5 ms·

Get fiber and host this from your own home. When i see these absurd costs I'm happy with the k8s I built, with ceph for storage.

ryanisnan 4y ago
Learn from the mistakes of others, do not do this. Remember Yevgeniy Nikulin?
- KomoD 4y ago
  What relevance does Yevgeniy Nikulin have with this, whatsoever?
  - ryanisnan 4y ago
    A lot, actually. He compromised a home-ran webserver on a VM, and compromised his way to a networked work machine. Running exposed ports from your house, no matter how smart you think you are, is not a good idea.
    - KomoD 4y ago
      Thanks for the explainer.
    - hbogert 4y ago
      What's fundamentally different if you host this in the cloud but still have a public port? What was the exact attack vector in the case of nyevgeny?
      - ryanisnan 4y ago
        The difference is it would be likely inconsequential if a the cloud resource running this was compromised. There’s no direct link (at least there shouldn’t be) to a work machine, which might have credentials or itself VPN information for an employer. Yevgeny did exactly this. He compromised a web server running Apache or something, used that to brute force his way into a networked work machine, which took weeks, but went undetected. That machine turned out to be the physical host the VM running the web server was on. Then he used the work machine to break into LinkedIn using credentials and VPN profiles found on the iMac. This vector would have been impossible had that open server not been running so close to the work machine.
seanhunter 4y ago
Costs of $1.70 per day which is mostly $30 for the domain name counts as “absurd”?
- KomoD 4y ago
  Yes, considering his instance has a single user, himself. If more people sign up to his instance, or he just uses it, the costs will keep going up due to the caching Mastodon does for assets (and especially due to the fact he also doesn't have purging enabled)
- hbogert 4y ago
  Imagine every little project costs you 30 dollars. ( He's getting compute for free for now, I included that) That will add up. The cloudwatch costs are just ridiculous. Even with the high energy costs in Europe I'll just be migrating to a more efficient machines and I will lower my power budget from 100 watt to 50. For now, with the current 100 watt I can run 4 nodes each with a hard drive and ssd, 16 gb of mem. These are hp 6300s, old but low power and if needed they can stil pack a punch with the i5 CPUs.
aprdm 4y ago
Do you have an article on how to set it up like that ?
layoric 4y ago
I do this, but just with straight docker compose. I’ve been using AWS for personal and work for about 8 years and realised over time it is a poor investment if you are always hosting your own stuff and experimenting with tech. So this year I bought at old Dell T7910 workstation and fitted it out with a 14 core E5-2680 V4 (second one coming), 1TB nvme, 64gb RAM and has cost me around $400 USD. Runs at around 95 watt and I already have a good fibre connection any way. For a similar spec machine I would be paying this every month and now I can just keep throwing things I’m interested in at it and so far has been overkill for a relatively fixed price. More messing around with hardware but something I mostly enjoy.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I do this in a VM. My mastodon server (for me personally) and BirdsiteLIVE bridge run on a VM on my old laptop configured as a Proxmox server. The entire thing has less than 2GB of RAM but it still runs just fine. The incredibly inefficient Rails framework Mastodon is written in annoys me with its wasted performance but honestly the load for one or just a few users isn't even enough for me to start looking for an alternative. I'm sure I'd need to switch to a more optimized ActivityPub server if I'd get 10k users on my server, but for a small private instance you really don't need anything all that fancy.
secondcoming 4y ago
How much is your internet per month, and what are your electricity costs per KWh?
- Macha 4y ago
  My internet is €70/mo, and if I did not self host anything it would be... €65/mo. The speed I pay for because video games are massive these days so the only saving would be dropping a static IP. Electricity per kwh is quite expensive these days, at €0.43/kwh because of war. My hardware is quite inefficient too, being cast off gaming hardware that is way overkill for the use case. Still, it averages 200W under load so that's (0.43 * 24/5) or €2/day. So €65/mo, with some of the world's most expensive electricity. With 2021 energy rates the electricity cost would have been one third of 2022, at €25/mo. Use more reasonable hardware like a pi 8gb or a nuc or something rather than a used gaming PC and you could get even lower, though obviously you'd want to depreciate your hardware cost. Meanwhile comparable compute from AWS is $1/hr

ryanisnan 4y ago

Learn from the mistakes of others, do not do this. Remember Yevgeniy Nikulin?

KomoD 4y ago
What relevance does Yevgeniy Nikulin have with this, whatsoever?
- ryanisnan 4y ago
  A lot, actually. He compromised a home-ran webserver on a VM, and compromised his way to a networked work machine. Running exposed ports from your house, no matter how smart you think you are, is not a good idea.
  - KomoD 4y ago
    Thanks for the explainer.
  - hbogert 4y ago
    What's fundamentally different if you host this in the cloud but still have a public port? What was the exact attack vector in the case of nyevgeny?
    - ryanisnan 4y ago
      The difference is it would be likely inconsequential if a the cloud resource running this was compromised. There’s no direct link (at least there shouldn’t be) to a work machine, which might have credentials or itself VPN information for an employer. Yevgeny did exactly this. He compromised a web server running Apache or something, used that to brute force his way into a networked work machine, which took weeks, but went undetected. That machine turned out to be the physical host the VM running the web server was on. Then he used the work machine to break into LinkedIn using credentials and VPN profiles found on the iMac. This vector would have been impossible had that open server not been running so close to the work machine.

seanhunter 4y ago

Costs of $1.70 per day which is mostly $30 for the domain name counts as “absurd”?

KomoD 4y ago
Yes, considering his instance has a single user, himself. If more people sign up to his instance, or he just uses it, the costs will keep going up due to the caching Mastodon does for assets (and especially due to the fact he also doesn't have purging enabled)
hbogert 4y ago
Imagine every little project costs you 30 dollars. ( He's getting compute for free for now, I included that) That will add up. The cloudwatch costs are just ridiculous. Even with the high energy costs in Europe I'll just be migrating to a more efficient machines and I will lower my power budget from 100 watt to 50. For now, with the current 100 watt I can run 4 nodes each with a hard drive and ssd, 16 gb of mem. These are hp 6300s, old but low power and if needed they can stil pack a punch with the i5 CPUs.

aprdm 4y ago

Do you have an article on how to set it up like that ?

layoric 4y ago

I do this, but just with straight docker compose. I’ve been using AWS for personal and work for about 8 years and realised over time it is a poor investment if you are always hosting your own stuff and experimenting with tech. So this year I bought at old Dell T7910 workstation and fitted it out with a 14 core E5-2680 V4 (second one coming), 1TB nvme, 64gb RAM and has cost me around $400 USD. Runs at around 95 watt and I already have a good fibre connection any way. For a similar spec machine I would be paying this every month and now I can just keep throwing things I’m interested in at it and so far has been overkill for a relatively fixed price. More messing around with hardware but something I mostly enjoy.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I do this in a VM. My mastodon server (for me personally) and BirdsiteLIVE bridge run on a VM on my old laptop configured as a Proxmox server. The entire thing has less than 2GB of RAM but it still runs just fine. The incredibly inefficient Rails framework Mastodon is written in annoys me with its wasted performance but honestly the load for one or just a few users isn't even enough for me to start looking for an alternative. I'm sure I'd need to switch to a more optimized ActivityPub server if I'd get 10k users on my server, but for a small private instance you really don't need anything all that fancy.

secondcoming 4y ago

How much is your internet per month, and what are your electricity costs per KWh?

Macha 4y ago
My internet is €70/mo, and if I did not self host anything it would be... €65/mo. The speed I pay for because video games are massive these days so the only saving would be dropping a static IP. Electricity per kwh is quite expensive these days, at €0.43/kwh because of war. My hardware is quite inefficient too, being cast off gaming hardware that is way overkill for the use case. Still, it averages 200W under load so that's (0.43 * 24/5) or €2/day. So €65/mo, with some of the world's most expensive electricity. With 2021 energy rates the electricity cost would have been one third of 2022, at €25/mo. Use more reasonable hardware like a pi 8gb or a nuc or something rather than a used gaming PC and you could get even lower, though obviously you'd want to depreciate your hardware cost. Meanwhile comparable compute from AWS is $1/hr