11 ms·

I think you not start at home. That "last mile" of connectivity is fraught with challenges of dealing with your internet provider and all sorts of other things.

I think you not start at home. That "last mile" of connectivity is fraught with challenges of dealing with your internet provider and all sorts of other things. It can be a headache, and it's very particular to your situation, and your provider. If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. It will give you results faster, you will make all the same mistakes and have similar problems, without having to fight hardware. You'll also have the network expertise of your hosting provider to fall back on. As much as you don't want someone waltzing in and walking all over your system, they don't particularly want that to happen to you either. The hosting plans are cheap enough that you can run for several years for the price of hardware in your home. And in the end, if you find you're unhappy with it, it's a mouseclick to get it of your life instead of now having a some extra hardware (even if it's a just a Pi and an SSD) lingering and collecting dust in your house. I think the virtual hosting is a smoother on ramp to this journey, you'll find faster success with it (which can keep you motivated rather than frustrated), and it'll give you a baseline to compare against if and when you decide to take the final step and bring it in to the broom closet. You can readily transition incrementally as you go forward depending on how you architect it.

kickaha 4y ago
> That "last mile" of connectivity is fraught with challenges of dealing with your internet provider and all sorts of other things. It can be a headache, and it's very particular to your situation, and your provider. > If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. This has been my suspicion all along! Yes, my goal is to learn the basics before I pull the Pi out of the drawer.
arantius 4y ago
> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance ... I can't anti-suggest this more. Everything I've done on anything labeled "cloud" is weird and special, in ways that would impede learning or dilute its quality. They're several wrapper layers above what's really going on. Get a bare VPS (I'd start with one listed at LowEndBox for a couple bucks a month) or dedicated host for learning. After you've learned there, you can try learning the significant extra complexity of "cloud".
dspillett 4y ago
> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. I would say this, but first the exact opposite of this… Run your own entirely local copies at home first. Then, when you are comfortable that you can set things up right, and you understand their security (setting up user accounts, handing out & managing access rights if you aren't the only non-read-only user, keeping things patched up-to-date, tweaking any options that have might have security repercussions, …), you can chuck a copy on a publicly accessible server for others to see. Then, if you have the local resources for it (a decent speed and reliably enough connection) at home, consider moving it back “in house” but publicly available. Those first test local-only instances can be on small machines (a Pi if you have one or are lucky enough to find one to purchase that isn't from a stupidly expensive scalper) or VMs on what-ever other machines you have. You can keep them around to play with to test new things later, before adding those new settings/add-ons/other to your public instance.

kickaha 4y ago

> That "last mile" of connectivity is fraught with challenges of dealing with your internet provider and all sorts of other things. It can be a headache, and it's very particular to your situation, and your provider. > If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. This has been my suspicion all along! Yes, my goal is to learn the basics before I pull the Pi out of the drawer.

arantius 4y ago

> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance ... I can't anti-suggest this more. Everything I've done on anything labeled "cloud" is weird and special, in ways that would impede learning or dilute its quality. They're several wrapper layers above what's really going on. Get a bare VPS (I'd start with one listed at LowEndBox for a couple bucks a month) or dedicated host for learning. After you've learned there, you can try learning the significant extra complexity of "cloud".

dspillett 4y ago

> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house. I would say this, but first the exact opposite of this… Run your own entirely local copies at home first. Then, when you are comfortable that you can set things up right, and you understand their security (setting up user accounts, handing out & managing access rights if you aren't the only non-read-only user, keeping things patched up-to-date, tweaking any options that have might have security repercussions, …), you can chuck a copy on a publicly accessible server for others to see. Then, if you have the local resources for it (a decent speed and reliably enough connection) at home, consider moving it back “in house” but publicly available. Those first test local-only instances can be on small machines (a Pi if you have one or are lucky enough to find one to purchase that isn't from a stupidly expensive scalper) or VMs on what-ever other machines you have. You can keep them around to play with to test new things later, before adding those new settings/add-ons/other to your public instance.