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Start Self Hosting

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Re: Start Self Hosting

#551

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

ayushnix wrote: post #441
0xdeadb00f wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm certainly not a layperson, but systemd frequently confuses me. I want to edit a service to harden it for example. Oh, wait I shouldn't edit it directly with vi? Because it gets overwritten by package updates. Okay, makes sense, I need to use systemctl edit instead. But that opens a file that has everything commented out. Do I uncomment the [Unit] heading? What do I need to keep and where do I add my additions? I…

> I want to edit a service to harden it for example. Oh, wait I shouldn't edit it directly with vi? Because it gets overwritten by package updates. I don't think you're supposed to edit anything inside /usr, except perhaps /usr/local, but even that has a better alternative in the form of $HOME/.local, which is a well defined standard at this point. Maybe I'm unaware or mistaken but if you're editing anything inside /…

> Maybe I'm unaware or mistaken but if you're editing anything inside /usr as a normal user,

I'm not doing any of this as a normal user. I'm doing all of this as root

Re: Start Self Hosting

#552

Post by horsawlarway »

Sammi wrote: post #499
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…

What I don't get is if the problem was the risk of unexpected bills from a cloud provider, then why not just use simple virtual servers that you can rent for a fixed price from almost any hosting provider? Gives you all that extra benefit you speak of of the extra compute headroom that you can use for spinning up any demo server application you want, and saves you all the costs, risks, and headache of managing your o…

I mean, I see VPS as the worst of both worlds.

You're still managing a server, but now you're paying through the nose to do it.

The costs just simply don't work out nicely to anyone who can afford to buy at even small scales.

A 4 cpu, 8gb ram machine will pretty commonly run you $50 a month, with less than 200gb storage. You're paying 600/year for a machine that I can build (with better specs) for ~400.

Not to mention that the machine you buy yourself will have a lifespan of 3 to 8 years.

So sure - once you factor in bandwidth, storage location, power - you're probably not going to save money in the first year. But by year 2 you are, and by year 4 you've saved a considerable sum.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#553

Post by horsawlarway »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #452
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…

Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-core, 16+ Gb ram, some old but still working 3TB hdd). Would it be stupid to run some of my code and data on these? Not everything I have needs to be geographically close to users or something like that, such as a mass notifier service that runs every so often.…

If you're already paying for business internet in the location you have, and your power costs are reasonable, and you don't mind possible downtime - I'd vote go for it.

Honestly - Most cloud services are exorbitantly over-priced. There's a reason AWS is ~15% of amazon's total revenue, and Azure now pulls in more revenue than any other MS product.

I throw old machines into a micro-k8s cluster. It costs me literally pennies on the dollar for much better computing hardware compared to a vps.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#554

Post by fps_doug »

jethro_tell wrote: post #528
fps_doug wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this discussion thread is basically people looking at this in different contexts. A lot of the replies seem to interpret your post as saying "systemd is more complicated than sysvinit was" which is most definitely not what you meant regarding your further replies in this thread. You seem to say "even systemd is too complicated for the layperson". I somewhat agree, if we assume someone totally not dealing with…

To be fair, a bus driver probably isn't writing a self-hosted service anyway. So if there is an issue with the service init 3 years later, they will probably file a bug and let the maintainer handle it. And they wouldn't be parsing a bash script for a sysV-init if that broke either? SysV-init was to complex for the layman as well. Because gracefully starting and stopping system services with their dependency chains i…

Sure, the bus driver was supposed to represent the other extreme. In reality, they probably wouldn't care no matter how simple the setup is. But the at-least-somewhat-curious non-tech person has probably better chances finding a problem with a systemd service than a sysvinit script, even if they just open a ticket in the end. The info they can provide is more likely to be useful with systemd, I'd argue.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#555

Post by v-yadli »

mceachen wrote: post #316
v-yadli wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting project, and nice landing page! Will definitely check it out. I'm a long time ownCloud/NextCloud user and I'm aware of the alternatives. With multiple android phones come and go in the past 8 years or so, the background upload seems to stand its ground. The real problem here is iOS and its lack of proper background tasks. See: https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/215 -- they tried every possible w…

> I recommend a "real" TF or PyTorch installation Yeah, PhotoStructure's feature of "runs everywhere" turns out to be a huge albatross around your neck (for me) when it comes to ML. Currently, all features are available on all platforms--but having classification plugins that are only supported for specific hardware/OS combinations might be a reasonable solution.

Even better -- things like ONNX Runtime are intended to run everywhere, and take advantage of the cutting edge tensor processors (like the INT8 processors in latest ARM chips)

Re: Start Self Hosting

#556

Post by rchaud »

Please bring back desktop apps!

There are so many apps that just do one thing really well, and don't really need updates unless they're to fix compatibility issues after OS updates.

"Web app" is now synonymous with the SaaS model, which means over time, the product becomes bloated with features designed to appeal to the next biggest segment the company currently doesn't have. And there's no way to opt out. Dropbox and Evernote come to mind, but everything falls victim to this eventually.

I like apps like Sketch. 1-time fee with 1 year of updates, which is fair. If I'm happy with my Year 1 features, I don't have to update.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#557

Post by troyjfarrell »

Gigachad wrote: post #262
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.

There are numerous projects which have attempted to create this. https://sandstorm.io/ was the biggest one but as far as I can tell its largely unmaintained and most of the apps are outdated https://yunohost.org/ probably has the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As wel…

Sandstorm is in need of more coders to help maintain and update apps, but it's not abandoned. I use it, both personally and professionally.

It results in a better experience for end-users because applications are actually sandboxed. This (mercifully) means that any security issues in the out-of-date applications does not become a cause for panic. The downside is that packaging those applications is not trivial.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#558

Post by horsawlarway »

q1w2 wrote: post #549
me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-core, 16+ Gb ram, some old but still working 3TB hdd). Would it be stupid to run some of my code and data on these? Not everything I have needs to be geographically close to users or something like that, such as a mass notifier service that runs every so often.…

You aren't really paying for computing power and storage - you are paying for power/network/facility/server redundancy and availability. We host out own servers, and the bulk of the time is ensuring that the power doesn't go out, that there is a backup internet connection, that the HDs are on RAID, that the server has a backup server available (and the router, and the switch, and the NICs), and that the management ne…

In almost all cases - you won't actually get 99.99% uptime from your cloud provider anyways.

That's around an hour of downtime every year.

A much more reasonable estimate is 99.9% - or approx 9 hours, unless you're doing serious planning and spending to account for outages. Hell - the Dec 7th 2021 outage for AWS was nearly 10 hours alone.

On your own, 99% is probably a reasonable prediction (roughly 3.5 days), and I think people vastly over-estimate how much small amounts of downtime actually matter for lots of services.

Re: Start Self Hosting

#559

Post by throwaway894345 »

pkulak wrote: post #548
throwaway894345 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I’m assuming at least some things are on a private network, in which case things are much more complicated.

No, not at all. You can tunnel traffic from any machine, anywhere to be terminated at a public IP.

I think you're misunderstanding the objective. I don't want most of my services (e.g., personal finance, photos, Plex, etc) to terminate at a public IP, that's the whole point of the private network in the first place. So for those explicitly private services, we now need DNS and TLS and in the latter case ideally something like LetsEncrypt so you don't have to manually rotate your certs (but the normal verification methods don't work because your service isn't accessible to LE in the first place--maybe you can run some bastion/proxy?).

Re: Start Self Hosting

#560

Post by jethro_tell »

fps_doug wrote: post #554
jethro_tell wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a bus driver probably isn't writing a self-hosted service anyway. So if there is an issue with the service init 3 years later, they will probably file a bug and let the maintainer handle it. And they wouldn't be parsing a bash script for a sysV-init if that broke either? SysV-init was to complex for the layman as well. Because gracefully starting and stopping system services with their dependency chains i…

Sure, the bus driver was supposed to represent the other extreme. In reality, they probably wouldn't care no matter how simple the setup is. But the at-least-somewhat-curious non-tech person has probably better chances finding a problem with a systemd service than a sysvinit script, even if they just open a ticket in the end. The info they can provide is more likely to be useful with systemd, I'd argue.

For the record, I'm a big systemd fan. But to a user, taking a debug log is more or less the same either way. They don't care.
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