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Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright aw

Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly changing but not fast enough! Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.

kornhole 4y ago
If you have high bandwidth requirements, you can self-host on a VPS from the many possible providers. I personally have a hybrid setup with my high storage and resource intensive apps such as Nextcloud hosted on a server at home but host services that need high bandwidth, no NAT restrictions, and different security on a VPS. Yes I pay a small subscription to the VPS provider, but it is relatively small.
dijit 4y ago
I guess that depends on where you live, I have almost the same upload vs download speed on my ISP Bahnhof in Sweden. Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  To be fair, they can do that just fine regardless of whether you’re running externally-available services. Most untargeted, low-effort DDoS relies on filling up all your bandwidth with spam traffic, not exploiting some layer-7 vulnerability in an application you host.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Who does untargetted layer 3/4 DDoS? Why would an attacker waste money booting a website that gets 0 visitors?
    - dijit 4y ago
      By "untargetted" the parent almost certainly means "not tailored to take down the site". Some people do smart things and find a page that is heavy for your computer to process and hit it a lot. Some people decide they don't like your service (or you) and flood you.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though. I've hosted a Tor exit node and other questionable stuff as a teenager, going from 1mbps upload to 50 mbps today. The site has been on the HN homepage, sometimes get featured on news sites like zdnet (that article gave me clicks for years on end), plus I run a file sharing service where anyone can post literally anything but the links are valid for one day. It has definitely hosted links to phishing and malware in the past (and I combat that when I see it, like replacing the short link with an info page "this was a phishing page" + infos). In ~15 years, I never noticed anyone trying to take down the site. But your sentiment keeps being echoed in places like r/selfhosted and moves people to put their services behind some traffic inspection service, reducing the decentralized to a few places where all traffic passes through (often with decryption keys made available to them). It's still good to self host even if you do that, but I do feel a bit conflicted about that and wouldn't do it myself.
- toast0 4y ago
  DDoS risk seems to be related to the type of services you're hosting. If you host openly available game services or adult media, those seem to attract DDoS, and you need a good relationship with your upstream. If you're just hosting personal things, you're not likely to get DDoSed except for people just hitting random IPs, which could get you anyway. If it happens, not too much you can do, other than move to real hosting, and let them know upfront, or they'll drop you quick. Note that the first line of DDoS defense at your real hosting is going to be null routing your IP: dropping traffic to that IP, preferably on their upstreams' routers. That's normal and ok, although frustrating for you; doing better has costs.
WXLCKNO 4y ago
I recently got 1.5 gigabit internet (1.5 down, 940 up) and it's been amazing. The fact that my desktop pc only has a gigabit card is perfect because I'm naturally throttled against using the entire. Obviously I can do this in my router (dream machine which is also gigabit only though) but it leaves a lot of room for everything else that's hosted at home even during peak utilization on my pc.
kefirlife 4y ago
One option to consider if you really want to host something is to get some space at your local transit provider collocation space. You have access to considerably larger amounts of bandwidth without all the complications of getting the path to your home to be sufficiently high bandwidth, and with sufficient capacity for your purposes. If you want something relatively highly available then power redundancy is important, and in my opinion leaning on existing infrastructure for this purpose is an additional benefit of this approach. Setting that up will be a lot more in depth and complicated than leveraging a cloud service provider, so you need to consider the cost benefit analysis for yourself. However, if you want to self host and want the bandwidth, I think it is a route worth considering.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  Not to mention the expense!
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    Colocation is dirt cheap compared to how expensive "the cloud" can become.
lucb1e 4y ago
It doesn't suit everything, but 10mbps can already be plenty for self hosting. Apparently youtube's 1080p stream is ~6 mbps¹. Count on some overhead, but I would say that 10 mbps upload should be enough for most types of content so long as it's just you and your friends using it. If it's a text blog (with css, site logo, etc. of course), 10mbps will easily survive the HN homepage at #1 position. Perhaps a photography blog, where you don't want to drag the jpg quality down to "looks fine without zooming" levels, might be more of a struggle. Or if your goal is to share flashable images for a raspberry pi or so (that can easily be gigabytes), yeah then this is not going to be a good experience even without concurrent users. Definitely you'll be fine to host things like: - email - a website (blog, CV, hobby, link shortening... can be anything) if you don't overload it with huge CSS/JS bundles - chat server, such as Matrix or an IRC bouncer - live editing notepad like etherpad, cryptpad, codimd - software development stuff, like a unit test server or a git server (maybe not if you're the Linux kernel with gigabytes of history), perhaps a build server depending on the size of the binaries (CLI vs GUI) - game servers: most real-time games (e.g. shooters) will run fine at low bandwidth if your latency is stable (let alone turn-based games), presuming it's just you and some friends playing, maybe not if you want to provide commercial game hosting services - backup server if are fine driving home for doing restores, especially if you mostly backup when you're at home anyway - "client" services like web scraping, e.g. I fetch some game's leaderboards regularly (with permission) and provide statistics for them, and monitor a river for giving me notifications in certain cases, which take negligible amounts of bandwidth - home automation that needs to talk to third-party services or you want to use outside of the house Probably there are more uses to be thought of. I can only say to not let your dreams be dreams :D ¹ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is-used-for-each-of-the-youtube-video-qualities-360p-1080p-in/24199025#24199025 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is...

kornhole 4y ago

If you have high bandwidth requirements, you can self-host on a VPS from the many possible providers. I personally have a hybrid setup with my high storage and resource intensive apps such as Nextcloud hosted on a server at home but host services that need high bandwidth, no NAT restrictions, and different security on a VPS. Yes I pay a small subscription to the VPS provider, but it is relatively small.

dijit 4y ago

I guess that depends on where you live, I have almost the same upload vs download speed on my ISP Bahnhof in Sweden. Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.

Nextgrid 4y ago
To be fair, they can do that just fine regardless of whether you’re running externally-available services. Most untargeted, low-effort DDoS relies on filling up all your bandwidth with spam traffic, not exploiting some layer-7 vulnerability in an application you host.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Who does untargetted layer 3/4 DDoS? Why would an attacker waste money booting a website that gets 0 visitors?
  - dijit 4y ago
    By "untargetted" the parent almost certainly means "not tailored to take down the site". Some people do smart things and find a page that is heavy for your computer to process and hit it a lot. Some people decide they don't like your service (or you) and flood you.
lucb1e 4y ago
> I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though. I've hosted a Tor exit node and other questionable stuff as a teenager, going from 1mbps upload to 50 mbps today. The site has been on the HN homepage, sometimes get featured on news sites like zdnet (that article gave me clicks for years on end), plus I run a file sharing service where anyone can post literally anything but the links are valid for one day. It has definitely hosted links to phishing and malware in the past (and I combat that when I see it, like replacing the short link with an info page "this was a phishing page" + infos). In ~15 years, I never noticed anyone trying to take down the site. But your sentiment keeps being echoed in places like r/selfhosted and moves people to put their services behind some traffic inspection service, reducing the decentralized to a few places where all traffic passes through (often with decryption keys made available to them). It's still good to self host even if you do that, but I do feel a bit conflicted about that and wouldn't do it myself.
toast0 4y ago
DDoS risk seems to be related to the type of services you're hosting. If you host openly available game services or adult media, those seem to attract DDoS, and you need a good relationship with your upstream. If you're just hosting personal things, you're not likely to get DDoSed except for people just hitting random IPs, which could get you anyway. If it happens, not too much you can do, other than move to real hosting, and let them know upfront, or they'll drop you quick. Note that the first line of DDoS defense at your real hosting is going to be null routing your IP: dropping traffic to that IP, preferably on their upstreams' routers. That's normal and ok, although frustrating for you; doing better has costs.

WXLCKNO 4y ago

I recently got 1.5 gigabit internet (1.5 down, 940 up) and it's been amazing. The fact that my desktop pc only has a gigabit card is perfect because I'm naturally throttled against using the entire. Obviously I can do this in my router (dream machine which is also gigabit only though) but it leaves a lot of room for everything else that's hosted at home even during peak utilization on my pc.

kefirlife 4y ago

One option to consider if you really want to host something is to get some space at your local transit provider collocation space. You have access to considerably larger amounts of bandwidth without all the complications of getting the path to your home to be sufficiently high bandwidth, and with sufficient capacity for your purposes. If you want something relatively highly available then power redundancy is important, and in my opinion leaning on existing infrastructure for this purpose is an additional benefit of this approach. Setting that up will be a lot more in depth and complicated than leveraging a cloud service provider, so you need to consider the cost benefit analysis for yourself. However, if you want to self host and want the bandwidth, I think it is a route worth considering.

bruce343434 4y ago
Not to mention the expense!
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  Colocation is dirt cheap compared to how expensive "the cloud" can become.

lucb1e 4y ago

It doesn't suit everything, but 10mbps can already be plenty for self hosting. Apparently youtube's 1080p stream is ~6 mbps¹. Count on some overhead, but I would say that 10 mbps upload should be enough for most types of content so long as it's just you and your friends using it. If it's a text blog (with css, site logo, etc. of course), 10mbps will easily survive the HN homepage at #1 position. Perhaps a photography blog, where you don't want to drag the jpg quality down to "looks fine without zooming" levels, might be more of a struggle. Or if your goal is to share flashable images for a raspberry pi or so (that can easily be gigabytes), yeah then this is not going to be a good experience even without concurrent users. Definitely you'll be fine to host things like: - email - a website (blog, CV, hobby, link shortening... can be anything) if you don't overload it with huge CSS/JS bundles - chat server, such as Matrix or an IRC bouncer - live editing notepad like etherpad, cryptpad, codimd - software development stuff, like a unit test server or a git server (maybe not if you're the Linux kernel with gigabytes of history), perhaps a build server depending on the size of the binaries (CLI vs GUI) - game servers: most real-time games (e.g. shooters) will run fine at low bandwidth if your latency is stable (let alone turn-based games), presuming it's just you and some friends playing, maybe not if you want to provide commercial game hosting services - backup server if are fine driving home for doing restores, especially if you mostly backup when you're at home anyway - "client" services like web scraping, e.g. I fetch some game's leaderboards regularly (with permission) and provide statistics for them, and monitor a river for giving me notifications in certain cases, which take negligible amounts of bandwidth - home automation that needs to talk to third-party services or you want to use outside of the house Probably there are more uses to be thought of. I can only say to not let your dreams be dreams :D ¹ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is-used-for-each-of-the-youtube-video-qualities-360p-1080p-in/24199025#24199025 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-is...