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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#431

Post by sdoering »

trevcanhuman wrote: post #377

I have a home server. It runs on a 2013/14 HP Pavillion laptop. I am indeed a linux user. I currently have arch linux installed on it. I run a blog at [0] and use a dynamic dns provider. I must say, it has not been easy at all. I learned a lot of things. I did not attend any school lectures to learn this. I am still in high school, but thanks to the beauty of the internet and a ton of effort I was able to get a stati…

My utmost respect. I ran a Linux box at home while I was at university. It acted like a NAT/masquerading server. It was the time when DSL routers weren't a thing. At least not widely available.

But I never had the idea to use it to host internal or external stuff there.

Kudos to you.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#432

Post by 40four »

I’m all for self hosting, and I run multiple services for myself and family. But I really don’t like this post. I think the arguments don’t make much sense.

Do I remember Picasa? Sure. Do I remember it being the ‘end all be all’ of photo management software, that was egregiously replaced with the inferior Google photos? No. I’ve never heard anyone argue that Picasa was The Goat, and we’ve never had anything better since.

I get the point they are trying to make, that’s just a really bad example. Same for the other examples. Like a song disappearing from your Spotify playlist? Well that’s not the reason we use Spotify. We use it because purchasing and maintaining a static collection of music in 2022 is expensive. In time & money.

But the greater problem, I think most of us here are aware of, is self hosting is simply not possible for what, at least 95% of the population (and that’s probably generous). Yeah, for software developers sure. We have experience & knowledge in regards to installing software & maintaining a Linux server. Nobody else does.

I know there are some services and companies trying to solve this problem, and I’m encouraged by that. I hope they come up with good solutions and people take notice, because I’m totally on board with the self hosting ethos.

We can easily build a package of self hosted software that fills all the needs applied to us by Big Tech. The way I see it is if you have a Protonmail/ or Fastmail account, and combine that with Mastodon, Matrix and Nextcloud servers, you have everything you need and it’s a huge win for your privacy. I just can’t figure out how to convince my friends and family to jump on board :)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#433

Post by sdoering »

javchz wrote: post #388
aetherspawn wrote: post #321

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…

I'm glad you did. One of the things that scare me the most about the current state of the Internet, it's how centralized it's everything in the "cloud" with a lot of the Internet infrastructure depending on like 5 providers. Self hosting it's dirty, time consuming, expensive, risky, but it's predictable. The problem with XaaS it's how little control we have. Not only the rules of pricing can change any day, but if yo…

In the end I think it will boil down to a question of anti fragility or resiliency VS. efficiency.

And there is actually imho no black and white answer. Take a current, very small freelance client of mine. I built them a homepage based on Kirby CMS. Hosted on uberspace.de. On the same shared server there is Matomo being hosted for basic stats.

Another client I was involved in went another way. They had their site built by a team of designers with webflow and are using Google Analytics.

In both cases the decision makes sense given the conditions and constraints of the respective projects.

Personally I would have not recommend to use webflow, but that was not my call to make. For GA I provided a pro/con evaluation and the client decided to go with GA (not my primary recommendation). I still think for his use case at the time a sensible decision.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#434

Post by midrus »

So much underestimation here regarding what it takes to have reliable, secure and resilient self hosted services. I've seen far too many disasters because somebody thought it was just easier/cheaper to self host.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#435

Post by sdoering »

Gigachad wrote: post #263
moonbas3 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Thanks for that insight. I went the middle ground and am using a shared hosting provider with great tutorials on how to get things running.

Nextcloud was 5 minutes (or 15 if one includes setting up ssh key in the web frontend for my account). WordPress was 3 minutes, Matomo also 5 including configuration.

I know that I am using a central service and am not self hosting. But for > 13 years this setup "just works".

I had a masquerading server at home once (back in the early 2000s) and updating, securing and just maintaining it was a hassle.

So to me the current setup is stable, mostly secure (and more secure than I could make it) and balances my needs for control and stability and ease of use quite well.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#436

Post by sdoering »

gcommer wrote: post #354
ziml77 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you're adding even more parties to trust as it's often the case that Docker images are not provided by the same people that are maintaining the project.

Fair point, but I haven't hit it in practice. Tons of services are embracing docker as a first-class output. I just checked and I run exactly 2 images that are from a third party.

As far as I understand 'below' the application layer there is usually a basic image (like alpine) in docker? Do these first parties maintain these as well? If not the trust chain just got longer.

I would call myself at least somewhat technically capable. But I actually never grasped docker beyond the 'I can pack an image and deploy it to AWS' stage so that I can access an internal tool I built at work over the internet.

I was not really understanding what I was doing and was more or less blindly following some tutorials on the net.

When building and deploying things to the shared hosting environment I use privately I have a better (albeit far from perfect) understanding of what I am doing while I know that I am trusting the underlying infrastructure and the people behind that.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#437

Post by sjmm1989 »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #390
ndiddy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laypeople don't know that systemd exists. They will install a webserver or something and the package manager will automatically install and enable its unit file.

What “lay person” is going to install a web server??? That’s insane. Maybe a lay faang-er would. Lay people work in a factory or shoe store or accounting firm. They have 1 or more kids. They hear what their friends are doing, and as long as it only requires signing up on a web page, they will consider it. They will use the same password as they do for their bank. And that’s FINE! There is life outside technology, and…

> What “lay person” is going to install a web server??? That’s insane.

You ... might be surprised.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#439

Post by mateuszf »

chaxor wrote: post #424
simonw wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale makes accessing a Raspberry Pi in your basement from outside of the house genuinely easy, including from mobile devices. I think Tailscale opens up all kinds of new opportunities for self-hosting.

You should probably use headscale instead of you care about self hosting. If you don't trust Google drive with your passwords, why would you trust a company's server that manages access to all of your devices?

Never heard of headscale before. Doesn't it require the control server to be accessible publicly?

Re: Start Self Hosting

#440

Post by rtpg »

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…

I loved using LingonX on Mac, one of the things I'd really love to do is make that but for systemd stuff.

I think the abstractions are good, but there's a lot of terms that are needed just for the basic "Spin up this process on boot" (one might say that explicit is better than implicit, but I dunno).

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