5 ms·

We're well on the path of universal, always connected, high-speed devices with cheap data. Software is also surging in sophistication and complexity. I really d

We're well on the path of universal, always connected, high-speed devices with cheap data. Software is also surging in sophistication and complexity. I really don't see why most applications cannot be truly self-hosted (which means your own device or hardware, not a VPS or colocated) these days, except for video. I can only speculate that the abysmal state of self-hosted software for the general public is because there is not enough money to be made in terms of recurring subscriptions or constant inflow of data.

FooBarWidget 5y ago
The appeal of hosting is that somebody else takes care of infra, OS, application management for you. Until this can be meaningfully solved for self-hosted situations, self-hosting will always be at a disadvantage.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  Why can it not be meaningfully solved right now, technically? Do we need AGI to solve easy to use self-hosted apps? I don't think so. I think the blockers are more economic than technical. Which is why in fact the field is heading the other way, towards the universal cloud and thin clients.
  - FooBarWidget 5y ago
    Self-hosting means that the person who does the administering, has no control over the infrastructure, configuration, etc. There are millions of ways in which something could be configured. The user could have installed a kernel extension that panics every 2 days, for all he knows. This means that the administrator must be sufficiently skilled to be able to handle all anything that might come at him. Which means that he's expensive. This makes it economically hard to compete against hosting, where they administrators can be cheaper due to having more controlled environments. One solution is for administrators to insist on that environment conforms to some sort of standard. But no meaningful standardization currently exist for this context. Making the device/software resilient enough, is also very hard, and suffers the same problems as with human administrators. If you install a device in a network with a faulty router, then what is that device supposed to do? How does it even know the router is the culprit?
    - FooBarWidget 5y ago
      Why the downvotes? What exactly have I said that is controversial, untrue or misleading?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I think the blockers are more economic than technical. I don't see why it can't be both. I run an eCommerce website and pay $5/month to DigitalOcean for what is basically a VPS running Wordpress and Cyberpanel (free and good cPanel alternative). The reason I'm happy to pay that $5 is because it makes a whole host of technical problems disappear. I don't have to worry about maintaining hardware or dealing with an outage if my (consumer) internet is down for maintenance. I don't have to configure my router or set up the CDN, and the bandwidth they have at these data centres is 10x what I have at home. If these technical problems disappeared, I wouldn't need to outsource the hosting to an external provider and could save myself the hosting fee. On the other hand, if cloud hosting were significantly more expensive (or if I was just running a website as a hobby and didn't care about downtime), I'd definitely spend the time learning to self-host.
jarcane 5y ago
because that "cheap data" is only cheap for download. upload is aggressively throttled, filtered, sniffed, redirected, and otherwise treated as a hostile act by ISPs, to submit to the demands of the media industry and keep squeezing businesses for exorbitant rates for the same bloody service but with the filters turned off. your average consumer ISP account where i live can't even run sshd without using complicated work arounds. the system has de-democratized web hosting and monolithic services have rushed to fill the vacuum left by the death of the ISP hosting era.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  ... in the US, period. (Nota bene for old asymmetric standards used in other countries, and 5G is still asymmetrical unless there's a street-by-street deployment due to conservation of physics).
  - ciarcode 5y ago
    Not related to the discussion, but I need to say I didn’t know I could use NB (i.e., “nota bene”) in an English conversation. Thanks
    - ldiracdelta 5y ago
      Only if you spell it out. I've never seen it abbreviated in English, but I have seen it spelled out. I only wish people knew what "e.g." meant -- "exampli gratia" or "free example". Folks on HN frequently use e.g. when they mean i.e. or "id est" or "that is". When you know the Latin, it rankles you every time. However despite Latin, "data" is stuff just like "hair" in standard English. "The hair _is_ on the floor", not "The hair _are_ on the floor." And thus "the data is collected", not "the data _are_ collected". English isn't a slave to Latin, but some misuses are too egregious to be tolerated.
      - triceratops 5y ago
        > Only if you spell it out. I've never seen it abbreviated in English, but I have seen it spelled out. I've only ever seen it abbreviated. The only time I've seen it spelled out is when I looked up what it meant.
goodpoint 5y ago
It was already the case for many years.
CR007 5y ago
I sell self-hosted software since 2012, what can I say... Times change. The problem with general public (people at home) is that most of them really don't want to pay for such software anymore and for the developer it requires to worry too much about stuff always getting broken as it runs in a galore of different configs. For my stuff 90% of support issues are just bad permissions, bad mounted filesystem, somebody forgot to run apt update, etc. People really think that all those issues are our responsibility, just to educate the customer is a waste of everybody's time.
- wngr 5y ago
  What are you selling, if I may ask?
IggleSniggle 5y ago
I pay over $100/mo for 5 Mbps up-speeds. There are literally no other ISPs that will offer me anything different. So, I use a VPS. Turns out, that’s not only better bandwidth performance, it’s also cheaper than the electricity from self-hosting where I am as well.
donmcronald 5y ago
> I can only speculate that the abysmal state of self-hosted software for the general public is because there is not enough money to be made in terms of recurring subscriptions or constant inflow of data. That's exactly what it is. Some software charges a subscription for self hosting. You maintain everything like a sysadmin and pay a huge per user per month subscription fee. It's insane. Look at authentication systems to see how ridiculous the price discrimination / gouging has become. It costs $0.0055 per month for and AWS Cognito user or $0.00325 per month for an Azure AD External Identities user. However, as soon as you use Active Directory for employees it's several dollars per month per user. The P1 plans are $6 per user per month. What makes auth for an employee worth 184,000% more than it is for a customer? I think big tech is absolutely scamming everyone, especially small businesses. They're taking "charge what the market will bear" to a whole new level and the only reason it's working is because anti-trust laws aren't being enforced. If we had fair competition the cost for a lot of tech would drop substantially IMO. There's a lot of room in a market with 2000x markup.

FooBarWidget 5y ago

The appeal of hosting is that somebody else takes care of infra, OS, application management for you. Until this can be meaningfully solved for self-hosted situations, self-hosting will always be at a disadvantage.

Santosh83 5y ago
Why can it not be meaningfully solved right now, technically? Do we need AGI to solve easy to use self-hosted apps? I don't think so. I think the blockers are more economic than technical. Which is why in fact the field is heading the other way, towards the universal cloud and thin clients.
- FooBarWidget 5y ago
  Self-hosting means that the person who does the administering, has no control over the infrastructure, configuration, etc. There are millions of ways in which something could be configured. The user could have installed a kernel extension that panics every 2 days, for all he knows. This means that the administrator must be sufficiently skilled to be able to handle all anything that might come at him. Which means that he's expensive. This makes it economically hard to compete against hosting, where they administrators can be cheaper due to having more controlled environments. One solution is for administrators to insist on that environment conforms to some sort of standard. But no meaningful standardization currently exist for this context. Making the device/software resilient enough, is also very hard, and suffers the same problems as with human administrators. If you install a device in a network with a faulty router, then what is that device supposed to do? How does it even know the router is the culprit?
  - FooBarWidget 5y ago
    Why the downvotes? What exactly have I said that is controversial, untrue or misleading?
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I think the blockers are more economic than technical. I don't see why it can't be both. I run an eCommerce website and pay $5/month to DigitalOcean for what is basically a VPS running Wordpress and Cyberpanel (free and good cPanel alternative). The reason I'm happy to pay that $5 is because it makes a whole host of technical problems disappear. I don't have to worry about maintaining hardware or dealing with an outage if my (consumer) internet is down for maintenance. I don't have to configure my router or set up the CDN, and the bandwidth they have at these data centres is 10x what I have at home. If these technical problems disappeared, I wouldn't need to outsource the hosting to an external provider and could save myself the hosting fee. On the other hand, if cloud hosting were significantly more expensive (or if I was just running a website as a hobby and didn't care about downtime), I'd definitely spend the time learning to self-host.

jarcane 5y ago

because that "cheap data" is only cheap for download. upload is aggressively throttled, filtered, sniffed, redirected, and otherwise treated as a hostile act by ISPs, to submit to the demands of the media industry and keep squeezing businesses for exorbitant rates for the same bloody service but with the filters turned off. your average consumer ISP account where i live can't even run sshd without using complicated work arounds. the system has de-democratized web hosting and monolithic services have rushed to fill the vacuum left by the death of the ISP hosting era.

zinekeller 5y ago
... in the US, period. (Nota bene for old asymmetric standards used in other countries, and 5G is still asymmetrical unless there's a street-by-street deployment due to conservation of physics).
- ciarcode 5y ago
  Not related to the discussion, but I need to say I didn’t know I could use NB (i.e., “nota bene”) in an English conversation. Thanks
  - ldiracdelta 5y ago
    Only if you spell it out. I've never seen it abbreviated in English, but I have seen it spelled out. I only wish people knew what "e.g." meant -- "exampli gratia" or "free example". Folks on HN frequently use e.g. when they mean i.e. or "id est" or "that is". When you know the Latin, it rankles you every time. However despite Latin, "data" is stuff just like "hair" in standard English. "The hair _is_ on the floor", not "The hair _are_ on the floor." And thus "the data is collected", not "the data _are_ collected". English isn't a slave to Latin, but some misuses are too egregious to be tolerated.
    - triceratops 5y ago
      > Only if you spell it out. I've never seen it abbreviated in English, but I have seen it spelled out. I've only ever seen it abbreviated. The only time I've seen it spelled out is when I looked up what it meant.

goodpoint 5y ago

It was already the case for many years.

CR007 5y ago

I sell self-hosted software since 2012, what can I say... Times change. The problem with general public (people at home) is that most of them really don't want to pay for such software anymore and for the developer it requires to worry too much about stuff always getting broken as it runs in a galore of different configs. For my stuff 90% of support issues are just bad permissions, bad mounted filesystem, somebody forgot to run apt update, etc. People really think that all those issues are our responsibility, just to educate the customer is a waste of everybody's time.

wngr 5y ago
What are you selling, if I may ask?

IggleSniggle 5y ago

I pay over $100/mo for 5 Mbps up-speeds. There are literally no other ISPs that will offer me anything different. So, I use a VPS. Turns out, that’s not only better bandwidth performance, it’s also cheaper than the electricity from self-hosting where I am as well.

donmcronald 5y ago

> I can only speculate that the abysmal state of self-hosted software for the general public is because there is not enough money to be made in terms of recurring subscriptions or constant inflow of data. That's exactly what it is. Some software charges a subscription for self hosting. You maintain everything like a sysadmin and pay a huge per user per month subscription fee. It's insane. Look at authentication systems to see how ridiculous the price discrimination / gouging has become. It costs $0.0055 per month for and AWS Cognito user or $0.00325 per month for an Azure AD External Identities user. However, as soon as you use Active Directory for employees it's several dollars per month per user. The P1 plans are $6 per user per month. What makes auth for an employee worth 184,000% more than it is for a customer? I think big tech is absolutely scamming everyone, especially small businesses. They're taking "charge what the market will bear" to a whole new level and the only reason it's working is because anti-trust laws aren't being enforced. If we had fair competition the cost for a lot of tech would drop substantially IMO. There's a lot of room in a market with 2000x markup.