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> when your friends or family rely on it I would very much discourage people reading "how to self-host" articles on hosting for anyone but themselves. As soon

> when your friends or family rely on it I would very much discourage people reading "how to self-host" articles on hosting for anyone but themselves. As soon as you involve other people, your stress will grow immense, there are all kinds of expectations and possible disappointments. It's one thing to share a few photo folders, but to provide online services is a dev job, and you don't want this relation with them. Note that I specifically mean the situation where you share your own self-hosted setup with some close people so they can also benefit. If you want to self-host to specifically serve a community, go for it, you're awesome.

saurik 4y ago
FWIW, I'd go a bit stronger and say that, if you are running a service for other people, you aren't "self-hosting" anymore, you're just regular-old "hosting" at that point ;P.
- the_common_man 4y ago
  True, op is a saas provider
- j45 4y ago
  Self hosting is hosting users yourself. If it’s production grade even for you, the most boring and reliable way for systems to update themselves is mandatory. Luckily there’s way more out there than the past.
- hkt 4y ago
  It makes much more sense to form a little co-op, pay some pros to look after it (managed hosting) and contribute to the core, imo. Extract an SLA from the managed service that will cover restoring service. It doesn't feel as cool, but it is much less stressful as well as fairer to the nontechnical folk.
rwky 4y ago
Also if you do host for other people they need to know that shit might go wrong and they should have their own backups (which is a good thing to teach them with any service).
orsenthil 4y ago
I use cloudron for this. While I agree that there is _some work_, but technology and services has improved to the extend that a reasonably good developer can host apps for themselves, their family and others.
kornhole 4y ago
Depending on what you are hosting, I recommend hosting just for yourself for perhaps a year. After you have the redundancies, backups, processes and other knowledge, you can share it with your community. I would never expect my family and friends to have the skill or desire to self-host, but I do not like to see them abused by platforms. It is a labor of love for me.
windexh8er 4y ago
I grew up hosting PHPBB, game servers, ratio'd FTPs among many other things in the 90s. Dozens of friends used my "services". It didn't contribute to anxiety. It taught me a lot of skills because I wanted the things we used collectively to be available. Were they always? Nope. That was the contract. Fast forward to today and it's no different. The complexity has increased, yes. But in many ways some of those complexities make things easier. The hosted solutions I provide friends and family with are rarely offline. Do I hit 5 nines annually? The real question is - does anyone care? No. But if I were to guess my downtime is cumulatively less than a few hours per year. If you're drawn to it don't be distracted by an opinion of others who project these sorts of narratives. For some it may create anxiety - so don't do it, but for others they may find a path in their career through learning via the self-host path. And if people you're providing ancillary services for are jerks about a bit of downtime here and there, and those folks are not contributing to your endeavors then tell them to go fly a kite. Because nobody I've shared self-hosting with has ever truly complained. I've had years of fun banter, especially in the earlier days, around uptime. But those people weren't trying to cause discourse. Those people are still friends. I enjoy following the self-host community, contributing in minimal ways, and self-hosting useful things for friends and family. It doesn't keep me up at night. I'm constantly improving because of it.
m-p-3 4y ago
I host a bunch of stuff for friends completely free with the expectation that if there is an outage I'll do my best, on my own schedule to fix it. If I plan on sunsetting something I'll let them know a bit of time in advance, and that they're responsible for backing up the data they can't afford to lose. So far everyone is happy with that arrangement, and I don't mind sharing the extra resources I have with people I care for.

saurik 4y ago

FWIW, I'd go a bit stronger and say that, if you are running a service for other people, you aren't "self-hosting" anymore, you're just regular-old "hosting" at that point ;P.

the_common_man 4y ago
True, op is a saas provider
j45 4y ago
Self hosting is hosting users yourself. If it’s production grade even for you, the most boring and reliable way for systems to update themselves is mandatory. Luckily there’s way more out there than the past.
hkt 4y ago
It makes much more sense to form a little co-op, pay some pros to look after it (managed hosting) and contribute to the core, imo. Extract an SLA from the managed service that will cover restoring service. It doesn't feel as cool, but it is much less stressful as well as fairer to the nontechnical folk.

rwky 4y ago

Also if you do host for other people they need to know that shit might go wrong and they should have their own backups (which is a good thing to teach them with any service).

orsenthil 4y ago

I use cloudron for this. While I agree that there is _some work_, but technology and services has improved to the extend that a reasonably good developer can host apps for themselves, their family and others.

kornhole 4y ago

Depending on what you are hosting, I recommend hosting just for yourself for perhaps a year. After you have the redundancies, backups, processes and other knowledge, you can share it with your community. I would never expect my family and friends to have the skill or desire to self-host, but I do not like to see them abused by platforms. It is a labor of love for me.

windexh8er 4y ago

I grew up hosting PHPBB, game servers, ratio'd FTPs among many other things in the 90s. Dozens of friends used my "services". It didn't contribute to anxiety. It taught me a lot of skills because I wanted the things we used collectively to be available. Were they always? Nope. That was the contract. Fast forward to today and it's no different. The complexity has increased, yes. But in many ways some of those complexities make things easier. The hosted solutions I provide friends and family with are rarely offline. Do I hit 5 nines annually? The real question is - does anyone care? No. But if I were to guess my downtime is cumulatively less than a few hours per year. If you're drawn to it don't be distracted by an opinion of others who project these sorts of narratives. For some it may create anxiety - so don't do it, but for others they may find a path in their career through learning via the self-host path. And if people you're providing ancillary services for are jerks about a bit of downtime here and there, and those folks are not contributing to your endeavors then tell them to go fly a kite. Because nobody I've shared self-hosting with has ever truly complained. I've had years of fun banter, especially in the earlier days, around uptime. But those people weren't trying to cause discourse. Those people are still friends. I enjoy following the self-host community, contributing in minimal ways, and self-hosting useful things for friends and family. It doesn't keep me up at night. I'm constantly improving because of it.

m-p-3 4y ago

I host a bunch of stuff for friends completely free with the expectation that if there is an outage I'll do my best, on my own schedule to fix it. If I plan on sunsetting something I'll let them know a bit of time in advance, and that they're responsible for backing up the data they can't afford to lose. So far everyone is happy with that arrangement, and I don't mind sharing the extra resources I have with people I care for.