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What I Self Host

fredrikmeyer.net

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Re: What I Self Host

#71

Post by dooglius »

teddyh wrote: post #35
dooglius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define it? If your ISP has a problem, you can't access that hardware physically, so it would seem this definition rules out anyone that doesn't control an ISP.

This is a common, but disingenuous, objection. People also don’t make their own electricity. Is therefore “self-host” an unreachable goal, which nobody can fulfill in practice? No, this would be a useless definition.

I agree that that's a bad definition, that's my point. The question is how _you_ are defining it since your definition seems to have this problem; if you're going to complain about others' use of the term you should indicate what you think the term should mean!

Re: What I Self Host

#72

Post by npodbielski »

tallanvor wrote: post #54
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.

It depends of your needs and resources of course but you can keep in some drawer or basement some old or small PC and you basically do not have to spend money on this, but for paid servers you have to spend 20-50$/month for something sensible. 1tb of backup in some s3 service costs like 120$ per year, and 1TB is not that much. In reality paid servers will be close to 1k$/year and in that price you can have sensible machine.

Re: What I Self Host

#73

Post by belorn »

tallanvor wrote: post #44
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…

If I self-host at home and my internet connection goes down so I can't access anything remotely, then I'm still SOL until I can get home. And millions of people are stuck with crappy upload speeds that make plenty of services that they may want to self-host nonviable if they care about being able to access it from anywhere. Yes, words have meaning, but most of us will happily disagree with your definition of self-hos…

Reminds me of self sufficiency farming. If you grow your own food you will be impacted by the yield of that farm, rather than going to the supermarket and buy the food there. If the soil is bad then it might be difficult to impossible to do self sufficiency farming.

Re: What I Self Host

#74

Post by leosanchez »

npodbielski wrote: post #60
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…

Can you list out the names of services?

Re: What I Self Host

#75

Post by Gud »

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…

As someone who self hosts in a VPN, I agree with you. :-)

I did self host on my own hardware for a long, long time. But convenience won.

I had built myself a massive beast. A Xeon board I had purchased cheaply for $200 bucks from a friend. I put a water cooler(OEM from Intel) and clocked that sob from 2.6GHz to 4GHz. I quickly clocked it down back to 2.6GHz. It never hit temperatures above 30 again.

I installed 24GB RAM, which was the maximum. I installed it in a 3U chassi with the max possible 3.5” hot swap slots. I think 16?

I used FreeBSD with ZFS to run a bhyve virtualisation platform. It was a lot of fun.

Re: What I Self Host

#76

Post by zahlman »

joekrill wrote: post #7
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…

Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.

I do have backup storage, of course.

It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.

And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.

Re: What I Self Host

#77

Post by zahlman »

cma wrote: post #17
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…

You'll need to port that to windows, linux, Mac, android, and ios for a typical device mix of someone doing self-hosting, and no access from more closed platforms that have a browser.

I can understand Linux programs not being easily made to work on Android, but I can't understand why I'd ever need or want a device that runs Android and a device that runs IOS. Unless they're test devices for development, but I wouldn't be using those to access services in my day-to-day life.

Re: What I Self Host

#78

Post by lpln3452 »

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…

Some may lament that 'writing' now includes typing, despite having been limited to pen and paper. Frankly it's doubtful that point is taken seriously.

Similarly the core of your 'self-farming' analogy is the direct management of the crops. The involvement of others in demolishing existing structures, erecting fences, or managing water resources on the land is of little consequence.

Of course, some might argue that unless the farm is directly managed, it does not constitute self-farming.

Re: What I Self Host

#79

Post by zahlman »

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.

> I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).

Re: What I Self Host

#80

Post by watermelon0 »

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…

Not sure if it's the best source, but Wikipedia says:

> Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control.

> The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines.

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