 20x the compute for the same price.

You're overestimating AWS/cloud costs by a decent amount.

t3a.medium is under $30/month and that price only goes down when you reserve for the year. Save even more if you can run your service on ARM/Gravitron.

A VPS service like Linode will have even better pricing than AWS.

Driving over to a data center isn't free (time and cost), either. Those used Xeon blades are cheap for good reason – the companies that originally owned them consider them EOL. There's "no such thing" as dealing with hardware failure (except for occasional stop/starts) in the cloud.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#329

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Whenever I bring this up people are like “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”. But this is exactly similar to saying “I don’t care about free speech because I have nothing to say”

Brilliant. I fully support this spirit. We need to self host more.

Here is another important one that self hosting would protect you from: censorship and ideological regulations imposed by a platform.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#330

Post by takinola »

Hendrikto wrote: post #137
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…

> SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedeskt…

If you know what systemd is, you are, by definition, not a layperson.
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