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What I Self Host

fredrikmeyer.net

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Re: What I Self Host

#51

Post by Semaphor »

latexr wrote: post #37
Semaphor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. Some of it on my 2 mini servers in my living room, some (prosody and seafile) on a VPS. Calling the latter not self hosted seems weird to me.

> The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.

I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;)

Though I guess I missed "on a server"

Re: What I Self Host

#52

Post by hunter2_ »

throwaway270925 wrote: post #40
tetrisgm wrote: post #13

Self hosting is great. The examples in this article are not exactly shining examples: an API that shows your Spotify stats? If we’re going to talk about self hosting music, I’d like to mention Roon, which is loved by audiophiles. It aims at creating a magazine like experience for navigating and discovering music. Been using it since COVID and it’s completely transformed my experience of listening to something else th…

How is this Roon selfhosting when its 14,99€/m? Isnt this just another Streaming Service?

I'm not super familiar, but it looks like you're subscribing to Roon's metadata but it's "bring your own music" (to quote their FAQ) which can be files you self-host and/or supported music streaming services (which don't include Roon) that you subscribe to separately.

Re: What I Self Host

#53

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

zahlman wrote: post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

I think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions.

For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.

Re: What I Self Host

#54

Post by tallanvor »

busymom0 wrote: post #25

> I pay for a cheap droplet at DigitalOcean, about $5 per month, and an additional dollar for backup. Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.

There is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home.

My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.

Re: What I Self Host

#55

Post by mathieudombrock »

For what it's worth, I wrote a very bare bones RSS reader in an afternoon. It really just renders a set of RSS feeds into HTML and nothing else.

But it was fun to and educational to build and could pretty easily be extended to add more features.

I would recommend just going for it if you are interested in writing one. It's not as hard as it sounds.

Re: What I Self Host

#56

Post by wltr »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #47

How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

Write your own then, I guess. I prefer a developer to have at least some basic understanding of what they’re developing and why. And when they do, and when they themselves use their product, they do have opinions. In my opinion, especially if the project is open source, you’re free to do as you like.

I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.

Re: What I Self Host

#57

Post by hunter2_ »

rpdillon wrote: post #34
busymom0 wrote: post #25

> I pay for a cheap droplet at DigitalOcean, about $5 per month, and an additional dollar for backup. Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.

I didn't realize, but apparently this is a long-standing argument. I did just a tiny bit of digging because I'm sort of into self-hosting and I ran across the selfhosted Reddit's wiki on the topic. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted TLDR: they don't differentiate on whether you own the hardware or not.

Basically it sounds like IaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware and restricts OS choices), and even PaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware, the OS, and the configuration of interpreters such as php / node.js / python / etc.), since these let you run your own code (which can include your instance of community code). Only SaaS would be excluded, as these don't let you run your own code.

Re: What I Self Host

#58

Post by latexr »

Semaphor wrote: post #51
latexr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meaning is I install my own software and set up as I want. That seems a bit vague. If you tell that to someone who never heard of self-hosting, they’d be excused for wondering if that means downloading from an App Store and opening the settings.

I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;) Though I guess I missed "on a server"

> I'd expand on it of my audience weren't HN ;)

Fair! Not everyone on HN is a programmer, but there is overrepresentation.

> Though I guess I missed "on a server"

Yes, that’s what I was thinking was missing.

Re: What I Self Host

#59

Post by pessimizer »

lordnacho wrote: post #22
teddyh wrote: post #4

I deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘se…

It's a spectrum that has been illuminated by time. In the old times you had to do all these. Now you can cut this somewhere: - Power + cooling, physical security, network. (Old school LAN party) - Can you access the bare metal OS? (Hetzner/OVH bare metal) - Can you access a VM and decide what runs on it? (EC2 + associated services, K8s, etc, etc) - Can you run a function? (Lambda for example) So the meaning has wande…

There is no such thing as "bare metal OS." Metal is hardware, and an OS is an abstraction over hardware that restricts the software's access to it.

Re: What I Self Host

#60

Post by npodbielski »

zahlman wrote: post #2

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want t…

Others already answered with information that you usually have more devices then just 1. So you can have access to your data from PC, laptop and your phone. I for once also like to have my own data my own. I.e. I have:

- my own email server

- my own files sharing service

- service for cardDav, CalDav etc.

- service for editing my own office files on mobile

- notes that are synchronized

- streaming of movies and music

- build and git server

- my own smart home service

- notification service

- chat

- VPN

- desktop sharing service

- my own DNS for blocking adds

- and others

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