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> self host … from home That requires an ISP that allows incoming connections, and preferably a static IP address. These are both increasingly uncommon.
by chrismorgan 4y ago
> self host … from home
That requires an ISP that allows incoming connections, and preferably a static IP address. These are both increasingly uncommon.
- codazoda 4y agoYou can use a dynamic IP with dynamic DNS easy enough. It works great for me.
- Nursie 4y agoNot if you’re on the wrong end of CGNAT :/ Which I recently discovered we are.
- mandis 4y agoI have used DDNS before, but totally unfamiliar with what you refer to in your comment. Care to elaborate a bit?
- Nursie 4y agoCarrier-grade NAT. Generally rolled out due to IPv4 exhaustion. Under CGNAT Your router does not get an externally reachable IP address from your ISP, as it sits behind ISP-level NAT router that assigns addresses to subscribers much like your home router assigns addresses to your home machines. So you can’t run any sort of externally reachable service at all.
- nivenkos 4y agoUsually the ISP will provide some sort of port forwarding though.
- olyjohn 4y agoLike... what ISP would go out of their way to do that? Call me cynical, but I doubt there's an ISP that uses CGNAT who would forward a port to you. Like, they all do the total absolute minimum necessary to get you Internet access. Why would they bother creating some way to let you forward a port to your computer? No average person needs to do that anymore now that everything is cloud-based. I could be way wrong on this, but I just have my doubts...
- alephu5 4y agoMy ISP gives a dedicated IPv4 to anyone that asks, everyone else goes on CGNAT. Hardly anyone asks so they don't mind.
- squarefoot 4y agoWith IPv4 scarcity, many carriers had to employ NAT (network address translation) so that many users are mapped behind a single IP at the same time. This of course makes impossible to put a personal server on a local home network because although connecting to external addresses is still doable, any incoming packet wouldn't know which one of the users it should reach without explicit rules that the users have no access to.
- counttheforks 4y agoIt also means you will frequently be blocked by services such as cloudflare if anyone else you're sharing an IP address with is infected with a spammy virus.
- chrismorgan 4y agoI’ve been behind CGNAT once. It was a miserable experience for this reason. (No idea how many people there were at the one IP address, but https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ reported on average ten or twenty hours of video per day being downloaded via BitTorrent from the address, none of which was from my endpoint.)
- counttheforks 4y agoSwitch to an ISP which actually sells you an internet connection.
- Nursie 4y agoThis is not always an option, and 99% of people will never care.
- counttheforks 4y agoYou cared enough to post about it.
- Nursie 4y agoYes, but I didn't make the claim that "it's not an internet connection", because clearly it is. The vast majority of people will never care that theirs can't do server stuff, because they will never try to run one, or even know what it means. It's a perfectly fine internet connection for such folks.
- 0xCMP 4y agonot really. you can get a very cheap VPS and reverse proxy via a wireguard, ssh, or stunnel connection. just make the home side connect to the server side. too much work? use tailscale.
- chrismorgan 4y agoSuch a proxying arrangement loses a significant fraction of the “from home”-ness; not all, by any means, but a good chunk.
- uneekname 4y agoI spend extra for a business connection. It's not for everyone, but if self-hosting is important to you it adds some assurance of reliability (and a static IP!)
- simonw 4y agoTailscale to an external VPS instance, run a proxy there.
- aendruk 4y ago…at which point you might as well just host the website on the VPS?
- anderspitman 4y agoIMO tunneling is the way to go today: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
- KronisLV 4y ago> That requires an ISP that allows incoming connections, and preferably a static IP address. These are both increasingly uncommon. Not if you can afford a cheap VPS to tunnel the traffic through with WireGuard or another solution. Here's my vague blog post on the topic: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-your-homelab-behind-nat https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you... For example, along the lines of https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ or whatever is the cheapest plan that your provider offers, or something you can find on LowEndBox: https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ Though some people also suggested Cloudflare Tunnel or similar solutions, like: https://eddiez.me/working-around-cgnat/ https://eddiez.me/working-around-cgnat/
- senko 4y ago> Not if you can afford a cheap VPS [...] At that point, you might as well host it on that cheap VPS instead of at home.
- tecleandor 4y agoI have both things. Tunneling have some advantages: - you don't expose your home IP - you can move your hosting easily (you could even have it in your phone) - you can host bigger stuff that you couldn't pay or would be too expensive "in the cloud" (you home NAS, a rack of servers, home assistant) - you could setup just one vps gateway with nginx or traefik and then set a bunch of tunnels for all your friends or several different sites... It has some interesting uses.
- dspillett 4y agoIf your site/app is not latency sensitive, then hosting this way can be better than the straight VPS. Maybe you need better resources than a cheap VPS can offer, i.e. an experimental app that likes a chunk of RAM and IO so won't be happy on an oversold & contended host, but doesn't need low latency or massive bandwidth¹ so is happy with the connectivity found on such a cheap service. Another consideration is that if the VPS host dies and you are just using it as a proxy/tunnel, all you need to do is sign up for another, change DNS pointers and perhaps VPN config, and you are back up and running: no extra app/stack configuration needed, no need to restore content from backups⁴ to the new location, ete., so time+faf to service restoration is short. ---- [1] It doesn't apply to all locations, as some are lucky to be in places where there has been sufficient infrastructure investment for FTTP to be inexpensively available, but for a lot of people a key limit to self-hosting is an asynchronous link: I know many with 1.4mbit or noticeably less upstream from home, the best I can reliably get here² is ~14mbit³ upstream. Most VPS providers that aren't ridiculously oversold can give you that, so their network would not be the outgoing connectivity bottleneck. [2] York, UK, not far from the city centre. FTTP is available in parts of the city and outskirts, but rollout is glacial so won't be near me any time soon [3] g.fast is available from the exchange/cab I'm connected through, but it is hit-and-miss and there is a risk I'll get less out of the nominally 150/30 standard than I do out of the 80/20 one. [4] though obviously: still keep good backups!
- CaptArmchair 4y agoI can think of several good reasons to self host from your own home. Then again, those reasons are tangential to the core notion of self-publishing / independently publishing on the Web. There are two key goals here. First, being in full control of what you can put online and in which form. Second, being able to take whatever you've put online and move ship if you have/want to. Owning a domain name and having access to a VPS or shared hosting are great first steps. Even so, you're still relying on someone else to host your content for you. Depending on how much stock / trust you are willing to put in someone else's intentions and abilities - present and future - you may want to consider self-hosting on hardware you own. The trade-off being that you'll have to put your confidence in your own abilities, resources and skills. Which isn't a trade-off many people wouldn't necessarily be willing to make. As for the article. When it comes to the rise of social media over the past 15-20 years, well, Eternal September happened. The vast majority of modern-day influencers aren't interested in tinkering and self-hosting. They just took the opportunity of a platform which offered free - albeit limited - tools to share content with a growing audience. More content and a growing audience, in turn, attracted more people. Arguably, the vast majority of people today would have never really entered into massive online communities if it weren't for big tech, social media, cheap internet connections and cheap mobile devices. Sure, social media has eclipsed the, comparatively small, web of independent blogs and bloggers such as it was back in the mid-00s. That period of time is never going to come back. Despite all their flaws, vast social media networks aren't going to disappear either. Independent Web publishing may see a modest renaissance today with new protocols, the Fediverse and dirt cheap hosting. Then again, from a sociological perspective: the notion of online identity has always been evolving and has become ever more complex and fluid. People don't exclusively turn to one tool or one platform: they own several identities across many domains, platforms, accounts,... Age, social-economic background, culture, personality traits, peers,... are all deciding factors as to how people manifest that identity. In turn, collectively, this drives how the Web itself keeps evolving and morphing into something new in the future, which may or may not put a bigger focus on self publishing.
- tjpnz 4y agoEven if you don't have those problems how do you deal with petty individuals who don't like what you have to say? A residential ISP would drop you in a heartbeat, especially if you're violating the boilerplate hosting clause in your contract.