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Why Self-Host?

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Re: Why Self-Host?

#41

Post by bluGill »

codegeek wrote: post #21

"start self-hosting more of your personal services." I would make the case that you should also self host more as a small Software/SAAS business and it is not quite the boogeyman that a lot of cloud vendors want you to think. Here is why. Most software projects/businesses don't require the scale and complexity for which you truly need the cloud vendors and their expertise. For example, you don't need Vercel to deploy…

A small business should onlyself host if they are a hosting company. everyone else should pay their local small business self hosting company to host for them.

This is not a job for the big guys. You want someone local who will take care of you. They also come when a computer fails, ensuring updates are applied to them. Not by come I mean physically sending a human to you. This will cost some money but you should be running your business not trying to learn computers.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#42

Post by fridder »

I do wonder if there is a market for a preinstalled self hosting computer or setup where the service would be automated backups, e2e encrypted of course, and perhaps high availability

Re: Why Self-Host?

#43

Post by tylerjl »

Another sort-of-recent development in the space has made self-hosting dramatically more accessible: even though hardware costs were reasonable before, they're now _very_ reasonable and also resource-efficient.

Repurposing an old tower would offer you enough compute to self-host services back in the day, but now an Intel NUC has plenty of resources in a very small footprint and branching out into the Raspberry Pi-adjacent family of hardware also offers even smaller power draw on aarch64 SBCs.

One experiment in my own lab has been to deploy glusterfs across a fleet of ODroid HC4 devices to operate a distributed storage network. The devices sip small amounts of power, are easy to expand, and last week a disk died completely but I swapped the hardware out while never losing access to the data thanks to separate networked peers staying online while the downed host got new hardware.

Relying on container deployments rather than fat VMs also helps to compress resource requirements when operating lots of self-hosted services. I've got about ~20 nomad-operated services spread across various small, cheap aarch64 hosts that can go down without worrying about it because nomad will just pick a new one.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#45

Post by arich »

neoromantique wrote: post #32
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD! Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TL…

>No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget. Just like Limewire. But that's the reason no one self-hosts. Security. As an avid self-hoster with a rack next to my desk, I shudder as I read your comment, unfortunately.

The core point is valid. As someone who self hosts, it's become so complicated to get the most basic functionality setup that someone with little to no knowledge would really struggle whereas years ago it was much simpler. Functionally now we can do much more but practically, we've regressed.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#46

Post by dizhn »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD! Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TL…

Self hosting involves 3 steps in my life.

1) Find the docker compose file. 2) Change the expose line to make it specific 10.0.10.1:9000 instead of the default 0.0.0.0:9000 . 3) Connect via wireguard.

(Answers the "security" point a sister comment brought up too)

Re: Why Self-Host?

#47

Post by troupo »

thayne wrote: post #20

I wish articles like this would include recommendations on how to choose hardware to run your self-hosted services on.

And things like "this is a rack you can use, it will not cost you a kidney, and it will not blow your eardrums out with noise"

Re: Why Self-Host?

#48

Post by skhameneh »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD! Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TL…

XAMPP seems to still be alive and maintained.

https://www.apachefriends.org/

I haven't used it in over a decade, but I'm glad to see it's still kicking.

Re: Why Self-Host?

#50

Post by lifestyleguru »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #27

20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD! Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TL…

Because of American copyright predators and jurisdictions friendly to their lobbying like e.g. Germany. If you're planning to get involved in this kind of software, better think beforehand about practices to ensure your anonymity.
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