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I somewhat agree with you (and with stuff like Tailscale it's incredibly easy to set up), with one big caveat, which you hinted at in the fourth footnote: you s

by senko 4y ago

I somewhat agree with you (and with stuff like Tailscale it's incredibly easy to set up), with one big caveat, which you hinted at in the fourth footnote: you still need to maintain your home server. I am confident that my VPS provider (DigitalOcean) can maintain VPSs' better than I can (or want to), for example: automigrate for hadrware faults, cheap daily/weekly backup, and making sure it's up & running after power cycling the home (which is an infrequent but not unheard of situation where I live). Even for beefier setups, Hetzner (my go to provider for dedicated hw) still looks more appealing than setting it up at home, when I calculate hardware cost. If you have spare hardware sitting unused anyways, I'd agree. But on the main point we agree - if you know how to administer a server, it's easy to host, either home or on a VPS. The main drawback I see for common people is that they aren't gonna read up on nginx and postgres configs or set up minikube locally. That requires one-click setup for local use.

dspillett 4y ago
> more appealing than setting it up at home, when I calculate hardware cost That one can be complex. My home server does mainly private stuff so external bandwidth/latency isn't a big issue. Even accounting for cycling drives out¹² and other involuntary maintenance³ the cost of putting the machine together and keeping it running is lower than I'd have spent on the monthly costs of a similarly specced machine with a good provider. Power costs have made me reconsider that a bit in recent months, but hosting providers are putting up prices as they are subject to similar cost increases too so I'll wait a bit and see how that settles before making major changes. ---- [1] I've had a few failures over the years, though thanks to RAID I've never actually lost data due to that⁴. [2] Also for space upgrades, but that is an issue for externally hosted options too. [3] The PSU went fzzzt early last year. [4] Actual (temporary) data loss due to human error has occurred, but backups resolved those occurrences.

by senko 4y ago

dspillett 4y ago

> more appealing than setting it up at home, when I calculate hardware cost That one can be complex. My home server does mainly private stuff so external bandwidth/latency isn't a big issue. Even accounting for cycling drives out¹² and other involuntary maintenance³ the cost of putting the machine together and keeping it running is lower than I'd have spent on the monthly costs of a similarly specced machine with a good provider. Power costs have made me reconsider that a bit in recent months, but hosting providers are putting up prices as they are subject to similar cost increases too so I'll wait a bit and see how that settles before making major changes. ---- [1] I've had a few failures over the years, though thanks to RAID I've never actually lost data due to that⁴. [2] Also for space upgrades, but that is an issue for externally hosted options too. [3] The PSU went fzzzt early last year. [4] Actual (temporary) data loss due to human error has occurred, but backups resolved those occurrences.