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Having started my career in hosting, I would suggest that this world is unlikely to come back except for exceptionally small applications with minimal business

by lumost 5y ago

Having started my career in hosting, I would suggest that this world is unlikely to come back except for exceptionally small applications with minimal business impact. What does self-hosting provide which end-end encryption does not? Self-hosting means: - Needing to know how to configure your linux host across firewalls, upgrades, backups. - Negotiating contracts with network service providers. While verifying that you have the right kind of optic on the network line drop. - Thinking through the order of operations on every remote hands request, and idiot proofing them so that no one accidentally unplugs your DB. - Making sure that you have sufficient cold spares that a server loss doesn't nuke your business for 6-12 weeks depending on how the hardware manufacturers view your business. - Building your own monitoring, notifications, and deployment tools using both open source and in-house tools. - Building expertise in all of your custom tools. - A 6-20 week lead time to provision a build server. - Paying for all of your hardware for 3-5 years, regardless of whether you will actually need it. - Over-provisioning memory or CPU to make up for the fact that you can't get hardware fast enough. - Getting paged in the middle of the night because the hardware is over-provisioned and something gets overwhelmed or a physical machine died. - Dealing with the fact that an overworked systems engineer or developer is never making any component the best. And everything you touch will just passably work. - Everyone will have their own opinions on how something should be done, and every decision will have long term consequences. Get ready for physical vs virtual debates till the heat death of the universe.

moreira 5y ago
I think there might be a vast gap between what what the article is talking about, and what you're suggesting. Somebody self-hosting their project management app on a LAMP server on some random web hosting company is one thing. What you're talking about is something else entirely. And yes, having a web hosting company manage your server isn't "real" self hosting, for all the reasons you described, but it's a far cry from dumping all your data with a big data-guzzling giant. Your data isn't calling home, isn't being used by a company, it's sitting on your server under your control, and only you manage it. I think that's their main gripe.
- lumost 5y ago
  There are a few tiers of hosting providers ranging from "We rent you server space", "We rent you a physical server with internet access", too "We rent you a VM" or "We rent you services you may want to access". The privacy angle of self-hosting generally ends as soon as you are renting a physical server with internet access. Someone else has access to the hard drives, the network traffic, the hardware, and via hardware remote access the OS/Data. At this point you would need to trust the legal bindings on what the hosting company can and can't do to your physical machine. One really exciting angle on end2end encryption is that your provider may be technically incapable of any malpractice (for better or worse, I may wish my provider could have a sys eng bail me out every now and then).
chaxor 5y ago
I think the point is that most of this, other than buying extra hard drives, is solved by having a decent FOSS project. For example, an OS that has a nextcloud-like suite of services, and a very easy to use GUI to enable a VPN / mesh network for all of your devices pretty much removes much of the concerns you mentioned regarding networking/firewalls/etc.
linker3000 5y ago
... so, basically, just how we ran an IT services department in the 1990s and early 2000s. Except that: Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain. Hardware could be leased, or the capital expendite written off over 3 years, plus it came with a 4-hr onsite service warranty (if you worked with the right partners), and it being a capital, rather than operational, cost had bottom-line benefits. 24/7 service coverage for major incidents was very doable if you planned correctly, plus you owned the kit and so could control how you brought in resources to support incident recovery, rather thank waiting for your service provider to put the green dot back on their service status page. //CSB The max total outage time for one corporate where I ran the IT dept was 12 minutes in 3 years, while we swapped out an HP battery-backed disk cache controller that took itself offline due to a confidence check failure.
- lumost 5y ago
  aye - and it took time to setup all of those things, time to maintain the gear, delays for business/dev teams while the IT department made sure they knew how to run something stably. > Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain. This would only be true in a large shop with cold spares or virtualization. Server hardware generally has a 6-12 week lead time. The exception being if you are paying out the nose to a reseller who could do faster delivery. Just imagine the time it took to setup Nagios or Zabbix for monitoring. In a small shop you are probably talking about at least 1-3 days of work + calendar time for hardware. Add to that some time for dealing with scale of metrics storage etc. depending on the shop.
PedroBatista 5y ago
You’re talking about running a tank battalion in WWII when we were talking about learning how to drive a car with manual transmission.

by lumost 5y ago

moreira 5y ago

I think there might be a vast gap between what what the article is talking about, and what you're suggesting. Somebody self-hosting their project management app on a LAMP server on some random web hosting company is one thing. What you're talking about is something else entirely. And yes, having a web hosting company manage your server isn't "real" self hosting, for all the reasons you described, but it's a far cry from dumping all your data with a big data-guzzling giant. Your data isn't calling home, isn't being used by a company, it's sitting on your server under your control, and only you manage it. I think that's their main gripe.

lumost 5y ago
There are a few tiers of hosting providers ranging from "We rent you server space", "We rent you a physical server with internet access", too "We rent you a VM" or "We rent you services you may want to access". The privacy angle of self-hosting generally ends as soon as you are renting a physical server with internet access. Someone else has access to the hard drives, the network traffic, the hardware, and via hardware remote access the OS/Data. At this point you would need to trust the legal bindings on what the hosting company can and can't do to your physical machine. One really exciting angle on end2end encryption is that your provider may be technically incapable of any malpractice (for better or worse, I may wish my provider could have a sys eng bail me out every now and then).

chaxor 5y ago

I think the point is that most of this, other than buying extra hard drives, is solved by having a decent FOSS project. For example, an OS that has a nextcloud-like suite of services, and a very easy to use GUI to enable a VPN / mesh network for all of your devices pretty much removes much of the concerns you mentioned regarding networking/firewalls/etc.

linker3000 5y ago

... so, basically, just how we ran an IT services department in the 1990s and early 2000s. Except that: Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain. Hardware could be leased, or the capital expendite written off over 3 years, plus it came with a 4-hr onsite service warranty (if you worked with the right partners), and it being a capital, rather than operational, cost had bottom-line benefits. 24/7 service coverage for major incidents was very doable if you planned correctly, plus you owned the kit and so could control how you brought in resources to support incident recovery, rather thank waiting for your service provider to put the green dot back on their service status page. //CSB The max total outage time for one corporate where I ran the IT dept was 12 minutes in 3 years, while we swapped out an HP battery-backed disk cache controller that took itself offline due to a confidence check failure.

lumost 5y ago
aye - and it took time to setup all of those things, time to maintain the gear, delays for business/dev teams while the IT department made sure they knew how to run something stably. > Build servers took a day or so depending on the approval chain. This would only be true in a large shop with cold spares or virtualization. Server hardware generally has a 6-12 week lead time. The exception being if you are paying out the nose to a reseller who could do faster delivery. Just imagine the time it took to setup Nagios or Zabbix for monitoring. In a small shop you are probably talking about at least 1-3 days of work + calendar time for hardware. Add to that some time for dealing with scale of metrics storage etc. depending on the shop.

PedroBatista 5y ago

You’re talking about running a tank battalion in WWII when we were talking about learning how to drive a car with manual transmission.