Self hosting can also be a great option to protect against authoritarian regimes. After my family’s VPN was banned in Russia a few weeks ago, it took me an hour to set up Wireguard server with Algo VPN on digital ocean. Now I’m supporting uncensored internet access for 3 families back home, while Russian authorities playing cat and mouse games with popular VPN providers.
Start Self Hosting
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Re: Start Self Hosting
#92You 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…
We used to host our own software. It was called an application and it ran on your personal computer. We just need that, but running on some appliance instead, like a NAS. Package the service up in something like docker-compose, have a way to sell it, install it, update it and support it. Synology is pretty close with their Docker support, but still pretty far.
You also need stuff like networking, TLS/certs, and DNS which aren't easily packaged, at least not in a way that doesn't require you to make sketchy changes on every client device.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#93Philosophizing 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…
Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills.
not the first time I’ve seen such comments or sentiments close to it regarding the content of developer blogs, when one gets shared here.
I ask most sincerely: isn’t that just one of the many reasons people chose to launch a personal blog in the first place?
Re: Start Self Hosting
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
That blog post literally mentions that link.
I know. Now I made a comment that helps self-hosters just as much as the OP with much less text and much less moralizing.
One of the most important aspects of choosing a solution is understanding the problem first.
There's a place for both:
1. Blogs that moralize and talk about a much larger philosophical underlying problem. These help the reader understand a problem that they may not have fully understood. Before, the problem was: "I need a place to host my photos". If that's your only problem, there's no reason not to choose something easy like Google Photos.
Only by digging deeper does one start to understand that there's more to it than this, and choosing certain solutions bring with those solutions a whole set of new problems. Now, you realize "I need a place to host my photos and I need it to provide a certain level of privacy, and a certain degree of predictability..." etc. A set of problems that can be solved by self hosting.
2. Blogs that are solution oriented. You already know what you want, now go do it.
If all you ever present are solutions, the reader is left to wonder why they'd ever invest the time and effort in doing something that is much easier elsewhere. An investment that does start to make sense if you have problems with the implications of hosting elsewhere.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#95Self hosting can also be a great option to protect against authoritarian regimes. After my family’s VPN was banned in Russia a few weeks ago, it took me an hour to set up Wireguard server with Algo VPN on digital ocean. Now I’m supporting uncensored internet access for 3 families back home, while Russian authorities playing cat and mouse games with popular VPN providers.
Dear Gods of OPSEC, I hope your username isn’t your real name.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 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 interac…
This comment was brought to you by someone who never produced/maintained software that had to withstand a 24/7 onslaught of automated exploit kits and port scanners over an extended period of time.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#97Self 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.
> You need to take care of security
Easiest solution is to just host stuff on a local network without access to the wider internet. E.g. running on an old laptop/raspberry pi/server in your basement.
Sure, that means you can no longer access your self-hosted stuff when you're out of the house, but the tradeoff is peace of mind about your data leaking or worse.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#98Self-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 trying to tackle the workload orchestration piece; CasaOS (https://www.casaos.io/) being one of my favorites but there's also Portainer (https://portainer.io). TailScale and and ZeroTier are great for Mesh VPN networking, where you may need to run some workloads in the cloud but want them networked with your home applications (or just to keep them offline). They also allow you to access applications running on a home server that doesn't have a static IP. Cloudflare Access is okay; I haven't tried it because it deviates from the mesh VPN model significantly.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 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 interac…
Sure, but my old Google cloud apps on python 2.7 will one day get rug-pulled and forced to upgrade. It can only stay working forever if the platform doesn't change underneath it.
Re: Start Self Hosting
#100Self 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.
I'm amused by the implications here that 1) the outsourced alternatives are better than you are at keeping up with the 'hard stuff', and 2) that in an outsourced scenario you can't "flip the wrong switch and you expose something to the world". This thinking is why I can't tell you how many incident post-mortems I've done where I have to once again hear "...but, but, but...we outsourced this to them so this couldn't happen...".