71–80 of 625 posts
Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. If you're actually interested in self-hosting, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great resource for self-hosted apps. Roll up your sleeves, get prepared to get lost in documentation, and have some fun! You'll realize the tradeoffs of what to self-host and what not-to quickly as you start playing around with actual te…
There might be a few use-cases where self-hosting is a bit less risky than losing everything but I suspect for most people, the online services are just easier. That said, if you pay for stuff, you are more likely to get some proper support. I pay fastmail for my email because they provide me email and support in return for money. You can't use free GMail and then complain that they have broken something or locked you out.
I run a few services from my home but still have to rely on aws/fly.io for some portions of my infrastructure. I really want is to learn how to rent rack space from a colocation. The documentation available does not make it easy to learn. Can I just buy an old 1U blade, throw xen on it and show up at my nearest colo? What do I need to preconfigure to ensure I have remote access without giving remote access to the col…
You can also just rent a space to place your own server but I haven't tried that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the hardest part of hosting anything is the maintenance over time.
Yes! This is what experience has taught me too. We tend to underappreciate the importance of time in everything. A button click can instantiate something powerful (and useful (and easy-to-use...)), but it will degrade over time, and eventually flat-out stop working. I had a stack that worked just fine for my own needs, but it ran on shudder Python 2.7 -- everyone knows how that worked out (I chose to rebuild my stack…
Software doesn't degrade over time (other than, you know things like cosmic ray bit flips, but in most realistic situations that should be fully mitigatable.)
The needs of the software user (including hardware and software they want the piece of software to interact with) may evolve, but that's different than software degrading over time.
> I had a stack that worked just fine for my own needs, but it ran on shudder Python 2.7 -- everyone knows how that worked out
While there's no further first party support for that version of Python, if it worked properly before, Python 2.7 and the software running on it probably still works properly now.
My feelings on this are similar but different, I do have things to hide, but I just don't care.
You know what would be kind of neat? Like, a web site you'd go to called makemeoneofthose.com, and you'd click some buttons, and then sometime later you'd have a hosting setup that you own with some software, web server(s) and database(s) on it, and then you can go hack on it yourself, add some features, whatever. Like they send you some AWS keys and say "It's all yours. Good luck and don't forget to pay your hosting…
Self hosting is hard. You need to take care of security, backups, software updates, software installation and so on. Even on something like a QNAP (which can be compared to managed hosting) this can be hard. Flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world. Missed a security update: your device is now vulnerable. While I host a lot of things myself I can understand self hosting is not for everyone.
There's honestly so many posts that make it look so easy, but without everything else that would normally make it a job position in a company :)
Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. If you're actually interested in self-hosting, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great resource for self-hosted apps. Roll up your sleeves, get prepared to get lost in documentation, and have some fun! You'll realize the tradeoffs of what to self-host and what not-to quickly as you start playing around with actual te…
That blog post literally mentions that link.
You know what would be kind of neat? Like, a web site you'd go to called makemeoneofthose.com, and you'd click some buttons, and then sometime later you'd have a hosting setup that you own with some software, web server(s) and database(s) on it, and then you can go hack on it yourself, add some features, whatever. Like they send you some AWS keys and say "It's all yours. Good luck and don't forget to pay your hosting…
The irony of an article titled "Start Self Hosting" having its site go down