31 ms·

Start Self Hosting

• hitovst 5y ago
  Wanted to mention FreedomBox, LibreServer, Epicyon, and Retroshare. Any others worth mentioning?
• xwdv 5y ago
  Although I once loved the idea of self-hosting, my opinion nowadays is that life is too short to self-host. Yea platforms will come and go and sometimes it sucks, but what we really need is easy ways to move data from one place to another, more than we need self-hosting.
• DrSiemer 5y ago
  How would that work, self hosting Spotify and YouTube? In theory you could probably find ways to rip and download everything you want to save, but it would require a massive amount of storage space just to be sure you never lose things that have a tiny chance of being missed.
• tjpnz 5y ago
  Remember that self hosting doesn't necessarily mean having to manage a server - not in the traditional sense at least. Many of the things mentioned in TFA are fairly trivial to setup with a consumer grade NAS.
• billiam 5y ago
  Great fun to make, a lifetime to maintain.
• spansoa 5y ago
  I haven't tried it, but Piwigo[0] looks promising for photo albums & management. That or Ente[1] although Ente doesn't have a self-hosting option like Piwigo. If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the hard-drives corrupted, etc That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped, so having /BOTH/ a VPS and an in-house on-prem solution means you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and you have a contingency plan in place, which one day may be worth it. It buys you peace of mind because of the redundancy. [0] https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo [1] https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/
  • cubesnooper 5y ago
    > That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped Well, there are other reasons to prefer using external hosting. Home connections are typically port‐filtered, have dynamic IP addresses, and have a low IP reputation, and your ISP selection is very limited. Whereas if using a VPS there are so many options that it’s easy to shop around. But you can still self‐host while getting the benefits of a VPS. Just forward ports from the VPS over a WireGuard tunnel to your real machine. Then all the actual infrastructure is on hardware you control, and the cloud provider has no access to your TLS private keys.
    • ptman 5y ago
      Yes, and you can even do this quite cheaply. Oracle cloud free tier has a nice traffic allowance: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . Add tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/plain wireguard for connecting your home server to the cloud instance.
  • mohaine 5y ago
    IANAL but I believe another reason to true self host, at least in the US, is that rules for things inside your house have extra protection. Sure they can still get a warrant, but this is a totally different level than what they need to get the same data off of a VPS. Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?
    • spansoa 5y ago
      > Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS? I'm aware of this, which is why I do full disk encryption of any VPS instance I operate. See the Third Party Doctrine[0] which applies to the US only AFAIK. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
  • LeSaucy 5y ago
    I am comfortable re-building my self hosting setup from scratch/backup. I enjoy the sense of agency being able to fix something myself vs wait for a cloud service to return. As I rely on my self hosted setups more, I also build in the appropriate amount of high availability features required. You will learn a TON of skills that are sideways related to software engineering. It's very empowering to be nearly entirely self sufficient with your profession. I can write/test/deploy software (ie pay the bills) and never have some critical service or infrastructure carpet pulled out from underneath you(ie dockerhub,github) and prevent you from doing your work. This is such a niche attitude/market but it has been incredible to see the surge of self-hosted applications/services over the last 5 years. It is also relatively easy these days with modern ci/cd tools to have a "portable" enough stack that in the event of an emergency you could purchase a few linode instances and be migrated to a vps environment in an afternoon.
• anon23anon 5y ago
  imagine being at that beautiful place but on that shitty computer.
• mcdermott 5y ago
  Agreed, we've given up too much control, privacy and sense of ownership.
• stathibus 5y ago
  The author mentions but doesn't address the Picasa problem, which incidentally is the one I care most about. What do I do when all the useful software is cloud based and requires me to store my data with the service provider in order to use it? Self hosting is not a solution.
  • quaintdev 5y ago
    Good point. I use Photoprism to manage my pictures. https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/
• Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  Self-hosting is not always the answer for a lot of people. Self-hosting are not easy for laypeople (someone who are not familiar with it) to try to get their feet wet with it. For myself, I am on the level of beginner and I do struggle to stay on self-hosting path. When I set it up, I learn there is more steps that I have to do because the documentations and guides did not bother to explain those step and expect me to research more to find the information about it. My biggest beef with self-hosting is that they expect us to set up the SSL/TLS certificate without explaining the step to set it up. Some guides does have section about it but never provide the details about creating CA for my self-hosting needs. I turn to Google/DDG to find information about it and they are all over the place or leading into dead-end. There are few others thing I have gripes with self-hosting. I like self-hosting and they are pleasing for me as I don't need to rely on third party solution. The gripes I have is the documentations that are over the place or sparse information about it.
  • wolpoli 5y ago
    It sounds like part of the difficulty has to do with the general poor quality of online tutorials. There is a need for properly written guide books and magazines, but unfortunately, it seems like there is no way to pay for people to write them.
  • mhitza 5y ago
    > My biggest beef with self-hosting is that they expect us to set up the SSL/TLS certificate without explaining the step to set it up. Some guides does have section about it but never provide the details about creating CA for my self-hosting needs. I turn to Google/DDG to find information about it and they are all over the place or leading into dead-end. If you have your own domain pointed at your server, the Let's Encrypt certbot can automatically pull in a certificate and configure your apache/nginx webserver (alternative webserver caddy has this feature built in as far as I know). If you don't have your own domain, don't go with self-signed certificates. Get a free https://desec.io/ https://desec.io/ subdomain, and they have their own certbot plugin to generate automatic certificates.
    • bsder 5y ago
• chipgap98 5y ago
  The irony of an article titled "Start Self Hosting" having its site go down
  • ct0 5y ago
    You're missing the point if you think uptime is the number 1 priority.
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  That's a good post on the topic, thanks. Like a lot of others I'm a hybrid-self-hoster. I do rely on some third-party, third-party-hosted or other cloud services, but I also spend a lot of time bringing things back home when I can. It's tricky to be in that hybrid-box since the conversation in this area is very dichotomous--cloud things OR my own thing--but overall I like keeping my options open and swimming with the herd ;-) in making sensible use of cloud services when it seems appropriate.
  • ndneighbor 5y ago
    I think the granularity of control is just as important as where the app is hosted imo. Its perfectly valid to make a fair compromise on ease of management vs. being able to vendor your own versions. And especially with how great Tailscale/Wireguard networking is nowadays, you really can make that line blur between your own network + a cloud provider.
• dlivingston 5y ago
  Follow-up question: Should someone interested in self-hosting do it from a literal PC in your basement, configured as a server? Or is self-hosting on AWS / DreamHost / whatever good enough? I ask because I like self-hosting a lot, especially when market solutions don’t really do what I need them to. But security, man, that worries me. I can’t tell you what a three-way handshake truly is, or what a signed certificate really means: so self-hosting my own email / web server / etc. from my basement gives me a fear that someone, somewhere will take advantage of a vulnerability in some system component that I’ve never even heard of.
  • ozim 5y ago
    Even better do you really need "self hosting" many people will be good enough with external drive. You can also setup something like Synology which is good enough for layman and if you keep it in your local network it is basically easier than configuring some old PC.
  • inetknght 5y ago
    > Should someone interested in self-hosting do it from a literal PC in your basement, configured as a server? It's a good place to start/test. But don't open your firewall: do all of your testing on your internal network. You really don't want to open your network to the kind of problems that can occur while you're learning. When you're ready to really host things then you should rent a cheap shared instance, or maybe a low-priced dedicated server. You can pick up something decent for $10/mo. That's not much if you're skilled enough (eg, employable enough) to learn how to self-host. For your internal network you can use a pi-hole to set up all of your DNS entries so you can even visit "http://example.com http://example.com" and have it point to an IP on your LAN.
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    If you need mail, you need VPS with good reputation. Otherwise hosting from your basement is an option if you've got accessible IP address.
  • dna_polymerase 5y ago
    For some things your local network is enough, like personal pictures and other private files. E-Mails I would suggest to host in a datacenter. Not necessarily in AWS but a local company offering hosting. For those who feel unable top securely self host I'd suggest looking into smaller providers of hosted E-Mail solutions. A large number of federated services is better than everyone being on Google Workspace or MS360.
• judge2020 5y ago
  What self hosting stories don't seem to focus enough on is backup and encryption, as these are the main issues with server-in-your-house hosting. Even disregarding fire/water damage it's not uncommon to have hard drives die outright, which is a problem if you didn't think to (or had the money to) set up zfs for data redundancy purposes.
  • gen220 5y ago
    I agree coming up with a good backup strategy is an essential ingredient to long-term-sustainable self-hosting. Speaking for myself, I don't have the goal of 100% detaching myself from "the grid", so to speak. I still want to pay an ISP to act as a gateway to the internet, and want to pay the local electric company to power my house. To me, "backups" are a commodity service, like internet service and electricity. Dumb file servers are offered by any number of places for a price lower than the cost of in-housing that service, and with a negligible switching cost at for my workload. I'm personally OK with having one relatively shitty local mirror, and a background task that rsync's to backblaze. If BB makes noises about going under, I can migrate aws s3, rsync.net, digital ocean, whatever entity wants to charge me the least for my workload. I don't think NAS's or ZFS are strict requirements, although playing with them can be fun.
• ndneighbor 5y ago
  This is an important call to action, in a world where your user experience of an application is determined by a Product Manager who may be stat-maxxing a graph, I hope that we can see a resurgence of self-hosted apps. Selfishly speaking, I work at Railway and our community maintains a list of self-hosted apps (we call them starters) that people can deploy to our platform. You can checkout the list of apps here: https://railway.app/starters https://railway.app/starters and we even accept submissions via our GitHub repo: https://github.com/railwayapp/starters https://github.com/railwayapp/starters (Just reply to me here and we can get it reviewed for ya.)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cube2222 5y ago
  No thank you. I'll have to take care of backups, security, availability, updates, etc. I prefer to use a managed solution. If you don't want to lose data on being banned, just do your own backups, which are by themselves much less time consuming to handle than full-blown self-hosting. I'm fine with the occasional service being axed, I'll just migrate to another one. Often, somebody writes a migration script and open sources it, making that even easier. It is good though to promote and vote with your wallet for services that give you good and dependable support.
  • Kenji 5y ago
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    > I'll have to take care of backups, security, availability, updates, etc. I prefer to use a managed solution. A hosting cooperative is often a good compromise. You get to mutualize services and maintenance with other people who have the same needs. On a spectrum from selfhosting to cloud computing, hosting cooperatives lie in the middle when users have agency but don't have to take care of everything by themselves.
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Self hosting also implies building (or using) your own self hosted product. That's a significant requirement, particularly if you want social features. I'm going through this dilemma with books. Goodreads lost my account of nine years. I've managed to recover most of the data from a backup and set up my own blog. I'm self hosting! But my blog is very spare and is not backed by a database of books, book covers, etc. Also it has no social features, no easy way to see other people's reviews or find related books or... I could imagine building all those things but that's like building a whole product! I could also imagine some self hosted book product I could just use (analagous to Picasa in the story) but it doesn't happen to exist. Meanwhile there's a pretty great product for books in Goodreads, other than the crippling disaster of losing a user's account. Also some good cloud competitors like The StoryGraph. So maybe I should just use their product and hope my data is safe. PS: I was at Google when Picasa was acquired. My memory is that the plan was always to focus on the hosted version. Maintaining a desktop standalone product was very much not in the Google business model.
  • aww_dang 5y ago
    Try this, I think they have some covers as well as other meta data. It has been years since I used it. https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
    • NelsonMinar 5y ago
      Maybe I didn't explain myself well. Yes, I could get a data dump from many sources. It is a lot of work to turn that dump into a product that I self host.
      • zozbot234 5y ago
        You don't have to write that stuff. There is a fairly well-known project licensed under AGPL3, that's fine for self-hosting if perhaps not commercial use. Just search around.
• erulabs 5y ago
  We're not quite publicly launched yet, but I've been working on making self-hosting easier for several years now. People often ask "why would I self-host?" and it's hard to pin down one answer - instead the answer depends on your values - but there is an answer. This post is excellent because it's not "do it for security" or "do it to see fewer ads" or "do it to fight big tech" or "don't give photos of your infant to Facebook". It's all of those reasons, but it's also more broadly (and deeper in the kool-aid), because it helps fix the internet itself. > This engineering talent is supposed to be solving world’s problems but instead they are ensuring how everyone wastes their time Agreed! If software was sold for its utility instead of its addictive properties - this might start to change. Self-hosted / open-source software does need plenty of "hosted" accoutrements though: backups, remote access, etc. Shameless self-promo: we're trying to solve this over at https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com
• cjlm 5y ago
  Dismayed with the brittleness of Pinboard and the bloat of most alternatives I turned to self-hosting an excellent bookmark server called linkding[0] on a Raspberry Pi. Very happy with the result. [0] https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
• nfriedly 5y ago
  I've been pretty happy with my local Unraid server. I have a few things running on it, including Plex for my music library and Nextcloud for notes, file storage, and automatic photo uploads from my phone. The software and Nextcloud data are all on an SSD, but the Nextcloud data gets a nightly backup to a mechanical hard drive. The music doesn't have any backup, but I could always re-rip the CDs if I had to.
• rank0 5y ago
  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 colo as well? Do I get physical access to the data center? Wish I could find some guides on this topic. 95% of blog post tutorials are just ads for the latest trendy cloud startup/language framework.
  • kjs3 5y ago
    I've never worked with a colo vendor that once you contacted them didn't have exhaustive support for "how to we get to the point where we can start billing you", usually including an actual human that you can ask questions.
  • eddieroger 5y ago
    I did this once. Don't overthink it too much - yes, it is as simple as finding a rack with sufficient space, power and network, plugging it in and going. You'll most likely get a public IP and have no access to your neighbors, so they won't really care what you do with it as long as it's not illegal or against the Terms of Service for your host. So yeah, if you want to do it, just do it. Get an OS you know, install an SSH server or Remote Desktop, and rack it up. If you can get to it on your LAN, you'll be able to get to it on the public Internet. Also, quickly learn about good auth and firewalls and fail2ban. That all said (and said with the clarity of age and knowing I was a stubborn kid who did things "because I could"), the experience of spinning up a VPS today on Linode or Digital Ocean is effectively the same, infinitely cheaper, and a lot more fun than racking a server somewhere. I can script up a fleet of servers from my bed at 1am just because, and can't tell the difference between SSH'ing to them versus that one box I did 15 years ago. If you want to do it, go nuts and have fun, but you really aren't really missing much over conventional VPSes these days.
    • rank0 5y ago
      Thanks for the response! I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where I live is like $50/month for 1U and gets much cheaper/machine as you scale up. $50 on aws will get me maybe 1 medium ec2 instance and an s3 bucket. With a used blade I get 20x the compute for the same price.
• _bfhp 5y ago
  > It gives you the peace of mind by keeping you in control of your data. I like the sentiment and the points made, but the author uses this amorphous concept of "your data" throughout and I feel like it simplifies things a lot and conflates many different issues. Most people shouldn't focus on self-hosting literally all the data related to them. This is a sort of perfectionist mental compulsion many of us on HN are familiar with. You have to decide what data you actually really don't want to live without in the rare event you lose access to it, and prioritize that. For most people, this data is not very complex: family photos and videos, an album by an obscure artist, a game you like to play every few years or hope to show your children. If you are an activist, or someone creating dissident media, or something like that, you should already be wary of the cloud -- the incentives already drive you to use tools that are secure and self-host when needed. If you truly don't like the ways the big tech companies are doing things, you should find ways to organize with others and demand change; otherwise you are just modifying your personal habits and thinking you are sticking it to the Man with a one-person boycott.
• blenderdt 5y ago
  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.
  • brettermeier 5y ago
    I tried it but there are so many traps you can fall in, like security settings as mentioned by you. When i had my server online back then, it was hacked 1 week later :D
    • macinjosh 5y ago
      I hear a lot of stories like this. I've been self-hosting for a few years out of my home. I have a symmetrical gigabit fiber connection. My IP changes very frequently (DDNS and a low TTL solves that problem for my use cases). _anyway_ I haven't been hacked.. yet. /me knocks on wood The precautions I take are basic: - Use unique and secure credentials on each service I expose. - I only expose ports 80 and 443 to the public. 80 HTTP redirects to HTTPS/443 - I keep my software updated (docker-compose pull) - Nightly backups to cloud storage and local disk - I "airgap" my home network from my hosting network. There is no shared hardware between them including firewalss/routers, switches, etc. I figure cloud services and SaaS get hacked anyway. I can't enumerate the breaches my data has been a part of. If my self-hosted stuff gets hacked at least I can do the forensics and actually see what happened and what was accessed. With a 3rd party all I can hope for is what their PR department lets out.
      • sgarman 5y ago
        IMO separate hardware for your self-hosted network puts you into a whole new class of hosting at "home."
        • 5y ago
• asim 5y ago
  If you really want mainstream adoption of self hosting then you need to stop calling it self hosting and rebrand to "personal cloud". The ease of use of cloud software includes zero install, zero management and consumption based pricing. Desktop and mobile had hardware packaged with software and a simple install mechanism with ease of use as a staple for mainstream users. Self hosting has zero standardisation around hardware, software, install mechanisms. It's a Dev led movement that has everything to do with control and ownership over ease of use. You want mainstream adoption of self hosting. Rebrand it, standardise it, make it easy for non devs.
  • jart 5y ago
    That's what Western Digital does with their "My Cloud" product line and honestly it makes me cringe.
    • asim 5y ago
      That's because its a product by western digital. No one wants that. Let's put it like this. Cloud 1.0 was infrastructure, Cloud 2.0 was services, Cloud 3.0 is personal/private.
      • jart 5y ago
        I respect Western Digital and think they're trying their best to do a good thing. It's that word in general though. Buzzword paradigms always make me feel unwell. As someone who's usually a ahead of the herd in terms of adopting tech, once the broader public catches on and starts making up jargon, I always get a sense that it twists the meaning I personally associated with these concepts and causes me to feel negative emotion about parts of my work life once tacitly normal.
        • asim 5y ago
          Everything starts out as a buzzword but it's only because it's trying to distil down an entire category into a word. As much as you may dislike it, every industry is quite literally built and defined that way. Something has to be a hook, even if you can explain in detail what it is. Cloud is just this idea that everything goes to a remote place that appears as one thing, which you don't control or manage. In all these trend setting new categories you either play the game or lose out and get left behind as a relic aka like WD, IBM, Seagate and everyone else.
• kerblang 5y ago
  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 bill." And now you have a blog, a picture-sharing thingie, a bulletin board, a whatever. Maybe there could even be a version where you pick a datacenter and somebody racks up a PC for you with the software on it.
  • anamexis 5y ago
    And we can call it cPanel ;)
    • boplicity 5y ago
      cPanel isn't "cool" so it doesn't get a lot of credit here, but it is actually an amazing product that solves real problems. It makes running a server -- even hosting email -- almost effortless. Combined with a decent host, you don't need to have much technical knowledge at all. It really does make running your own server accessible to many, many people who would otherwise be unable to do it.
      • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        Additionally: Setting up PHP/MySQL applications on these servers tends to be "upload files, load page" level simple, and cPanel hosting is still generally a fraction of the cost of modern "cool" cloud products. Sure, I have some neat modern things I'd like to do, but I also have a shared hosting that's been doing it's job for pennies since 2011.
  • andreyk 5y ago
    Seems like you could do this pretty easily with a Docker image and a config file. Actually, I've done this with AWS (use a pre-existing image to get some open source wiki software up and running, which I then customized)+
• CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
  Great relevant podcast: https://selfhosted.show/ https://selfhosted.show/
• the_common_man 5y ago
  Can recommend https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io for those looking to get started with self-hosting and don't have a whole lot of time figuring out how to install/update a variety of apps.
• gkoberger 5y ago
  I understand this, but I also... really like the cloud. I can share, be social, get recommendations, not worry about backups or a lost computer, not maintain anything, access from my iPhone, etc. I have thousands of photos and music collections lost on old laptops and hard drives that I'll never see again. I know there's huge tradeoffs (as articulated here), but there's some really amazing things about the direction the web is going.
• mrmattyboy 5y ago
  I love promoting self-hosting.. self-host, self-host, self-host! Having said that, I'd say: Chose your battles wisely... You can run your hardware in X number of physical locations that you have access to (personal house, family etc.). But that doesn't always suffice for backups, so go with an additional cloud provider for additional backups. Emails: Do you want to be hit with tonnes of spam traps because you're an unknown IP (any individual doesn't send email emails to 'warm-up' your IP). Do you want to lose emails because your personal server had a power-cut or internet connection drop? Monitoring: I'd said for small-medium personal setups, to get the level of monitoring, central logging and intrusion detection detection that someone (at least for me) would be comfortable with in the current age, a fair chunk of computing power goes to this. Maybe you'd use an external vendor for monitoring, since your home server monitoring itself won't detect if it goes out. Instant messaging: For IOS, at least, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to send notifications to devices - should you use an external service for this? Honestly, I'm rambling, but.. I absolutely recommend self-hosting everything.. but I think a foreword about the amount of effort that needs to go into setting up services that you rely on a daily basis is (or should be) pretty high. I.e. if I were wanting to setup a single service for myself that I _heavily_ relied on.. I probably wouldn't do it. If I wanted a bunch of applications.. serving 5 applications from a k8s cluster and some additional work for monitoring, log management, backups and other bits and pieces probably starts making sense. On another note, for me, hosting things on your own, especially for data/services that you truly care about, sometimes can have a keep-you-up-at-night feeling of "you don't know what you don't know".. what if someone is in my network.. what if there's a vulnerability in the VPN, firewall and X, Y Z that hasn't been patched and someone is on my machine deleting/stealing my data. There's also people at lot more clever than you in the world and plenty of people writing scripts to automatically break into services that require a little more knowledge than you have on the subject (whatever the attack vector maybe).
• patientplatypus 5y ago
  I have this idea that I'm probably too stupid to implement. It's a what-if scenario so just follow along for the moment. What if someone made an image board style web page, similar to 4chan, with a space for people to upload pictures and comments as well as a blog section. Just a polished javascript application that would be fully open source. Let's say 1000 people downloaded this application and made their own image boards. You could pull the image data from each of the 1000 chan boards and take the top 100 posts from each category and create a master list, without comments, that would act as a sort of newspaper. The ads from the newspaper would go to fund the continual development and maintenance of the system as a whole including the chan board itself. I like this idea because it would mean that since the *chan board would be open source and written in javascript + some backend language (python?) each of the boards itself would have a javascript template, a backend with SQL for the boards and comments, and an API hook to the master server. Only the API endpoints to the master server (phoenix?) would be non-negotiable and it would allow the community to customize the open source webpage. There would be no "building-blocks" that are so high level as to be non-functional. The open source web page itself could be used in standalone mode without the API hooks to the server (but not have added benefits that the server could give such as dashboard analytics, the chance to have posts be on the main newspaper, and maybe some AI image classification, a chat hook that connected the chan boards through socketing?). The newspaper would be a real source of truth because there would be no incentive to game the system - no master website to knock over or gain the top comment off of. The individual websites and the SQL data would all be owned by individual devs running their own environments. The application itself would be continuously improved by a community of people who cared about open source software and not by an algorithmically driven corporation. Like I say I'm probably too dumb to build this, but I'm working on a small website and maybe I can turn it into that. Or maybe someone else will start building this and I can help. But I think that this is important given where the news and social media is these days so it would be exciting if this were made.
  • d110af5ccf 5y ago
    Have you seen fedi? Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, ... If you wanted to collect and publish the "top" 100 posts from a set of instances each day you could do that. I'm not sure how you would rank the posts but then I'm not sure how you would do that with a chan either.
• zelon88 5y ago
  I love self hosting. I made my own cloud platform [1] with app launcher [2] and add-on games [3], file conversion server application [4], and anti-virus server application [5]. I'm currently working on the third iteration of the Cloud and app platform [6] which features completely noSQL and cookieless user and session management features. They are my passion projects. [1] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2 https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2 [2] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2-App-Pack https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2-App-Pack [3] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2-Game-Pack https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2-Game-Pack [4] https://github.com/zelon88/HRConvert2 https://github.com/zelon88/HRConvert2 [5] https://github.com/zelon88/HRScan2 https://github.com/zelon88/HRScan2 [6] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud3 https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud3
  • bullen 5y ago
    Interesting, we have done very similar things in completely different ways: http://github.com/tinspin http://github.com/tinspin (I made my own HTTP server and JSON database and on top of that I made a cloud platform with multiplayer games).
• gregmac 5y ago
  Like so many things, this is just all about trade-offs. Self-host is not a silver bullet, it just swaps in a different set of problems. Risk is part of it. Cloud service disappearing, discontinuing, failing, changing pricing, or modifying product, vs fire/flood, theft, hardware failure or software update breaking things. Responsibility for maintenance is a whole thing, too. Maybe you like that sort of thing, but is still a time suck and for most people it eventually gets boring (especially if it's similar to your day job). Do it less often and eventually you will find yourself upgrading something through major versions with all kinds of breaking changes. Security is a constant concern, and it's unfortunately not as simple as "it's firewalled on my LAN with no inbound access" Media disappearing from a cloud service is incredibly irritating, but you know what else is bad? Trying to watch a movie with your spouse but instead spending your evening diagnosing why your NAS refuses to boot.
• andrewallbright 5y ago
  I wish self hosting was a bit easier. Right now it seems you need to know so much. I've always wondered if there was a way of making self hosting products that were easy to set up and secure by default. I'd love to spend $100 for a mail server that I just plug into my router, as an example.
• fareesh 5y ago
  Anyone know of a good YouTube channel that reviews self-hosted programs? I don't mind self-hosting but I don't have the time to install, configure and deploy 50 different video library products and then decide which one works for me. I'd rather watch a video and listen to someone who has done that exercise, because it saves me a lot of time.
• Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  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 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 technologies. Just remember that your life is production and if you're self-hosting XMPP for your family, you may want to be confident you know how to run XMPP before pushing everyone onto it, so maybe setup a lab or staging environment. But that's fine, it's part of the process! Stop writing screeds and start actually self-hosting. EDIT: Since I'm mostly just reposting the link that OP links in their post, I'll add a couple fun things that I use a lot with self-hosting. https://hoppy.network/ https://hoppy.network/ lets you setup a Wireguard tunnel to have your own static IPv4 /32 and /128 IPv6. https://freerangecloud.com/ https://freerangecloud.com/ gives you similar products but also lets you do things like colocating a Raspberry Pi or getting a VPS at an IX https://www.zerotier.com/ https://www.zerotier.com/ can effortlessly setup a private network between hosts There's more I'm sure, but I like these.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • yewenjie 5y ago
    That blog post literally mentions that link.
    • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      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.
      • JoshTriplett 5y ago
        Your comment doesn't convince anyone to self-host who isn't already doing so, unlike this blog post. It's absolutely possible to write more concisely if you have a narrower target audience of people who already agree with you.
• yewenjie 5y ago
  What are you all self-hosting? For me - - Gitea (git forge) - Maddy (email) - Calendso (scheduling) - Vaultwarden (password manager) - linx (filesharing) - Syncthing (file syncing) - Wireguard (VPN) - a couple of metasearch engines I am not mentioning all the tools and services for monitoring and management. Self hosting is easy for me cause I am managing all of this with NixOS.
  • TwoNineA 5y ago
    - Vaultwarden (passwords) - FreshRSS (RSS reader) - Homebridge (gets some non homekit devices into Homekit) - Minecraft Server (kids) - Valheim Server (me and my buds) - Syncthing Discovery and Relay servers (I am paranoid, for file sync) - PiHole (network adblock) - Wireguard (all our devices have it installed, combined with PiHole = adblock on the go) - Grafana + InfluxDB (to monitor system health) All this is running in a 16 GB space eating VM that's backed up offsite. Maintenance is not too bad, if something goes wrong I'll roll back in a flash and investigate later.
  • sccxy 5y ago
    - Wireguard (VPN) - Pi-hole (Adblocking and works with VPN) - Plex (Media collection) - Plausible (Web analytics) - Home assistant (Smart home) - Uptime Kuma (Monitoring) - Traccar (GPS tracking) - 5 nodejs web apps Wireguard and nginx ports are only opened to internet.
  • pandacasi 5y ago
    - Nextcloud (personal data) - Mailu (email) - Harbor (docker registry) - gitlab (git+ci) - portainer (deployment) - matrix+bridges (chat) - openVPN - grafana, prometheus, ... (monitoring)
• lbriner 5y ago
  I feel that a lot of what the OP mentions is not really solved by self-hosting. Has does self-hosting solve Netflix problems? How does it stop Spotify changing your playlists? Sure, you can create your own jukebox of music files but the reason you pay for Spotify is unlimited access to a lot more music than you would ever buy and easy use between devices. 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.
• paulcole 5y ago
  >Whenever I bring this up people are like “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”. My feelings on this are similar but different, I do have things to hide, but I just don't care.
• mertd 5y ago
  The post is conflating two separate things as if they are the same. 1) Personal stuff that you created and own. For example photos on Google Photos. If Google decides to remove a random photo from my collection, that would be a big problem for me. But they don't. On the upside, the probability of Google losing my photos is an order of magnitude lower than my personal hard disk failing and me having forgotten to back it up. 2) Stuff that others created like movies and songs. I really don't care if a show that I was watching drops off of Netflix. I don't have the same emotional investment to it as the stuff in #1. I'll just find something else to watch.
  • ngcc_hk 5y ago
    Google issue is whether they will pull the plug of the whole service, change name or what. Then you will ask what. And if you are not looking in that several months … it is really what.
  • hkon 5y ago
    Yes, completely valid to treat it as the same when it's something you want to have access to without any third party denying/removing that access. That you have no attachments to movies, music or tv shows is just you. Others may want to continue enjoying the media long after it has been removed from online services.
• romanzubenko 5y ago
  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.
  • gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    Dear Gods of OPSEC, I hope your username isn’t your real name.
  • sgt 5y ago
    Good luck on that side. Russians are great people and not everyone supports Putin.
• kodah 5y ago
  Self-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/ https://www.casaos.io/) being one of my favorites but there's also Portainer (https://portainer.io 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.
  • Hendrikto 5y ago
    > SystemD is complicated for a layperson Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. I suspect that a nice GUI would make systemd quite usable for non-expert users. BTW: It‘s called ”systemd“: > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. [0] [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#spelling https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#spelling
    • kodah 5y ago
      > Is it? It has clean and logical abstractions, and consistency. Services depending in each other isn‘t complex or difficult to understand. For a technologist or engineer, yes. For a layperson, no. The average consumer who desires privacy is probably neither a technologist or engineer, so the longterm target is something that just works. Laypeople also aren't going to entertain the kind of pedantry that is systemd vs systemD vs System D vs SystemD so making systems that abstract further away from those communities is beneficial. Edit: Thank you for your correction, as a systems engineer, but I couldn't help but highlight this is a big hurdle even in the Linux communities that I've been a part of as desktop Linux as gained wider adoption by laypeople.
• rcarmo 5y ago
  I've gone down this path a while back and self-host Gitea and other things: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/02/12/1930 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/02/12/1930 I will be moving my KVM/LXD setup to Proxmox eventually (probably when I get new hardware) and am looking into low-wattage servers (ARM would be nice, to continue the grand tradition of running services on an NSLU2 a few years back, but there just aren't any good ARM server boards with lots of RAM and NVME storage).
  • mendelmaleh 5y ago
    > I will be moving my KVM/LXD setup to Proxmox eventually How come? I'm running proxmox currently but I'm considering just using a regular distro with lxd because I'm almost only using lxc containers...
    • rcarmo 5y ago
      Old kernel, and I would like a UI other people (my kids) can use.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• pronoiac 5y ago
  I run Caprover on a $5 Linode VPS, and it makes it easy to spin up new apps from a curated selection or from a Docker Compose file. I checked out Dokku, but the learning curve out of the box was harder.
• v-yadli 5y ago
  PhotoPrism[1]+NextCloud is a potential solution to the Picasa problem. I run them on my personal NAS. The devops experience is fine -- I can wrap up PWAs for all the devices (PCs and phones) in the family. Need to set up a few systemd timers to synchronize data, build indices and check for PhotoPrism app updates but that's not too bad. Docker makes deployment super easy. The user experience, hmm, modern, minimalism, tolerable. Modern = it knows about iPhone live photos and all sorts of photo metadata; has machine learning for classification. Recognizes faces. etc. Minimalism = just a viewer, no photo editing (Picasa photo editing and the ability to put an album together into one picture totally rocks) Tolerable = meh classification precision, slow geotagged map (dreaming of Picasa + Google Earth), NextCloud iOS autoupload constantly breaks (you want non-iCloud cloud on iOS and you're not a megacorp huh? good luck) etc. Conclusion? It has been a decade since Picasa is gone. I'd expect a lot more improvements to happen, but in reality, the best thing we have now is just that. Some good, some bad, some ugly. [1]: https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/
  • mceachen 5y ago
    I'm writing PhotoStructure, which you might be interested in. It's self-hosted, but also runs on Windows and macOS without docker, libraries are portable, and photo and video deduplication is robust. Photoprism had a couple features I haven't built out yet, but I'm getting there. More details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/ Also, if nextcloud gives you attitude (I had scaling issues with it), know that there are several other alternatives to background phone syncing with your server: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#how-do-i-back-up-files-on-my-phone https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...
    • v-yadli 5y ago
      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 https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/215 -- they tried every possible way to persuade iOS into running background sync, but still hit and miss. I have to request access to my wife's iPhone and manually trigger some :) One small suggestion here -- PhotoPrism went with `tensorflow.js` to load up classification models, and I recommend a "real" TF or PyTorch installation to properly leverage the computation resources. The difference is huge even running cpu-only because it's wasm vs. proper BLAS library. I worked on a nodejs binding for native ONNX runtime (not publicly) so that's also a possible way out.
• TheBozzCL 5y ago
  Been on this route for a while. Currently, I have: - My blog (Jekyll + Apache 2 + nginx) - An Invidious instance - My VPN (Wireshark) - A DNS server (Pi-hole + nginx for DNS-over-TLS) - My password manager, up to a point (KeePass + OneDrive for backups and sync, but I'm thinking of ways to self-host that) The big ones left are making my password manager self-hosted, email (not sure if I want to go beyond having my own domain yet) and code repo. I feel these need more reliable hardware and internet connections to be fully viable as self-hosted.
• mholt 5y ago
  This is why I'm building Timelinize [1]. It's a follow-up to my open source Timeliner project [2], which has the potential to download all your digital life onto your own computer locally, and projects it all onto a single timeline, across all data sources (text messages, social media sites, photos, location history, and more). It's a little different from "self hosting" but it does have a similar effect of bringing all your data home and putting it in your control. We have to start somewhere, might as well start with bringing in all the data we've put out there. (It's not a replacement for self-hosted media servers, for example.) The backend and underlying processing engine is all functional and working very well; now I'm just getting the UI put together, so I hope to have something to share later this year. [1]: https://twitter.com/timelinize https://twitter.com/timelinize (website coming eventually) [2]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
  • metadat 5y ago
    This sounds very cool, please submit a "Show HN" once the basics are working!
    • mholt 5y ago
      Oh I will, for sure! I will need a lot of feedback.
  • BonoboIO 5y ago
    Sounds nice. Do you know some tool, to have all your feeds in one place. I hate having to use Instagram, but a few friends post nice things. Like timeline but with your own feed with only the things i want to see from the sources i want. Like a daily "You missed this posts, images and ..."
  • olah_1 5y ago
    Have you considered using something like hypercore[1] for the timeline sharing? Or maybe you don't plan on making timelines shareable? [1]: https://twitter.com/HypercoreProto https://twitter.com/HypercoreProto
• pansinghkoder 5y ago
  Genuine question: does it make sense to go even more paranoid with self hosting? 1. buy a box at home 2. run on onion: https://medium.com/axon-technologies/hosting-anonymous-website-on-tor-network-3a82394d7a01 https://medium.com/axon-technologies/hosting-anonymous-websi... 3. access media using onion browser I believe electricity cost of hosting at home would be expensive and accessibility will be a problem 2000 miles away without cdn. One might have to consider having this box on a separate network. So anonymity here might not be worth the price?
• dashwehacct 5y ago
  I used to produce and record music and used a website called imeem to host my works. At some point it was bought out by MySpace and all non-licensed music was removed (granted there was a ton of stuff uploaded by individuals who did not own the rights to the work they uploaded) including stuff uploaded by the creators. My work was pretty sub-par at the time, but I felt the burn pretty badly. Since then I’ve had very little faith in any site that allows creators to upload their content. I still have work uploaded to SoundCloud, but also have backups stored locally and on my self hosted nextcloud instance for this reason. This is probably more along the lines of the current situation with Vimeo than it is with Picaso, but I can still feel the burn from time to time.
• robbomacrae 5y ago
  I want to run my servers from both AWS as well as my laptop. At the moment the configuration and deployment of each is unique which, apart form being a bit of a hassle, also means there might be issues on one i cannot reproduce on the other. It would be really cool if there was a way I could deploy to my machine with awscli and self host my own beanstalk setup so I can test and debug even offline safe in the knowledge it will work exactly the same. Are there any projects that offer something like this?
• davchana 5y ago
  Author; Unrelated to the topic but related to your blog; the footer has a missing colon in address, in theme link. It is https://https//github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini https://https//github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini It should be https://github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini https://github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini
• em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
  > "But if you cannot wait, head over to r/selfhosted" The irony of this blog post is telling me to visit a non-self hosted cloud service to get started self-hosting.
• u2077 5y ago
  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.
  • kesslern 5y ago
    Unraid can do something extremely similar to this. There's a plugin that provides a repository of Community Applications that are essentially docker configuration templates designed specifically for Unraid. You can search for say, HomeAssistant and install it with just a few clicks.
    • xanaxagoras 5y ago
      Unraid is great, but be warned, it can spiral out of control. I started with unraid and a gazillion containers, now I have that, 2 mini PCs, and some networking equipment that I never thought I'd want or need. It's a lot of fun.
  • BonoboIO 5y ago
    YES! I think the single most important thing of any software is "how do i install this". Thats the first thing i search for on a github repo. And please no outdated tutorials, that sucks so bad ... that i give up and don't use it.
    • moonbas3 5y ago
      Most things offer a docker image, so maybe learn how to work with those.
      • Gigachad 5y ago
        It's not as easy as "just run the docker image". Maybe it is if you just want to run a single one. But as soon as you want to run multiple it becomes a very complex job of configuring nginx and lets encrypt. It took me several hours to work out how to host nextcloud and get the nginx config working.
• sekou 5y ago
  I'm not affiliated but I came across some software called Yunohost (https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/) recently, a Debian-based OS that tries to be user-friendly for self-hosting applications. Not sure how much it's being maintained.
  • iN7h33nD 5y ago
    It's very active. I have been using it for years and they update often enough.
• BonoboIO 5y ago
  I HATE the Spotify podcast player. It is the worst UI for pretty much anything: music, video, podcast, lyrics ... I selfhost ... i download the spotify exclusive podcasts and host them myself to use the with overcast. They come as OPUS files, but ffmpeg to the rescue.
• api 5y ago
  The main barrier is the difficulty of doing it, and there is currently an economic disincentive to fix this. For software companies the cloud is DRM, and the only kind that works. Rent access to software and you can easily charge a recurring fee for it. This is incredible on the business side, especially because recurring revenue is valued higher by finance types than non-recurring revenue (due to perceived lower risk). For makers of software you can self-host, money is often made through support. This creates a disincentive to make things too easy or you cut into support profits. If you try to make a living making endpoint applications, life is hard. The FOSS movement has educated the market that software should always be free (as in beer, not freedom). People will pay $10 for a Starbucks drink but not $5 for an app they use every day.
• teekert 5y ago
  I love selfhosting. Right now I have this in my personal docker-compose.yaml: NextCould (3 installs, each their own MariaDB instance), HomeAssistant, Mosquitto, Vaultwarden, an Nginx served static website, Unifi controller, nzbget, Samba, librespeed, Wireguard, 4 MineCraft servers, AdGuard home, FoundryVTT and Traefik as reverse proxy for https (it's all 1 yaml file, everything! At least, excluding the HA config etc). All on a 16 GB RAM, corei3 based server. Home Assistant tells me it is consuming about 30 W right now (and generally stays between 30-35W). That's about 70 eur a year for multi-terabyte personal cloud, and docker-compose makes managing it very easy (docker-compose pull, docker-compose up -d). Over the past 2 years I had only one issue (I had to pin Mariadb to 10.5 or NextCloud complains). Oh, the initial costs are of course quite high, including all disks I'd say about 1000 eur, so it's quite the hobby (I have a nice Fujitsu motherboard (3 y/o) and Fractal Design case (12 y/o), it saw 3 builds now, I started with a super cheap atom based board, then a Pentium dual core, and now the corei3 system that can handle a lot more disks, the nvme root drive makes it so fast.) I wonder about my next system. I also have a corei3 based Nuc (as htpc) and that thing is also very fast, silent and energy efficient. And it has nice and fast external I/O. Not sure yet, but my current system will last at least another 5 years. My father has a Synology NAS and for some time I thought that would be my next system because I'd get tired of the associated sys-admin tasks at some point (I started with a Gentoo system and there were no containers, meaning you have to set up php-fpm, then mariadb, then download Next(Own)Cloud, then update it regularly, pff and the migrations to other systems...). But docker-compose really changed that for me, I think the Synology would be more work. Btw, a nice podcast on Selfhosting where I got a lot of inspiration from: [0] [0]: https://selfhosted.show https://selfhosted.show
  • buzzert 5y ago
    > Btw, a nice podcast on Selfhosting Ironically, not self-hosted (served from fireside.fm).
    • teekert 5y ago
      In the podcast they talk a lot about when to self host. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. For example this podcast's community is on Discord, but for their other podcasts they maintain a Matrix server. It's interesting to hear them talk about the joys and pains that both solutions bring. I used to run an email server from my basement, now I also know that that is not something I want to self host anymore :)
• sylware 5y ago
  Bringing self hosting to lambda users is _REALLY_ hard and Big Tech won't let you do it too easily. Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus), or won't support no-DNS email address and servers (which is RFC from the start) or won't have the decency to handle grey listing or will send all your emails to their spam boxes (gogol) even though ppl did remove your emails from their spambox. IAPs won't provide a stable public IPv4 address or IPv6 prefix. UPNP NAT port redirection (IPv4) will have bugs on the IAP router/modem. Buying a DNS and configuring a domain is a pain. So few DNS registrars support automatic domain configuration via the standard dynDNS protocol (is this even a thing?). The self-hosting devices on user domestic LANs will be pown by very "smart" hackers pushing those very users towards big tech (I wonder who is pay... pushing such hackers to do that...). The path of least resistance will win, always, even if it means giving way to much power to some corps: Lambda users _will use_ comfy centralized services mostly, and those centralized services, once big, will try to zap away any alternatives or interop (which most used in the first place to get there). Like lambda users _will use only_ the pre-installed OS on the computer (or mobile phone) they bought, same idea. I am talking about nearly everybody else who is not "us", the 0.1% (ironical).
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    > Many corp email smtp servers will IP block your email server (big thanks to spamhaus) Nope. Spamhaus doesn't block self-hosted email servers. Spamhaus just publishes a number of lists, which postmasters can use or not, whether for filtering or just for scoring. The PBL in particular is likely to catch people self-hosting from a retail connection, because it lists most residential IP address-space. But it's the receiving mailserver that does the blocking, not Spamhaus. And it's down to the policies of the receiver's postmaster what lists are used and how they are used. That requires judgement and research, and some postmasters lack the former or don't have time for the latter.
    • p_j_w 5y ago
      GP never said Spamhaus blocks anything.
• QuikAccount 5y ago
  Couple weeks ago I made this post about self-hosting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30618577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30618577 My conclusion coming out of that thread was self-hosting is not a thing I'm going to do. I don't have the time or energy to essentially take up the part-time job of managing my own self-host.
• gonehome 5y ago
  I'm biased because I now work on it, but I think Urbit is the only way something like this will work for most people and at scale. "Only" is probably too strongly worded, but it's the one attempt I've seen where I think real success is among one of the possible outcomes (other attempts I've seen don't fix deeper issues and are DOA). The issues that caused the decentralized web to fail (and incentivize centralization) are deeper and to get self-hosting to work beyond the tiniest of niches requires rethinking some of the computing constraints we find ourselves operating under from first principles. People will never run their own servers if that means administering linux. Identity will never be solved by PGP key signing parties and spam will always be a problem on the current web. Federated systems in their current state that require everyone to run linux servers and keep them in sync/up to date will not work. https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr... https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit On the current web we're just serfs allowed account access on company servers. I think it's admirable to make it easier to run your own server, but I think decades have shown that it won't work (beyond a narrow hyper-technical niche) without fixing some of the larger issues: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook... - the most exciting part of the web was what people thought it would bring in the 90s. I think that isn't impossible, but we're currently trapped in a local max. We can't get out of that local max without acknowledging why we're in it - why the centralized services are currently so much better and why the dream of everyone self-hosting (even with decades of effort) has been a failure.
• epalm 5y ago
  When I hear "I have nothing to hide" my response of "OK, just send me your browser history" is usually met with silence.
• evantahler 5y ago
  The world of Synology products is fascinating in this regard. Take photos - They’ve got iOS and android apps that replace your photo app; a truly self-hosted server you run in your home with pretty easy to use DNS support tools. Even shared albums work without much fuss. I think they’ve invested in the UX in recent versions, and it shows. https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos
  • Forge36 5y ago
    Definitely pro-sumer, I think professionals are the primary audience, though as an individual this cuts most of the effort out of the process for me.
    • evantahler 5y ago
      Exactly! I guess above by “UX” I meant far more than the screens you interact with - running the app, storage, integrating with mobile and home ecosystems, etc. Sure it’s fun to learn how all of that works, but for a few 100$, you can really move a family to fully self-hosted (content) in a day.
  • viburnum 5y ago
    I've had a Synology raid for a few years but I'm completely baffled by it. There seem to be three options for everything (Photo Station, Moments, Photos. Similar situation for video). Nothing ever seems to work and it's very slow. It's never clear exactly where you're supposed to put your files either. Constantly doing security updates isn't very reassuring either. I feel like I'm going to get hit with ransomeware all the time.
    • emptysongglass 5y ago
      Synology Photos is what Moments has been rebranded too. It's fantastic and our whole household uses it. Apart from that admitted indecision of product naming, I love my Synology. Synology MailPlus handles all my selfhosted mail without any fuss. Synology Drive handles file sync to the NAS but you can use whatever protocol you want. The Docker support is really handy. I run more than 35 services on mine without it breaking a sweat. This is a DS-218+. > Constantly doing security updates isn't very reassuring either. That's why you do them. To keep your system secure. I'm not really sure what would be more reassuring to you since security is an always-evolving landscape that requires mitigations quickly. It's not something you sit on.
• symkat 5y ago
  I've been working on https://markdownsite.com/ https://markdownsite.com/ - the "Git Repo -> Website" type of hosting platform, and have completely opened sourced it so others can run it themself. The installation and on-going configuration management are first class things, with documentation and graphs: https://github.com/symkat/MarkdownSite/tree/master/devops https://github.com/symkat/MarkdownSite/tree/master/devops
• louison11 5y ago
  This article is a bit delusional and oblivious to market dynamics. 1. Privacy: Self hosting is not necessarily more private than cloud services. The security of self hosted services is only as good as the effort put into maintaining it. Who do you think invests more in security: the giant corporation or a free open source project? Even if the project is well maintained, there are many ways your server can be compromised. It’s only as safe as you’re willing to make it. The best way to be safe for me is not self hosting, but cloud hosting with E2E encryption. 2. Longevity: even though self hosting technically means nobody can discontinue your service, everything eventually gets discontinued. Your server will be out of date at some point. You will need to update it. You might be too busy to do it and your server will become a security risk. Again, middle path and ideal way for me here is: use cloud services, encrypted, AND save the data locally as well. 3. Usability & market dynamics: John Doe doesn’t have the time or knowledge to self host, which makes self hosting dangerous for him for the reasons mentioned above. If you’re going to self host, you need to know what you’re doing. If you do it half way, you’re better off staying with a cloud service. The cloud will always win because it’s easier for everyday people. And because it wins, there will always be more money and development happening in it. We need more cloud services that use encryption by default, and provide data migration tools. The more this becomes a standard, the more the “big cloud giants” will have to step up and match this new standard. For me, THIS is the way not just nerds but everybody benefits from a safer, more reliable Internet.
  • pjerem 5y ago
    1. I don’t understand why you conflate security with privacy. Or to be more precise, it depends on your threat model. A badly secured self hosting will make yourself vulnerable to targeted attacks over your privacy. While it’s an issue you should consider, those attacks are pretty unlikely. However traditional cloud services will harvest every bit of what they get about you with a frightening efficiency but they’ll never automatically scan your server for vulnerabilities to read your mails.
    • ziml77 5y ago
      Security is necessary to maintain privacy. If someone gains access to your systems, nothing you had on there is private anymore.
• preseinger 5y ago
  I explicitly do not want to be in control of my own data. I don't trust myself with it. A third-party is better equipped to manage it over time. This is both a common and rational position.
  • tormock 5y ago
    Can you trust yourself with passwords for true e2e encrypted traffic? that could work too...
• bob1029 5y ago
  I've been thinking about buying rack space from a colo in my metro area. Hosting at home is something I used to do religiously for over a decade, but I really don't like all the hackarounds and shitty ISP/DNS/port problems anymore. It's definitely not cheap to do this, but there are a lot of fun upsides. Just having an excuse to get out of the house to badge in at a DC is a nice mix-up for me. Everything I do at work is cloud hosted, so I rarely get the visceral experience anymore.
  • Havoc 5y ago
    >I really don't like all the hackarounds and shitty ISP/DNS/port problems anymore. This is a not insignificant part of the reason why I'm in no hurry to move from my flawed apartment. Symmetric gigabit fibre with static ipv4 is a luxury not everyone appreciates but I sure do Moving would be such a pain since rental agents don't get this at all. "Yes it has fast broadband"...what they mean is it has 4G reception if you lean out the right window.
• badhombres 5y ago
  I would love to self host, but the time and effort I would have to put into doing, maintaining, and convincing my spouse (which is a whole effort by itself) is so significant it will take away from my other goals in life.
• goatcode 5y ago
  Site is down. I guess we've learned the limit of this self-hosting advocate's self-hosted setup.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  I agree with the issues raised, but I'd say there are costs and risks associated with self-hosting, and those aren't factored into the post. Self-hosting will have the same appeal as off-the-grid power: It's expensive and technically complex to implement, comes with it's own unique risks, and is way less convenient than sucking it down through the same pipe everyone else is. But it does provide a sense of empowerment.
• aborsy 5y ago
  The main problems with self hosting are securing the server for remote access, and maintenance. If you can keep it local, Synology has good boxes that are reliable and largely plug and play. They require little to no maintenance.
• simow 5y ago
  [flagged]
• john61 5y ago
  https://freedombox.org/ https://freedombox.org/ can make this easier. It is based on Debian and has a nice Web GUI. One can also order an appliance: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/Pionee...
• simow 5y ago
  [flagged]
• gcommer 5y ago
  Lots of good points about the challenges of self-hosting throughout this thread, especially maintenance, security, and time-investment. Here's my solution to all of them: Invest in your common infra. Docker provides stable images configured primarily with env vars. I have a docker-compose host with logging/monitoring/alerting. All service-specific files are mounted from a NAS that has backups. All network access is closed by default, but exposed via a central login proxy (tailscale would be an easier alternative, but my Beyondcorp-esque system lets non-technical family members use my services easily from anywhere by tapping a yubikey). That's 3 pieces of infra to maintain (docker host, NAS, login proxy) but I can check all the boxes for self-hosting 15+ services. O(n) services with O(1) infra. I regularly spin up new services in under 10 minutes, while only having to touch 3 files that I am already familiar with (docker-compose.yml, dnsconfig.js, nginx.conf). I've run stable services for years on this stack. The only painful issues have been upgrades to the docker host, docker ipv6, and hardware issues. This is all on a recycled computer in the basement, with a cheap VPS as a stable public entrypoint.
  • ziml77 5y ago
    But then you're adding even more parties to trust as it's often the case that Docker images are not provided by the same people that are maintaining the project.
    • gcommer 5y ago
      Fair point, but I haven't hit it in practice. Tons of services are embracing docker as a first-class output. I just checked and I run exactly 2 images that are from a third party.
      • sdoering 5y ago
        As far as I understand 'below' the application layer there is usually a basic image (like alpine) in docker? Do these first parties maintain these as well? If not the trust chain just got longer. I would call myself at least somewhat technically capable. But I actually never grasped docker beyond the 'I can pack an image and deploy it to AWS' stage so that I can access an internal tool I built at work over the internet. I was not really understanding what I was doing and was more or less blindly following some tutorials on the net. When building and deploying things to the shared hosting environment I use privately I have a better (albeit far from perfect) understanding of what I am doing while I know that I am trusting the underlying infrastructure and the people behind that.
• deforciant 5y ago
  I self host a ton of things! :) it's really much less hassle than people think. I started with Docker compose and eventually started using my side project https://synpse.net/ https://synpse.net/ for it as it just helps to move things around and update things remotely. I just wish more tools embraced 12 factor app style deployment :)
• maestroia 5y ago
  Irony. Hosting a list of applications for self-hosting on a SaaS platform.
• mtoner23 5y ago
  The examples he gives are all the small downsides of cloud hosting but the huge upsides are clear to consumers and is the reason we all use them. Dont tell me that you really want to self host your youtube playlists, the market of people who want that is incredibly small.
• uhtred 5y ago
  Syncthing, baby.
• cuillevel3 5y ago
  What exactly is self-hosting? Are you just running services in isolation? Updates come from a central place, I guess. With some appliances, there is integrated federation, "cloud" access? Those can still comprise you. Do you share hosting with your family and friends? Are they still "self-hosted", or are you their provider?
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Flip-side: I self-hosted my blog and email for over 10 years, everything automated - first with Perl and Bash scripts, then much later with Ansible. It was beautiful. But last year I moved to S3/CloudFront via CloudFormation for my blog and Migadu for email. It's even more beautiful because it's now somebody else's problem and also a hell of a lot cheaper.
• rglullis 5y ago
  For those that avoid it on the grounds of "it is too hard to self-host", may I suggest a much simpler alternative? It takes two simple steps: 1) buy a domain name 2) Foment/patronize SMBs that can provide hosting for open source software alternatives. That's it. By demanding open source alternatives, you are ensuring that the service vendor can not lock you in. By using your own domain, you get the freedom to port your services to anyone that offers better price/better support/better performance.
• throwaway684936 5y ago
  Not quite self-hosting, but in the same spirit I've slowly been working on a simple local archival system for anything I don't want to lose. It's changed my life. Even across years of content, it's required less storage space than I expected. The more I archive, the less I need to rely on online search engines or worry about linkrot. It's also helped me cut down on how many tabs I keep open in fear of losing information. If I can't recall some piece of information, I can do a fuzzy global search through the text of all articles I've saved in a specific category, for example. If I find some obscure fix for something deep in an old reddit or HN thread, you bet I'm archiving that so if I run into the same issue a year later I can easily fix it again without trawling through 50 Google results.
  • axlee 5y ago
    What do you use to organize all of this unstructured data in a way that is searchable and retrievable?
    • throwaway684936 5y ago
      It's somewhat structured; I use both broad categories and a tag system. I can also add additional comment text to archived pages. It's all patched together with shell scripts and some Lua (since that's what I'm familiar with). `ripgrep` is the utility used for searching. It's fast enough for me even when I don't use any kind of category filtering, but I have a beefy computer and use NVMe drives, so YMMV.
• devmunchies 5y ago
  One thing I think would help the self-hosting community is a standardized method for tapping into repositories of scripts and functions. The next step is to build a UI on that platform and then I can do admin things from a self-hosted UI but it just runs several script for me behind the scenes. E.g. a button for check upgrade for my email server, a button for upgrading my email server, etc. If administrative configuration became standardized, then it will become commoditized by hosting platforms.
• pSYoniK 5y ago
  Self hosting seemed so very daunting up until a year or so ago. I decided to give it a shot while struggling to find a way to keep my notes. OneNote isn't good (no Linux support), wasn't a fan of Evernote, Nuclino was crawling on my old laptop and I ended up finding BookStackApp. This led me to find a cheap VPS, install it using the install script and then figure stuff out from there. It led me to setting up a home server and working my way through the entire setup - format and mount drives, automate backups, automate hdd health checks, setup smb, docker, traefik, emby and so on. At this point I'm looking at experimenting with Proxmox as my server is overkill (it also made me realize how few resources are used in these setups... we end up needing 2-3000$ systems to just run an OS... which is absolutely ridiculous). Linux showed me that in order to do any meaningful work you don't need a 3k machine. In any case, I'm in the process of arranging ALL my notes in order and I plan on publishing a guide that walks a user through the setup step by step. I know people are talking about a lot of the complexities, but you can always share your knowledge. Help someone setup an old linux box to use as an smb nas... get them to install jellyfin or emby or plex on it and even there you have already massively helped them in the right direction. I think it's our responsibility to share our knowledge and empower people to migrate or at least understand what's involved.
• dmitriid 5y ago
  I'd love to self-host something like Picasa or Google Photos. Alas, there are not too many choices that can replicate the experience.
• dmje 5y ago
  Seems to me that there's a middle way. Self hosting is too hard, but making sure you've got local duplicates of all your stuff is less so. As a simple example: I use Dropbox and Google Drive extensively. I'd like not to but the utility and ease is hard to beat. But I have made an effort to only use Word and Excel (rather than gdoc/gsheet) and have hooked up my Synology so it backs up all my cloud services whenever there's a file change. So - I'm not strictly self hosting, because it's too hard, but if Dropbox doubled price or Google stopped doing GDrive, I'm safe. Same with photos and other critical assets.
• johndhi 5y ago
  For those suggesting e2e encryption of data in Cloud services, how is that possible? How could you, for example, run Salesforce and have Salesforce only see encrypted data? Seems extremely complicated or impossible -- isn't the point of encryption that nothing can be done with it?
• weystrom 5y ago
  I self-host everything but my email. Hosting email is just too much. Big providers just treat you as guilty of spam, unless proven otherwise. Just too many hoops to jump through.
• johndhi 5y ago
  For those advocating e2e encryption instead, is that even possible with most cloud services? How can you encrypt Salesforce data, for example, and still have Salesforce perform all of the necessary operations on that data, if they can't even see it?
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Raspberrypi is solving self-hosting issues for most people (size, power usage, simplicity). It's also bringing the price down, because for 2 years of a paid dropbox plan, you can set up your own nextcloud instance + another backup drive if needed... plus all the bonus features (privacy, fast access at home, no ToSs to break, etc.).
• gsich 5y ago
  If someone is interested why Picasa was mentioned, it's because of the face recognition. Still best offline version there is.
• joshuajill 5y ago
  There are projects out there trying to make it easier for beginners, like Yunohost, FreedomBox, and FreedomBone. YunoHost in particular has a nice community, they are worth supporting if you're into democratizing self hosting.
• skarz 5y ago
  Interesting contrast to this article[1] which was posted to HN several days ago [1] https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2022/03/i-dont-need-a-vps-anymore/ https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2022/03/i-dont-need-a-vps-a...
• ketzo 5y ago
  Clicked the link, only to find that the site is down (presumably from too much traffic due to HN). The irony is... pretty heavy.
• aetherspawn 5y ago
  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 will pay off but this year we definitely won’t break even on the servers. How has this has changed our culture? Well, what I have enjoyed about the whole process is now we have a bunch of spare capacity, so we can spin up demo servers for SMB clients for even a few months and it “costs us nothing”. Then we can arrange payment later when they fully appreciate the service. We don’t take any risks anymore with bills that need to be settled to cloud providers. This has changed how “generous” we are in the outset with our clients. It feels really healthy to be able to do this.
  • javchz 5y ago
    I'm glad you did. One of the things that scare me the most about the current state of the Internet, it's how centralized it's everything in the "cloud" with a lot of the Internet infrastructure depending on like 5 providers. Self hosting it's dirty, time consuming, expensive, risky, but it's predictable. The problem with XaaS it's how little control we have. Not only the rules of pricing can change any day, but if you're already dependable on the service, they could easily shut down that service if it's not profitable enough, and with some luck you will only be able to migrate in a few months.
    • sdoering 5y ago
      In the end I think it will boil down to a question of anti fragility or resiliency VS. efficiency. And there is actually imho no black and white answer. Take a current, very small freelance client of mine. I built them a homepage based on Kirby CMS. Hosted on uberspace.de. On the same shared server there is Matomo being hosted for basic stats. Another client I was involved in went another way. They had their site built by a team of designers with webflow and are using Google Analytics. In both cases the decision makes sense given the conditions and constraints of the respective projects. Personally I would have not recommend to use webflow, but that was not my call to make. For GA I provided a pro/con evaluation and the client decided to go with GA (not my primary recommendation). I still think for his use case at the time a sensible decision.
• thoughtfunction 5y ago
  I've been using an app called Mylio as a replacement to Picasa. Everything is locally hosted, the apps are very fast with large libraries and you can have peer to peer syncing between multiple devices for the same library, including your phone. I like it a lot!
• sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  Whenever I bring this up people are like “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”. But this is exactly similar to saying “I don’t care about free speech because I have nothing to say” Brilliant. I fully support this spirit. We need to self host more. Here is another important one that self hosting would protect you from: censorship and ideological regulations imposed by a platform.
• mgraczyk 5y ago
  My personal site is a static page on github pages, behind cloudflare. It almost never goes down. This page appears to be down, probably because of the HN traffic. I don't buy counter arguments to “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”. This is completely reasonable if you mean it as "It's extremely unlikely that github or cloudflare will ever choose to censor any content I care to share. Therefore I'm okay with taking that risk in exchange for the free, easy, scalable web hosting"
  • throwaway0x7E6 5y ago
    >It's extremely unlikely that github or cloudflare will ever choose to censor any content I care to share are you absolutely certain that in 5, 10, 15 years, _all_ things you do and views you express that are widely acceptable today will continue to be so?
    • mgraczyk 5y ago
      In 15 years I may be dead, and yes I'm pretty much certain. Life is too short to worry about these things. I'll say controversial things in private or anonymously.
      • toastal 5y ago
        Cloudflare blocks readers running Tor or VPNs and GitHub has been down every day this week. I don't think your plan is bullet proof.
        • mgraczyk 5y ago
          I'm not going to run Tor or a VPN from my static web page.
          • toastal 5y ago
            But readers might
• mt_ 5y ago
  Consider self hosting instead of falling for the ponzi of the decentralization of web3
• redocecin 5y ago
  I love self hosting but very concern about reliability, security and stability of these systems, e.g. outage, disk crash, out of memory… Looking forward to seeing more articles about these problems.
• egberts1 5y ago
  The hardest part is drafting a series of questions for the end-user to understand and answer before we get that “MAGIC-PRESTO-CHANGO” get those configuration files that just works. I blame the program providers. Some Debian maintainers are trying to do this simple querying of complex configurations (dpkg-reconfigure <`package-name>`). And I applaud their limited inroad efforts there because no else one has seem to bother. I have made a bash script to configure for each Chronyd, named, sshd, dhcpd, dhclient, NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, /etc/resolv.conf, amongst many. They try and ask simple questions and glue appropriate settings then run their own syntax checkers (most are provided by the original stream). Postfix, Shorewall, and Exim4 remain a nightmare to my evolving design. CISecurity and other government hardening docs were applied as well and then some I took even further like Chrony had its file permissions/ownership even further and MitM block feature as well. These are dangerous scripts where it can write files as root but as a user, you will instead get configuration files written out in appropriate directories under `build` subdirectory. If these designs work across Redhat/Fedora/CentOS, Debian/Devuan, and ArchLinux well, I may forge even further. https://github.com/egberts/easy-admin https://github.com/egberts/easy-admin
  • hsn915 5y ago
    The problem is configuration itself. Things should not need configuration. Configuration is for builders, not users. When you buy a car, do you "configure" the gearbox? The engine? Imagine yourself buying a car, and the car dealer starts to ask you "where would you like to place the gas tank?" or "How many pipes do you want going from the engine to the gas tank?". Oh and by the way, if you place the gas tank in the wrong place or choose the wrong number or placement for pipes, the car won't start at all; it might even blow up! This is basically what debian is asking the user to do.
    • egberts1 5y ago
      That’s why pressing enter several times for a manufacturer-recommended default setting works for most car drivers, oh wait, I meant end-users. Mean Time to Consult the Manufacturing Specs (MTTCTM, or HOWTOs) should be cut down … drastically. Oh yeah, say “YES” to that fancy option of the Positron rear axle (cue in increase to manufacturing delivery time). This is the Information Age! You’ve only lost the “trial period” to get it right.
• rattray 5y ago
  One problem with "self-hosting" is you're usually still hosting in the cloud – say, on a DigitalOcean droplet or something. That means you're spending $5-10 every month or whatever, plus you're still vulnerable to some amount of cloud-provider fickleness (though much less than a SaaS provider). Much better would be a physical device in your own home. Lately I've been dreaming about a home wifi router that doubles as a personal server, with a few TB of storage, with tailscale-type networking for remote administration and a nice App store for self-hosted apps (FOSS or otherwise). Not a company I am going to start, just one that I hope someone does.
  • kbuck 5y ago
    Check out Synology NASes (and now they make a router too). Basically exactly what you describe.
    • rattray 5y ago
      Very interesting – thanks! For reference, https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS720+ https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS720+ lokos like a representative model. Seems to offer competitors to Google Photos, Drive, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more…
  • wmf 5y ago
    Given the choice between $5/month and, say, $300 upfront most people will choose monthly. I think both options should be available but realistically not many people are going to buy the box. There have been a bunch like FreedomBox, IndieBox, Helm, etc. but they don't seem to take off.
    • rattray 5y ago
      Interesting – Helm definitely looks cool, close to what I had in mind. Pricing of $400 plus $99/yr subscription sounds tough – and it doesn't include a wifi router, which I think is an element that would make more sense to the average home user (and ensure it's not connected to the internet over wifi).
• stoolpigeon 5y ago
  Hosting a server from my house is a violation of the TOS from my ISP. My choices are them or DSL. I don't live in a rural area. I'm well inside a metro area of 5 million people in the USA.
  • wmf 5y ago
    So get a VPS.
    • stoolpigeon 5y ago
      Which makes the whole point of the post I just read moot. I just switch one company that controls my stuff to another company that controls my stuff.
  • superkuh 5y ago
    Break your TOS. An ISP that doesn't allow you to use the internet is a web service provider.
  • bullen 5y ago
    You need to change your laws to make that TOS illegal. I have mailed the Swedish govt. agency that controls telecom (PTS, "Post och Tele Styrelsen" or "Post Traumatic Stress" both work in this case). ISPs should have to provide static IPs and open all ports, pressure your local authorities and spread the word.
• lubesGordi 5y ago
  Can self hosting include hosting on ec2? To me it's a bit of a jump to assume the hardware is in our basement or something.
• trevcanhuman 5y ago
  I have a home server. It runs on a 2013/14 HP Pavillion laptop. I am indeed a linux user. I currently have arch linux installed on it. I run a blog at [0] and use a dynamic dns provider. I must say, it has not been easy at all. I learned a lot of things. I did not attend any school lectures to learn this. I am still in high school, but thanks to the beauty of the internet and a ton of effort I was able to get a static blog working, learned a lot about free software, how sometimes just using certain web servers is just too complex. The main web server is at [0]. It runs on my home internet connection. Thankfully they do allow for port forwarding. But it's certainly a good exercise to understand how much we give for granted to giant and sometimes small corporations. I've learned to write and express my feelings among lots of other technical knowledge. references [0] https://blog.trevcan.duckdns.org/ https://blog.trevcan.duckdns.org/ [1] https://trevcan.duckdns.org/ https://trevcan.duckdns.org/
  • sdoering 5y ago
    My utmost respect. I ran a Linux box at home while I was at university. It acted like a NAT/masquerading server. It was the time when DSL routers weren't a thing. At least not widely available. But I never had the idea to use it to host internal or external stuff there. Kudos to you.
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    I love arch for a lot of things, but I've learned to keep stick to more "traditional" operating systems when it comes to servers. There's simply no auto-update functionality available in Arch so you need to constantly remind yourself to update. I wish you the best of luck with your arch server endeavours, may they treat you better than they have treated me. Ubuntu is pushing me away with their idiotic focus on snap every new release but I'm not hosting anything on a server that I can't just run sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades on to auto install security patches. I still need to reboot my servers from time to time, but that's rarely ever really necessary for security. It's a shame because I think the "closer to the metal" approach of Arch works quite well for server setups.
• pj_mukh 5y ago
  Speaking of which. Is there a good self-hosted version of Google photos and by which I mean the critical features that make Google Photos so attractive: a) very good mobile sync b) creepily good contextual search (search by people, places etc.) c) family sync and family albums based on b) I would gladly pay more than what I pay for Google photos for a local version AND a setup fee to help me transfer.
  • unexistential 5y ago
    Seemingly there isn't, which is a shame because a lot of people would benefit from it. Practically everyone has a smartphone and people's photo libraries keep growing and growing. When I was young and still naïve about the big G, Google photos was awesome but now it doesn't make sense to hand over all of my photos for them to mine and have to pay for storage too. Right now my setup involves using Syncthing to get photos from my phone to my RPi-based NAS, where I'm running a Photoprism instance. On paper it looked great but Photoprism lacks polish and some important features. On the app side I planned to use PhotoSync to sync with Photoprism but didn't bother downloading it when I found out it wasn't open source and the Android version was ad-supported. A solid Android app that uses Photoprism as a backend and is as smooth and fast as Google Photos would be great to have.
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  Yes. SaaS has betrayed us all. We’ve learned a lesson. Our data, our computer.
• langsoul-com 5y ago
  Self hosting is great, in theory, but terrible in practice. I was thinking about self hosting my podcast [1], but it's an insane amount of effort and will cost money. Compared to using anchor for free, that's owned by Spotify. For starters, I'd need to figure out RSS, figure out how to distribute the podcast and how to store it (+ costs). Not impossible sure, but not ideal either. [1] The Language of My Soul Podcast https://anchor.fm/lang-of-my-soul https://anchor.fm/lang-of-my-soul
• LoveGracePeace 5y ago
  I think it's great selfhosting has caught on again. I've been doing it since the 1990's. I host multiple low bandwidth domains on my old laptop over a Wireguard tunnel to my cheap AWS Lightsail instance for $3.50 with 1TB trasfer built in. Also I've hosted my own email all that time so I always have an alternative to Gmail or others (Gmail is good but I like options that I control). I host a custom service I wrote and run in Docker as well. I can and do use AWS services like Codecommit and am looking into others but for control; Selfhosting is where it's at.
• stanislavb 5y ago
  With regards to self-hosting, https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ could be helpful. Disclosure - the founder of LibHunt.
  • stanislavb 5y ago
    p.s. all open source projects mentioned on this thread could be found here: https://www.libhunt.com/posts/658517-start-self-hosting https://www.libhunt.com/posts/658517-start-self-hosting
• garfieldnate 5y ago
  I truly do miss Picasa so much, and I'm still mad at google about its loss. It was used extensively in family history research centers, and did a great job of automatically picking out pictures of your ancestors in old photos. I wish google had open-sourced it. Losing Picasa seriously made me distrustful of putting my personal data (in this case all of the annotations) into a proprietary app. I prefer open source, but if I can't get that then the real line for me is open data format.
  • stevesearer 5y ago
    Fellow Picasa user in mourning here. I have settled on XnView MP [0] as my Picasa replacement in terms of managing my photos locally. It took a bit of UI + options tweaking to get it close, but it is pretty fast for my purposes (quickly browsing folders of photos). My main image library folder is synced on Dropbox so I can have a nice local version of things on each computer. It doesn’t do AI stuff, but for photo management it gets the job done. [0] https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/ https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/
• pabs3 5y ago
  I vastly prefer local applications to self-hosting. The Internet really needs to return to its original roots; a network of equal peers.
• pabs3 5y ago
  The FreedomBox project is a good example of making self-hosting easier: https://www.freedombox.org/ https://www.freedombox.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
• mikewarot 5y ago
  I am not aware of any OS which will stand up to the internet without management for months at a time. Until that problem is solved, self hosting remains a dream. Ideally you should be able to set up a machine, and just have it work for at least a year, on average, with no need to intervein, do updates, patches, etc. Like the old Novell systems we keep hearing about, serving files from rooms since closed off to humans for years.
  • melenaos 5y ago
    How about commercial nas? I have a Synology and thus it gets updates, it keep working without internet for months. I bring it with me at the vacation house and it's like i am moving my personal cloud
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    Any selfhosting distro on which you enable unattended-upgrades will do the trick: libreserver.org, yunohost.org, freedombox.org are good examples. Of course, it's even better if you setup the backups before you forget :)
• jhfnetboy 5y ago
  It seems great, but I still can't get the essense. Should we, the engineers, build all the applications with self-hosting? And then people can get more privacy?
• 40four 5y ago
  I’m all for self hosting, and I run multiple services for myself and family. But I really don’t like this post. I think the arguments don’t make much sense. Do I remember Picasa? Sure. Do I remember it being the ‘end all be all’ of photo management software, that was egregiously replaced with the inferior Google photos? No. I’ve never heard anyone argue that Picasa was The Goat, and we’ve never had anything better since. I get the point they are trying to make, that’s just a really bad example. Same for the other examples. Like a song disappearing from your Spotify playlist? Well that’s not the reason we use Spotify. We use it because purchasing and maintaining a static collection of music in 2022 is expensive. In time & money. But the greater problem, I think most of us here are aware of, is self hosting is simply not possible for what, at least 95% of the population (and that’s probably generous). Yeah, for software developers sure. We have experience & knowledge in regards to installing software & maintaining a Linux server. Nobody else does. I know there are some services and companies trying to solve this problem, and I’m encouraged by that. I hope they come up with good solutions and people take notice, because I’m totally on board with the self hosting ethos. We can easily build a package of self hosted software that fills all the needs applied to us by Big Tech. The way I see it is if you have a Protonmail/ or Fastmail account, and combine that with Mastodon, Matrix and Nextcloud servers, you have everything you need and it’s a huge win for your privacy. I just can’t figure out how to convince my friends and family to jump on board :)
• midrus 5y ago
  So much underestimation here regarding what it takes to have reliable, secure and resilient self hosted services. I've seen far too many disasters because somebody thought it was just easier/cheaper to self host.
  • quaintdev 5y ago
    Self hosting has lot of issues but unless we discuss we will never move in that direction.
    • midrus 5y ago
      As a user of a service, unless it is for learning or paranoia reasons it makes no sense to try to self host the same it doesn't make sense to have your own mechanic workshop in case your car breaks or your own hospital in case you need medical attention.
      • quaintdev 5y ago
        The mechanic only offers the service. He works on our equipment and then he is done with it. At no point the mechanic keeps a part of car with himself and use it for his own adavantage. Nor he can suspend your access to your car. In fact if he does pull something like that the system will run a full enquiry into it and punish. As a user of service I want guarantee that my data will be processed as per my requirement and then it will be left alone.
        • midrus 5y ago
          >As a user of service I want guarantee that my data will be processed as per my requirement and then it will be left alone. This is totally orthogonal to self hosting. You can ask for a service to be operated for you and also ask for your data to not be processed in any way and be accessible only to you. Of course this is not free, which is what most people want and what you're mixing up here.
• MaxMoney 5y ago
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  A good alternative would be decentralized peer-to-peer apps. I can see a a youtube-like app using a technology like torrents where users also host the videos they watch. If it would be easy to use, convenient and fast, I can't see any reason why such an app can't become successful. In a similar manner, I can't see why blogging platforms or social media p2p based apps apps can't be successful provided, of course, they are easy to use, convenient and performant.
• atoav 5y ago
  A few years ago I moved from a nailed down Apache "Webspace" to a self-hosted nginx server on a virtual debian instance for 3.50 Euros a month. I had to learn a bit about Webserver configuration and best practises and have to adjust every now and then, but in hindsight I should have done that earlier. Before I constantly had to renew certificates manually (and the old hoster wanted not exactly little money for it) — now I can just use Let's Encrypt with automatic renewal. Before I was limited to whatever my webhoster would allow to run (which was basically only PHP), now I can run whatever I want behind a nginx reverse proxy.
• CalRobert 5y ago
  https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ was meant to address this but seems moribund, sadly. Urbit comes to mind as well.
• squarefoot 5y ago
  The awesome-selfhosted list is ..well.. awesome, however it lacks a hardware category to collect links and information on cheap low power small devices to be used to host our personal data/services, both to avoid keeping beefier PCs up 24/7 and to better isolate their functions. It could for example include from tiny boards with the bare minimum necessary to host very light services (Single NIC Raspberry/Orange/Nano/Banana PI, etc.) to small sized boards either with storage capabilities or a couple NICs to be used as moderate traffic firewalls (PCEngines.ch APU, etc) and bigger and more powerful systems with multiple NICs for SOHO+ sized servers and firewalls (www.ipu-system.de etc). Also, this m.2 to SATA port replicator reportedly works perfectly with Linux (Possibly FreeBSD/XigmaNAS too) as do many other JMB575 based cards. Could turn any cheap board into a low cost NAS. https://www.ebay.com/itm/203735847811 https://www.ebay.com/itm/203735847811 Too long for Mini PCs accepting only 2242 modules? Here's the extender. https://www.ebay.com/itm/263570657382 https://www.ebay.com/itm/263570657382 ..etc.
  • tashbarg 5y ago
    > this m.2 to SATA port replicator reportedly works perfectly with Linux That's a port multiplier and if that works or not depends more on the SATA controller and less on the operating system. Far from all SATA controllers support port multipliers. And even less support fast port multipliers (FIS), which is not much of an issue if your main target is size.
• mobiuscog 5y ago
  I enjoy 'playing' with self-hosting things, as I learn that way. However, I would never host anything important. Why ? If I'm in an accident and hospitalised, or something similar, there is no way my family will be able to manage/maintain/troubleshoot the systems. There's a reason they all use gmail/gdocs, and it's not because they love Google. I am a lifelong fan and user of technology, but the 'lay person' typically isn't and really doesn't want to be. Managed services may remove any semblance of privacy, but they offer the one thing that most everyone wants - convenience.
• anderspitman 5y ago
  The comments here illustrate the main problem with selfhosting today, which is that it's too damn hard. Until it's as simple and secure as downloading an app on your phone, we're not there yet. You should be able to take an old Android phone, install a Nextcloud app, go through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel traffic through a VPN provider, and be done with it.
• yksflip 5y ago
  Checkout https://coopcloud.tech https://coopcloud.tech "Co-op Cloud is a software stack that aims to make hosting libre software applications simple for small service providers such as tech co-operatives who are looking to standardise around an open, transparent and scalable infrastructure. It uses the latest container technologies and configurations are shared into the commons for the benefit of all."
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing! There are *a lot* of such solutions in the docker/k8s space, but i feel like mentioning some lower-tech solutions: alternC, ISPconfig, yunohost, libreserver, freedombox...
• dusted 5y ago
  It's not self hosting if it's not on your hardware, on your property, using your internet connection. It's still just having some other random person or company hosting it FOR you. The single biggest problem with real self-hosting is not a software one, even with all the software and hardware setup and working, the real problem is limits imposed on normal internet subscriptions by modern ISPs: Carrier grade NAT, lack of access to public routable IPs, lack of smarthosting combined with the IP blocking outgoing ports (which is somehow not illegal).
  • account42 5y ago
    You're also not hosting any parties if you rent your home. But mainly that's because your pedantry will not be entertaining enough to keep any guests. Others however will realize that hosting your own services on a generic VPS or dedicated server gives you much more freedom than a you-are-the-product service that does anything legally possible and then some to lock you in. Sure, hosting on your own hardware in a place you control has advantages, but as you said it is also significantly more difficult so that is no excuse to dismiss other options.
    • dusted 5y ago
      I actualy think it's the best excuse to dismiss other options, as those options makes self-hosting even harder because it gives the ISPs ample reason to keep restrictions in place "Oh, you don't NEED to host it yourself you can just trust your data to live on some random machine somewhere else" What I dislike about this use of the term "selfhosting" is that it's practically an advertisement for hosting providers vaguely disguised as a way to privacy and freedom, which it most certainly is not.
• nitnelave 5y ago
  I've been self hosting for nearly 10 years now, and in all this time the biggest pain point I remember is setting up OpenLDAP. That's why I created LLDAP (https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap), a minimalistic LDAP server with a nice web interface that is very easy to set up and configure. It needs a little bit more love before the 1.0 release, but it's already very usable.
  • pandacasi 5y ago
    A pity that I haven't found this earlier. OpenLDAP is definitely a pain, especially if you want Docker+Alpine Container+Group Management. I created a Docker container for myself but I wasn't able to get the group feature to work. Maybe I'll check this out. Thank you for mentioning!
  • southerntofu 5y ago
    That looks really nice, thanks for sharing! Just curious about "<100 MB RAM including the DB"... that sounds like a lot for a small LDAP database, doesn't it? I don't remember slapd using that much. Is 100MB a realistic RAM consumption for lldap or is it more like "you can be sure it will never under any circumstance go beyond that"?
    • nitnelave 5y ago
      It's more that I never properly measured it, but I know that it doesn't use more than that :) I should probably get a more accurate figure in there. EDIT: From docker stats, I can see the container using about 2.5MB RAM, which is more in line with what I had in mind. It might scale up a bit if you start having 100K users, though :D (but it's really not meant for this and the frontend will crash your browser way before because there's no pagination)
• leonroy 5y ago
  I've been self hosting since the early 00s. I used to host: * Email (for years rolled my own using Procmail, Postfix, Squirrelmail before finally using Zimbra Email Server - an all in one software package) * FreeNAS/TrueNAS for storage (3x SC836 16 bay Supermicro servers) * VMware vSphere for virtualization (clustered setup with vmotion running on 2x dual Xeon servers) * Elastix IP Phone Server (Asterisk PBX hooked up to Aastra IP phones in every room in my house) * Cisco Call Manager - proprietary IP phone server (helped with my job...) * Plex + the usual accompanying VMs * HomeBridge + HomeAssistant * Openfire (because everyone needs their own chat server) * ZoneMinder (CCTV server hooked up to cameras around the property) * Zabbix (to monitor it all) The whole family (about 20 folks) would use the above for their day to day personal and small businesses. It got to the point where I was spending several hundred in licenses and close to £1k in electricity a year. I'd get paid by some folks to maintain the above, but after a while the fun of building gets replaced by the chore of maintaining - and the few outages I've had (can count on one hand - proudly) were a royal PITA since I'd have to drop everything and try and get it back online again. In the 2000s and 2010s the skills my homelab taught me were still relevant; Routing, VLANs, Firewalls, NAT, subnets. But having just studied for an AWS certification I was struck by how much less application those basic skills have in today's marketplace - the cloud has representations of those sure, but maintaining a homelab doesn't give you exposure to what a VPC or a Security Group is. Also back in the day it was far cheaper to self host vs rent servers in the cloud - today (especially after energy price increases in the UK) self hosting my now much smaller homelab of 1x Intel NUC and two Synology boxes (250W total) is gonna cost about £640 a year in electricity alone. That'll buy me a lot of stuff in AWS/GCP and frankly I'd rather have the practise and experience with a more relevant tech stack.
  • xanaxagoras 5y ago
    > * Elastix IP Phone Server (Asterisk PBX hooked up to Aastra IP phones in every room in my house) How was your experience doing this? Also how do you get upstream to "the phone system" for lack of a better phrase. I really like this idea of this but I know nothing about how the peering works.
• jiri 5y ago
  I like the Picasa example. I am stuck with just looking for Picasa (ofcourse with sharing and cloud stuff) self-hosted alternative :-(
  • quaintdev 5y ago
    Photoprism?
• fantasticshower 5y ago
  I haven't seen it mentioned but there is Start9 [0] which is a privacy focused plug and play server. I own one but haven't had the time to set it and and use it properly. It's a Raspberry Pi running their own OS and can host a variety of apps from their marketplace. But they seem to make it easy enough to add services that users develop. [0] https://start9.com/latest/ https://start9.com/latest/
• deknos 5y ago
  nobody is talking about the freedombox? https://freedombox.org/ https://freedombox.org/
• mbravorus 5y ago
  If anything, I'm hoping that the increase in self-hosting (if even by only just reasonably tech-savvy users at first) will start putting more and more pressure on the ISPs and associated infrastructure (from municipal to federal or however it is structured in your country). Because at the end of the day, in most places connectivity is very heavily asymmetric, and as soon as you start self-hosting anything addressable from outside your LAN, your connection will go bust for all practical purposes.
• rchaud 5y ago
  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.
• neop1x 5y ago
  I used to host company stuff on a single physical server I built and put in the datacenter. After some time (and traffic overload) I redid and migrated the company stuff into the Kubernetes and cloud but I still kept the server for personal services and it is still running as we speak. I just had to switch one RAID drive on-line during all those years.. It is a bit costly, but hosts NextCloud photos, files, contacts, calendars, tasks there. Dovecot and Exim for native email, Roundcube webmail, LDAP and even authoritative Bind for couple of domains with a secondary replica on a VPS. Also gitolite git repo hosting, wireguard. I use those self-hosted services daily from android, my laptop and desktop. It is the real bare metal thing. It has some AppArmor policies, fail2ban, some docker containers too. Yes, it took a lot of time, configuration, constant small improvements, adding stuff one by one, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC, etc, it needs upgrades now and then but the hard part was mainly done at the beginning! Huge upfront cost and probably not for an ordinary hobbyist, true. But now the maintanence is quite ok. I can even SSH into it any time from Termux android terminal if I need to do something quick on the go or download something fast for backup via the server optical datalink. Most people were lazy, they decided to go clouds and cloud hosted services fast, they took shortcuts and now we have what we see today. There used to be a funny Microsoft tale ad [1] where a family was proud to have a server in the house. :xD While I am not a fan of Microsoft, this also inspired me to go this self-hosting (pain) way and learn a lot along the way. :) [1] http://www.jimhaven.com/microsoft-stay-at-home-server http://www.jimhaven.com/microsoft-stay-at-home-server
• XCSme 5y ago
  I do believe self-hosting is the future, this is why I changed the business model for my web analytics platform[0] from self-hosted + cloud to self-hosted only. By focusing purely on self-hosting, I can touch on many aspects that companies that promote their cloud offerings don't (server maintenance, monitoring, backups, alerting, etc.). This also forces the clients to give self-hosting a try if they want to use the app. [0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/ https://www.uxwizz.com/
• HenriTEL 5y ago
  It only saves the problems if you can maintain the same level of availability and integrity, what happen when you have an outage, when your hard drive die or when your house burns? What if you forgot to encrypt your data and your drive gets stolen? Can you patch your server vulnerabilities faster than company x ? What about simple maintenance like certificates renewal? It's not that easy to be better than a tech company. Regarding pure privacy, it's getting better with new regulations like GDPR, but yes, the best is to not share data with third parties.
• husamia 5y ago
  Could IPFS Filecoin solve this problem?
• 3bone 5y ago
  What we really need is a hosting provider cares about privacy, i.e. isn't Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.