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I don't want to host services but I do

aaviator42 3y ago
One of the 'services' I host is a simple interface on a server that allows me to easily upload files and get sharable links to them. At this point it's used by more than just me, a bunch of people in my circle use my instance to share files. In case anyone else finds this useful: https://github.com/aaviator42/izi https://github.com/aaviator42/izi There's a demo here: https://aavi.xyz/proj/fakeizi/ https://aavi.xyz/proj/fakeizi/
om154 3y ago
I want to self-host all of my data such as calendar, contacts, photos and more but I just haven’t dedicated the time yet
- stavros 3y ago
  Here you go: https://www.pastery.net/xtydav/ https://www.pastery.net/xtydav/ apt-get install postgresql, connect it, and you're done.
  - jasode 3y ago
    >, and you're done. It doesn't seem that simple. When I researched Nextcloud in the past, I avoided it because of warnings like the ones in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25481465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25481465 Ctrl+F search that thread for "failure". If Nextcloud has solved whatever issues were happening in 2020, it still doesn't necessarily instill confidence because one can remain skeptical and assume there are new issues still happening in 2023. E.g. https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues It's going to take some time to wade through all those Github issues to determine if there are any showstoppers that would affect one's installation. This doesn't look like a low-maintenance solution. The gp's wording of "dedicated the time" seems very relevant. Copy&paste of some YAML doesn't really address the work involved.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Well, personally, I've been running it for years and it's never had as much as a hiccup, but YMMV.
- midasz 3y ago
  For photos I recommend Immich (https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/) - recently switched from nextcloud to immich and it's ridiculous that this is free and opensource software - it feels so premium.
coffee33go 3y ago
A set of valid points especially As self-hosters we are not going to change the face of the world. The other 98% of the general public is going to use hegemonic services: self-hosting is a privilege for those who have the education, time and money to put into it. We’re only deploying solutions that work for us, individually.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  It's all niche stuff that only a few people use until there are watershed moments like the Twitter and Reddit fuck ups that push large swathes of users to look for an alternative. Then suddenly it's not a niche product and it's important that the kinks, bugs, and onboarding has been worked out during those years of being niche. People are absolutely getting sick of subscriptions. It's also getting easier to self host. Tailscale has been a game changer for me personally as I just had no confidence in getting my services working correctly over the internet without getting pwned
  - vkou 3y ago
    > It's all niche stuff that only a few people use until there are watershed moments like the Twitter and Reddit fuck ups that push large swathes of users to look for an alternative. And then after poking around for a week, they go back to Twitter and Reddit.
    - BestGuess 3y ago
      As something of a dumdum myself I think I know why. Corporations want people to be able to do their thing as easy as possible to make money, while people not directly motivated like that and not motivated to make it as easy as possible can do anything else. So instead of "make sure it's just a button click" it's "what, you didn't read all 580 pages of the documentation and all the changelogs and the code on github and compile it yourself on a custom built $40,000 machine? We don't help your kind around here go away" and yeah people go right back to windows or twitter or whatever. Jokin aside I'm just trying to explain there is a real problem there. Feeling smug about the result of that problem doesn't fix it but it is really easy to do
mg 3y ago
I would love to build my next web project so it will not save any data on the server but let the user save it locally via the File System Access API. That would give the user the same experience as with a desktop application. Full control over their data, saved locally. The problem is that, according my tests, Firefox does not support it at all. Chrome does not support it on Android and Safari does not support it on iOS. Not sure about Safari on the desktop. Here is a text editor demo which let's you try if it works with your browser: https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/ https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/ If your browser supports it, it will let you load and save files just like a desktop application. If it does not support it, it will use a download/upload workaround.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I like that effort! But it only addresses half of the value of self-hosting (which is much better than nothing). The other half is: being able to have control over the software itself, when/if it gets updated, being able to be sure what's done with the data (if you're sufficiently motivated), and not having the service become unavailable when the internet is out.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  There is a middle ground which all browsers do support, and not require permission prompts - Origin private file system https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API/Origin_private_file_system https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... If you're not familiar it's a file-system like API for writing files to an opaque non-user-accessable file system. Your application could probably provide it's own export functionality using blob urls, and import using traditional file "upload".
  - hinkley 3y ago
    The problem with these is that nobody has a single user agent anymore. Haven’t for years. If I need files I need them on my phone and tablet, or tablet and laptop. Those services have yet to become standardized.
- 3y ago
brunoqc 3y ago
I don't mind self-hosting, but I dream of a world where FOSS desktop and mobile apps have p2p sync (maybe with CRDT) so that everyone could use them without hosting, even my mom.
- treyd 3y ago
  Syncthing is partly in this direction.
  - brunoqc 3y ago
    Yeah, Syncthing is awesome. Even more with untrusted share.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
I feel the same way. The way companies have abused the privacy of the public is awful and I am in the position to run my own services but its not something most people can or should do. I think docker has made this a lot easier than it was and the new NAS operating systems making deploying common popular containers really easy so its more accessible than it once was.
cosinetau 3y ago
If the mods on r/selfhosted could read, they would be very angry at this.
rcme 3y ago
This is my dream for the blockchain: a massive global computer that no one controls. I can run my own services on it, using cryptography to maintain privacy when necessary, and I don’t need to worry about all the annoyances of self hosting. Everything will “just work” in perpetuity.
- zabzonk 3y ago
  > a massive global computer that no one controls who is paying for this?
  - rollcat 3y ago
    I know it's meant as a rhetorical question, but I think it deserves an answer for everyone around here who still doesn't get it: you and I, and every other person on Earth, no matter whether they are a blockchain enthusiast, or actively interested in its demise. Proof of waste is a colossal externalised cost; you think you're trading "your" electricity and dollars for "your" imaginary money; but the fact is, you're wasting my planet. Cryptocurrencies have already caused enormous harm, and even as the fad is waning, it couldn't die soon enough.
    - rcme 3y ago
      Might want to read about proof of stake.
      - rollcat 3y ago
        Ends do not justify the means. PoS is blood stained.
        rcme 3y ago
        How so?
        rollcat 3y ago
erulabs 3y ago
> My recommendation to most people putting services online would be: either do it for yourself only, or do it as a team with proper structure and processes. What sounds like an initiative to emancipate people could actually alienate them to you, and that is a huge responsibility. Oof, good advice. I run a startup that helps folks self-host, but it really does split the audience in two. Folks technical enough to swallow the somewhat rough edges become huge fans and part of a fun community. Folks just on the other side of that split tend to have pretty frustrating experiences... I dearly wish I had the capital to be able to spend another full-time year on making our product better, but self-hosting is a really tricky thing to build a company around - the audience by definition is looking to avoid paying for services! I do still fully believe (and hope!) that one day, far from now, self-hosting reliably will be trivial, and our kids will all think we were a bit slow for relying on a few megacorporations hosted services.
- rollcat 3y ago
  I think the main problem is that ordinary people don't even see what problems self-hosting is supposed to address; and those that do, still need to dedicate significant time and effort to "tinkering", even when handed a huge chunk of the solution on a plate. Another huge problem is that there's a home network between your product and the user's other devices; most home networks are utter crap, and often even tech-savvy people don't have a whole lot of control over it (I hate my ISP's modem with passion). This seriously limits your potential to provide an excellent UX; IMHO it's the UX that makes or breaks a product for "the rest of us". I used to self-host a whole bunch of things on a VPS, including my blog, git repos, a DIY blogroll / RSS reader, etc. In the end I've decided it was not worth the effort; the blog was moved to Netlify, repos to Github, and the RSS kludge got swapped for NetNewsWire with iCloud sync. I was paying €5 for the VPS, yet now I'm paying Apple €20 to host my email, sync my photos, get access to the music catalogue, etc. I would definitely pay €20/mo for a box under my desk + an online service, provided it gives me similar value without much additional effort. I think the problem that KubeSail/PiBox is aiming to solve might be both too broad (run any software you like!), and too narrow (if you're an enthusiast!) at the same time. I don't want to run Miniflux; I want to have my RSS feeds synced between devices. The software that pushes the bytes (and the hardware it runs on) should be invisible - unless I decide (out of my own free will / curiosity) to pop the cover open and start tinkering. I don't think you can solve this by addressing shortcomings in a single piece of the stack. Both the layer below you (your average home network), and above you (the apps) have their own problems; some are like splinters (tiny but enough to ruin the experience), some are fundamental ("what is MySQL and why do I need to know"). I don't think it's a lost fight, but I would try to start with a vision for a more vertically integrated solution; maybe one step of that road is to eventually build your own WiFi AP/router (or even become an ISP), maybe to make a deal with Spotify (or even directly with EMI/WB/etc)... I don't think a task is too big if you can seriously challenge Apple/Amazon/Google at the end of the road.
johnsbrayton 3y ago
Great article. While it mentions monitoring, it took me a long time to appreciate how beneficial it is to do monitoring really well. Things like: • Knowing when disk space, inode usage, or memory usage get high, long before it’s an emergency. • Automated monitoring of SSL certificate expiration dates, letting you know days before a certificate expires. Whether or not you use something like certbot, have a separate process that automatically tells you a certificate is close to expiration. • Automated periodic end-to-end testing of moving parts. Like if you run an email server, a process that sends something from your server to a gmail.com address, and then checks the gmail.com inbox to find the message. • Automated periodic testing that unexposed ports remain unavailable from outside the device or private network. • Automated checking that a Linux instance is successfully checking for and installing security updates, and is not waiting for a reboot. • Automated checking that backups are working as expected. You might not be able to automate periodic restore testing, but at least check that backups do not appear to be silently failing. • Separating out low priority alerts from high priority alerts. You want to get woken up when necessary, but not for an issue that can wait until you are at your desk.
- roblh 3y ago
  Do you have any recommendations or resources you think are great for learning more about this? I think I’m right at the beginning of this journey and looking for where to start.
  - johnsbrayton 3y ago
    I wish I did. My approach is that I have a ruby script that runs every five minutes and does a bunch of tests. The script takes a couple minutes to execute. It connects to servers via SSH to check things out, does end-to-end-tests, then it writes its result to a JSON file. It runs on a Linode instance with a webapp whose sole responsibility is to respond to Pingdom requests. There are two URLs that Pingdom looks for: one that returns a 500 if the JSON file indicates an issue that warrants texting me. A second that returns a 500 if the JSON file indicates an issue that warrants emailing me for a lower priority issue. Pingdom is configured accordingly. If for any reason the JSON file has not been written in the past 10 minutes (?) or cannot be read and parsed, both URLs return a 500. The script has a log file, so when I get an alert I can check the log file to determine what is wrong. This is likely atypical, but it works really well for me. My scripts do the work of monitoring the heck out of everything. I only need Pingdom (or a service like it) to monitor two URLs and do the texting/emailing. But my overall approach is to think of monitoring like unit tests or integration tests: when I think of something that could go wrong, I try to make sure there is monitoring that can detect it and alert me. When possible, before it becomes urgent. And when something does go wrong that is not automatically detected, it's a high priority to add monitoring around that.
skybrian 3y ago
Sandstorm would have been nice, but I think a reasonable way to go nowadays might be to write software so that it’s easily deployed on Netlify or Deno Deploy and encourage people to fork your repo and run their own website. You’re still writing software for others to use, but you don’t take responsibility for their uptime or content. It’s a little bit of a barrier because you need to create two free accounts (including GitHub) and learn your way around. Part of open source in practice is education and I think teaching people enough so they can edit a file on GitHub would be empowering, even if that’s as far as they go. Those are services I’ve used that have a free tier and seem pretty low-maintenance. What would be other good choices for this sort of thing?
saclark11 3y ago
This post resonates with me and briefly acknowledges the thing that scares me the most about self hosting personal stuff for myself and loved ones: the bus factor. I haven't heard many self-hosting proponents talk about their strategy to mitigate the bus factor. I really want to self-host, but it seems like such a headache and a risk.
- rablackburn 3y ago
  I think the only way is aggressively simplifying your solution, documenting the hell out of it (playbooks for rebooting, exporting data, etc), and leaving a notebook of passwords in a safety deposit box/safe.
js4ever 3y ago
I have created Elestio (https://elest.io https://elest.io) to address this pain, we take care of all aspects (infra, deployments, security, dns, smtp, backups, monitoring, alerts, updates, migrations ...) and we do it for a catalog of 233 open source software and also for CI/CD pipelines to deploy your own code from a Github/Gitlab repo
- samsquire 3y ago
  Wow this looks really good. Well done! Good work! Could you share how you think you compare to cloudron? Are you kind of a IaaS host coordinator?
  - js4ever 3y ago
    Thanks for your kind words :) Main difference is the human support, catalog size, CICD from Git and we help users in case of anything going wrong or with advanced customizations. Also we include Hosting + management fees + human support in a price per hour, we also have BringYourOwnVM and BringYourOwnAWS account options.
- miramba 3y ago
  I have a few hand-written node apps with a small express API. Can I deploy those on elest.io without having to worry about the underlying OS and its security and network setup? That would be very interesting for me. Kind of like a simple and cheap webhoster with php: Upload your files, forget about the rest. Is it that what you offer?
  - danieldifficult 3y ago
    hi, fellow Elest.io user here. Yes, that is a perfect use case, aside from a regular OSS deployment. The CI/CD feature is exactly what you’re describing - it’s basically a private netlify/vercel, but can run express on a server (vs. serverless only/no express) I myself run a Next.js app on it, it’s amazing how much faster it is than Vercel… even on the cheapest VM (1 CPU / 2 Gb RAM) I now get instant page loads vs. long long seconds of waiting with Vercel.
tombert 3y ago
I am basically in the camp of "it is impossible to have readily-accessible stuff that you don't have to constantly babysit". I have a server in my basement with like 35tb of zfs storage to hold my blu-ray rips. The movies are backed up onto tapes, and those are more or less durable but not really readily-accessible (and kind of a pain). A very large quantity of my time is spent mucking around with disks, and fixing data issues. Even when there's no data issues, there might be a transient read error which causes a fault and I have to spend time dealing with scrubs or at the very least checksumming files to make sure that they're fine. A masochistic part of me kind of enjoys it, but honestly it's gotten to a point where I'm debating just paying some money to Hetzner or Amazon and selling off the servers.
- fragmede 3y ago
  35TiB on Hetzner or Amazon isn't exactly going to be cheap, but regardless of that, even if you don't give up your local server, I'd still ask what your off-site backup situation is. Two friend's houses got broken into (different cities) and had their shit stolen, and another had their stuff destroyed in a fire, so at some point, I added cloud storage for off-site backup into my strategy.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    amazon storage appears to be about 10 times as expensive as a comparative server at hetzner.
- meatmanek 3y ago
  Serious question: Why go to so much trouble to back up your blu-ray rips? Why not just keep the original discs in a binder / on a spindle, and re-rip them if your hard drive dies?
  - tombert 3y ago
    I have over 400 movies, and about 30 complete TV series. Ripping movies isn't so bad, takes about 40 minutes on my laptop, but ripping TV series is a huge pain in the ass. Episodes appear to be stored in no particular order on Blu-ray, so I end up having to open the video file, pray for a title card, and match that against an episode order list on Wikipedia. For some shows (like most British shows) this isn't too bad, since there's a very small number of episodes so re-ripping doesn't take too long. For other shows (e.g. Adventure Time), there's a million episodes, and correctly labeling them takes a lot of effort that I do not want to duplicate. The thing is...I have re-ripped all my blu-rays. Twice. Because I didn't know what I was doing with ZFS and kept breakingu cluster. I don't really want to do it again.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I’m writing an app that relies on four different servers. I’ve written 3 of them. We’re unlikely to self-host, but we’ll almost certainly be doing some kind of cloud service for them. Thankfully, the scale is minuscule, compared to what a lot of folks, hereabouts, are used to.
kkfx 3y ago
I do as well and I want BUT I dislike two key facts: - the development and use of services useful at small scale is essentially ceased in the last decades, meaning it's harder to keep up. We still have emails (even if current antispam solutions makes hard to have personal mailserver able to communicate with anyone) but feeds are more and more useless since most sites or do not offer them or publish just titles and ads and so on; - older services got abandoned and modern ones try to mimic the giants ones, being needlessly complex and heavy for personal use. Let's talk clear: - we do not have modern MUAs, comfy enough. Yes, we have notmuch-emacs, Mu4E, but a proper setup demands few hundred SLoC at least, not something as simple a state: this is the root dir to downloads all my messages, keep them on server or delete, few filters and auto-refile rules, remote credentials and stop; - we do not have file sharing stuff the easy way, the least obscene is WebDAV that's supported by most OSes, but most people do not know it, so we just need web-apps to mimick a file manager Google Drive alike to makes others able to reach our files; - we do lost most of the desktop computing model, with people on limited and limiting mobile devices, who happen to be integrated only with cloud crap; - IPv6 is not that widespread in the form a a global per any device, and personal domains are not much used by most. Technically ANYTHING needed is there, but since most people do not know it and some bi&powerful want anybody on their servers we essentially have very little margin of maneuvers. Modern telephony is old classic VoIP, but most carriers do not offer few settings to connect any softphone or a personal PBX (Yate/Asterisk) to them, mails are still there, but for most mails means webmails, some big vendors have even buggy IMAP (GMail) or no IMAP/POP at all (TutaNota) or try to push their new favorite protocol (Proton Mail/JMAP). The value of having messages managed on personal iron, locally indexed, having a domain name with various subdomains and so on is unknown to most. Cars nowadays have wifi and mobile connections but nothing to be directly connected to their formal owner, anything goes through the OEM server, who happen to be the substantial owner. In the 2030 "you'll own nothing" is a THREAT TO THE HUMANITY but most seems to like it and few like the profitable outcome of that. That's the real issue.
jfdi 3y ago
Genuine q. The main thing stopping me from self hosting is security. Having a box in the cloud get hacked as long as data is properly encrypted and secured - not good but also can easily destroy and spin up anew. But having your home server hacked and then presumably your entire home network and everything in it - seems way too fraught to even attempt it. Thoughts on that? Am I just too unfamiliar with network security and this actually solved now — and there is already a well-defined trusted approach to this?
- kyleyeats 3y ago
  You have to cheat and compromise your morality somewhere to make it work with decentralizing, I've found. Here, the answer is a Cloudflare tunnel. Hail corporate.
- PhilipRoman 3y ago
  For all its faults, the term "zero trust" applies here - treat your local network as untrusted. Historically the security of Ethernet, IEEE802.11 and other such protocols has been full of half measures, laughably weak crypto and whatever WPS is supposed to be. Look at the history of wireless security if you want to have a good laugh. In the application layer, on the other hand, we have rock solid solutions like SSH which remain the gold standard for security.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    That sounds like an ideal more than a reality. Windows has separate "Home network" firewall settings that it automatically detects, and I assume lots of other consumer devices make similar assumptions. Yeah you can lock everything down, _if_ you're careful, _if_ you don't mess up, _if_ some consumer hardware doesn't have a vulnerability
- fungiblecog 3y ago
  With 3 routers you can isolate your home network from external-facing services very securely. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-545.pdf https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-545.pdf
turtlebits 3y ago
The biggest reason for me is costs - for personal use, cloud/SaaS pricing is way to expensive. The second is having to read and learn provider specific documentation is a waste of time (ie deploying on fly/supabase/heroku/netlify, which all have their own cli tools and their own config syntax)
- codazoda 3y ago
  True for me too. The costs for cloud services _seem_ like they’re higher to get started _and_ I worry about the cost runs you hear horror stories about.
kelahcim 3y ago
For me, it turned our that buying hardware and hosting Minecraft server in a garage is simply much cheaper comparing to Cloud providers. This is why I am for self hosted stuff.
bluGill 3y ago
I wish there was someone I could trust to host for me. I use fastmail for email after giving up self hosting 15 years ago. I like that they take care of applying security updates and everything has just worked. They are also big enough that everybody accepts email from them so I don't end up in automatic spam land. Unfortunately they do email well, but they don't do a lot of other services I'd like - backup all my pictures as I take them for example. Google wants me to use them, but they have earn my lack of trust - between deprecating services that look useful, the algorithm locking a few people out with no way to get back in, random changes that make useful workflows break I'm not interested.
- andrey_utkin 3y ago
  What do you want to have hosted for you? Feel free to contact me for a totally not shady hosting :)
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Something good for backing up my family pictures that I may or may not want to share with other family members or friends (but for sure don't want to share with random people). Not shady is important. As is reason to believe that you are contributing to make the software you host better (as opposed to mooching off free software)
    - andrey_utkin 3y ago
      Maybe Nextcloud with its E2EE can do that, but I am not sure if it works to share the files with other people while protecting the files from the host admins.
loughnane 3y ago
I used to expose my services to the internet. Now I use WireGuard through OPNsense to connect remotely. The attack surface is small and I’m still even able to stream videos that are located at home. I’m not a security expert but it makes me feel like keeping software up to date is less urgent. That lets me stick to one version for a while once it does everything I like. The stability of experience and ease of use is greet.
- bpye 3y ago
  Another option is to stick an authenticated reverse proxy in front of whatever you’re hosting. No software needed on the client beyond a web browser, and you only need to worry about say the security of Nginx…
fragmede 3y ago
There's just some stuff that to have to host yourself. In my case, it's my garage door. Instead of having to be there to press the button on my garage door remote, I hooked it into a microcontroller and can now control it over the Internet. I then expose it via a tiny PHP script and Tailscale, and now, not only can I let people into my garage remotely, but they can let themselves in with their password. An expensive business feature for an apartment complex if I were to make a product out of it, but I built it myself and self-host.
aloer 3y ago
I've recently mentioned* that I believe the serverless model to be a great fit for self hosting needs. It enables a kind of bring your own account (BYOA?) installation process. Where self-hostable services would be entirely built based on managed services. - Infrastructure as code. The installer takes in any <cloud_vendor> account and provisions + configures the required components - High availability built in - no need to support old or niche hardware - On-demand costs structure. Many self-hosted services don't need to run 24/7 My biggest fear with raspberry pi or VPS is the security. But self-hosting does not mean my-server-hosting. Some amount of vendor lock-in is acceptable and using the same APIs and processes as enterprise users sounds like a win. At least compared to not self-hosting at all. Of course many things are still missing: - self-hosted tools that actually work like this - connection between data center and home. To integrate with smart home/IoT and similar things - a reliable billing model for less technical users. It has to be impossible to rack up huge cloud bills For now I guess it's just not yet mature enough. But I would like to see the serverless mentality finding it's way into self-hosted software communities. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36986980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36986980 An example of what I mean: https://github.com/full-stack-serverless/conference-app-in-a-box https://github.com/full-stack-serverless/conference-app-in-a... I don't see any reason why that shouldn't also work for more typical self-hosted applications
- Macha 3y ago
  The problem for me is there's no "generic" serverless stack, so you're then locked into one single vendor which defeats a lot of the personal control appeal of self hosting for me.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I think the web needs a bit of a redesign so that all of the responsibilities associated with hosting don't fall to a single entity. Responsibility and power go together, and power corrupts. I ought to be able to choose a person that I trust to not lose or leak data, a different person to curate code for use on my device, and yet another person for being authoritative about the problem domain. If I later decide that Jimbo has bad taste in client side code, I shouldn't have to also abandon Mary's excellent data handling track record. Yet somehow we've found our way to a corner of the design space where each entity that carries any of these burdens also carries the others.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  How is this not already achievable today? You’re free to use Cloudflare to cache, AWS for your web servers and GCP for your DB. It’s just not as practical to do this from an IAM standpoint and cloud providers are offering incentives to get more of your hosting business.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Not really, I used ten or fifteen web apps today and I was totally at the mercy of whoever designed them re: who had access to the data I generated, re: which front end I used, etc. It's the user's trust preference that I want to matter, not the app developer's. My NAS appliance has plenty of storage available, I want to select it as my storage backend so that if the internet goes down everything that doesn't require collaboration still works for me. And not because I've been very choosy about what code I rely on, but because that degree of composability is built into the protocols.
FloatArtifact 3y ago
I've tried leveraging several self-hosting solutions like TrueCharts(A app catalog fop TrueNAS SCALE) or Unraid both of which can use the ZFS. Neither application has a built-in mechanism for backing up your application data that is anywhere near user-friendly. TrueCharts does not have the GUI backup mechanism besides to protect user data per application. One application that becomes corrupt? Good luck, you have to restore all applications to a single point in time if you used with their commandline tool. Unraid does not have any sort of backup mechanism relies on a community for setting up backups. ZFS replication is not enough special care must be given for applications to be in their correct state to prevent data corruption.
Timber-6539 3y ago
This is a very complete article that covers most of the pitfalls of self-hosting services. As someone who self-hosts a good chunk of the services that I use, I am in total agreement of the challenges that face the poor souls that seek alternatives to big tech. From Oracle (allegedly) randomly shutting down instances [0] to Google doing A-B testing [1] on how to further lock down Youtube videos. It truly is a treacherous journey for the self-hosters. [0] https://gist.github.com/yewtudotbe/c16a69ddad88a37c2a364a5ff5359197 https://gist.github.com/yewtudotbe/c16a69ddad88a37c2a364a5ff... [1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4027#issuecomment-1666940357 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4027#issuecomment...
deiu 3y ago
I have created Easypanel [1] to make it easier for developers to self-host applications. However, non-developer people started to use it for deploying open-source apps. Our "templates" [2] list is now at 200+ apps. I would say 50% use it to power their "homelab" and 50% are developers who use it for their apps. https://easypanel.io https://easypanel.io https://easypanel.io/templates https://easypanel.io/templates
- _cenw 3y ago
  backups are a paid feature? this feels one step down from the SSO tax.
  - ozim 3y ago
    I see it differently. I am paying for hosting, I would have to spend time to make backups on my own, now someone with experience is doing backups for me. It is just like I can change oil in my car on my own if I go to the shop they are not going to do it for free because I can do it on my own. "SSO tax" is also because someone has to spend time to set it up and maintain for specific company. We slowly get to OAuth2 everywhere and Azure Active Directory/Other providers where it won't be a hassle but still bunch of big companies keep on their outdated SAML services thinking it is secure and they would like you do do their job.
    - _cenw 3y ago
      Some features ought to be essential. Being able to follow best-practices security and having backups ought to be included.
      - ozim 3y ago
        Yeah included in price - if you don't want to pay for backups you can pick $0 plan. I don't see how it is wrong not to include backups in $0 plan. If you open "Easy panel" pricing page.
        3y ago
XCSme 3y ago
Are the "security updates" really required? Let's say you are running Ubuntu 20 with nginx simply hosting some static websites, and you let it run for 5 years without any updates. Are there vulnerabilities so big found with the OS or very popular software (like nginx) that they could compromise your server and give root access?

One of the 'services' I host is a simple interface on a server that allows me to easily upload files and get sharable links to them. At this point it's used by more than just me, a bunch of people in my circle use my instance to share files. In case anyone else finds this useful: https://github.com/aaviator42/izi https://github.com/aaviator42/izi There's a demo here: https://aavi.xyz/proj/fakeizi/ https://aavi.xyz/proj/fakeizi/

om154 3y ago

I want to self-host all of my data such as calendar, contacts, photos and more but I just haven’t dedicated the time yet

stavros 3y ago
Here you go: https://www.pastery.net/xtydav/ https://www.pastery.net/xtydav/ apt-get install postgresql, connect it, and you're done.
- jasode 3y ago
  >, and you're done. It doesn't seem that simple. When I researched Nextcloud in the past, I avoided it because of warnings like the ones in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25481465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25481465 Ctrl+F search that thread for "failure". If Nextcloud has solved whatever issues were happening in 2020, it still doesn't necessarily instill confidence because one can remain skeptical and assume there are new issues still happening in 2023. E.g. https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues It's going to take some time to wade through all those Github issues to determine if there are any showstoppers that would affect one's installation. This doesn't look like a low-maintenance solution. The gp's wording of "dedicated the time" seems very relevant. Copy&paste of some YAML doesn't really address the work involved.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Well, personally, I've been running it for years and it's never had as much as a hiccup, but YMMV.
midasz 3y ago
For photos I recommend Immich (https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/) - recently switched from nextcloud to immich and it's ridiculous that this is free and opensource software - it feels so premium.

coffee33go 3y ago

A set of valid points especially As self-hosters we are not going to change the face of the world. The other 98% of the general public is going to use hegemonic services: self-hosting is a privilege for those who have the education, time and money to put into it. We’re only deploying solutions that work for us, individually.

Larrikin 3y ago
It's all niche stuff that only a few people use until there are watershed moments like the Twitter and Reddit fuck ups that push large swathes of users to look for an alternative. Then suddenly it's not a niche product and it's important that the kinks, bugs, and onboarding has been worked out during those years of being niche. People are absolutely getting sick of subscriptions. It's also getting easier to self host. Tailscale has been a game changer for me personally as I just had no confidence in getting my services working correctly over the internet without getting pwned
- vkou 3y ago
  > It's all niche stuff that only a few people use until there are watershed moments like the Twitter and Reddit fuck ups that push large swathes of users to look for an alternative. And then after poking around for a week, they go back to Twitter and Reddit.
  - BestGuess 3y ago
    As something of a dumdum myself I think I know why. Corporations want people to be able to do their thing as easy as possible to make money, while people not directly motivated like that and not motivated to make it as easy as possible can do anything else. So instead of "make sure it's just a button click" it's "what, you didn't read all 580 pages of the documentation and all the changelogs and the code on github and compile it yourself on a custom built $40,000 machine? We don't help your kind around here go away" and yeah people go right back to windows or twitter or whatever. Jokin aside I'm just trying to explain there is a real problem there. Feeling smug about the result of that problem doesn't fix it but it is really easy to do

mg 3y ago

I would love to build my next web project so it will not save any data on the server but let the user save it locally via the File System Access API. That would give the user the same experience as with a desktop application. Full control over their data, saved locally. The problem is that, according my tests, Firefox does not support it at all. Chrome does not support it on Android and Safari does not support it on iOS. Not sure about Safari on the desktop. Here is a text editor demo which let's you try if it works with your browser: https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/ https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/ If your browser supports it, it will let you load and save files just like a desktop application. If it does not support it, it will use a download/upload workaround.

JohnFen 3y ago
I like that effort! But it only addresses half of the value of self-hosting (which is much better than nothing). The other half is: being able to have control over the software itself, when/if it gets updated, being able to be sure what's done with the data (if you're sufficiently motivated), and not having the service become unavailable when the internet is out.
madeofpalk 3y ago
There is a middle ground which all browsers do support, and not require permission prompts - Origin private file system https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API/Origin_private_file_system https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... If you're not familiar it's a file-system like API for writing files to an opaque non-user-accessable file system. Your application could probably provide it's own export functionality using blob urls, and import using traditional file "upload".
- hinkley 3y ago
  The problem with these is that nobody has a single user agent anymore. Haven’t for years. If I need files I need them on my phone and tablet, or tablet and laptop. Those services have yet to become standardized.
3y ago

brunoqc 3y ago

I don't mind self-hosting, but I dream of a world where FOSS desktop and mobile apps have p2p sync (maybe with CRDT) so that everyone could use them without hosting, even my mom.

treyd 3y ago
Syncthing is partly in this direction.
- brunoqc 3y ago
  Yeah, Syncthing is awesome. Even more with untrusted share.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

I feel the same way. The way companies have abused the privacy of the public is awful and I am in the position to run my own services but its not something most people can or should do. I think docker has made this a lot easier than it was and the new NAS operating systems making deploying common popular containers really easy so its more accessible than it once was.

cosinetau 3y ago

If the mods on r/selfhosted could read, they would be very angry at this.

rcme 3y ago

This is my dream for the blockchain: a massive global computer that no one controls. I can run my own services on it, using cryptography to maintain privacy when necessary, and I don’t need to worry about all the annoyances of self hosting. Everything will “just work” in perpetuity.

zabzonk 3y ago
> a massive global computer that no one controls who is paying for this?
- rollcat 3y ago
  I know it's meant as a rhetorical question, but I think it deserves an answer for everyone around here who still doesn't get it: you and I, and every other person on Earth, no matter whether they are a blockchain enthusiast, or actively interested in its demise. Proof of waste is a colossal externalised cost; you think you're trading "your" electricity and dollars for "your" imaginary money; but the fact is, you're wasting my planet. Cryptocurrencies have already caused enormous harm, and even as the fad is waning, it couldn't die soon enough.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Might want to read about proof of stake.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      Ends do not justify the means. PoS is blood stained.
      - rcme 3y ago
        How so?
        rollcat 3y ago

erulabs 3y ago

> My recommendation to most people putting services online would be: either do it for yourself only, or do it as a team with proper structure and processes. What sounds like an initiative to emancipate people could actually alienate them to you, and that is a huge responsibility. Oof, good advice. I run a startup that helps folks self-host, but it really does split the audience in two. Folks technical enough to swallow the somewhat rough edges become huge fans and part of a fun community. Folks just on the other side of that split tend to have pretty frustrating experiences... I dearly wish I had the capital to be able to spend another full-time year on making our product better, but self-hosting is a really tricky thing to build a company around - the audience by definition is looking to avoid paying for services! I do still fully believe (and hope!) that one day, far from now, self-hosting reliably will be trivial, and our kids will all think we were a bit slow for relying on a few megacorporations hosted services.

rollcat 3y ago
I think the main problem is that ordinary people don't even see what problems self-hosting is supposed to address; and those that do, still need to dedicate significant time and effort to "tinkering", even when handed a huge chunk of the solution on a plate. Another huge problem is that there's a home network between your product and the user's other devices; most home networks are utter crap, and often even tech-savvy people don't have a whole lot of control over it (I hate my ISP's modem with passion). This seriously limits your potential to provide an excellent UX; IMHO it's the UX that makes or breaks a product for "the rest of us". I used to self-host a whole bunch of things on a VPS, including my blog, git repos, a DIY blogroll / RSS reader, etc. In the end I've decided it was not worth the effort; the blog was moved to Netlify, repos to Github, and the RSS kludge got swapped for NetNewsWire with iCloud sync. I was paying €5 for the VPS, yet now I'm paying Apple €20 to host my email, sync my photos, get access to the music catalogue, etc. I would definitely pay €20/mo for a box under my desk + an online service, provided it gives me similar value without much additional effort. I think the problem that KubeSail/PiBox is aiming to solve might be both too broad (run any software you like!), and too narrow (if you're an enthusiast!) at the same time. I don't want to run Miniflux; I want to have my RSS feeds synced between devices. The software that pushes the bytes (and the hardware it runs on) should be invisible - unless I decide (out of my own free will / curiosity) to pop the cover open and start tinkering. I don't think you can solve this by addressing shortcomings in a single piece of the stack. Both the layer below you (your average home network), and above you (the apps) have their own problems; some are like splinters (tiny but enough to ruin the experience), some are fundamental ("what is MySQL and why do I need to know"). I don't think it's a lost fight, but I would try to start with a vision for a more vertically integrated solution; maybe one step of that road is to eventually build your own WiFi AP/router (or even become an ISP), maybe to make a deal with Spotify (or even directly with EMI/WB/etc)... I don't think a task is too big if you can seriously challenge Apple/Amazon/Google at the end of the road.

johnsbrayton 3y ago

Great article. While it mentions monitoring, it took me a long time to appreciate how beneficial it is to do monitoring really well. Things like: • Knowing when disk space, inode usage, or memory usage get high, long before it’s an emergency. • Automated monitoring of SSL certificate expiration dates, letting you know days before a certificate expires. Whether or not you use something like certbot, have a separate process that automatically tells you a certificate is close to expiration. • Automated periodic end-to-end testing of moving parts. Like if you run an email server, a process that sends something from your server to a gmail.com address, and then checks the gmail.com inbox to find the message. • Automated periodic testing that unexposed ports remain unavailable from outside the device or private network. • Automated checking that a Linux instance is successfully checking for and installing security updates, and is not waiting for a reboot. • Automated checking that backups are working as expected. You might not be able to automate periodic restore testing, but at least check that backups do not appear to be silently failing. • Separating out low priority alerts from high priority alerts. You want to get woken up when necessary, but not for an issue that can wait until you are at your desk.

roblh 3y ago
Do you have any recommendations or resources you think are great for learning more about this? I think I’m right at the beginning of this journey and looking for where to start.
- johnsbrayton 3y ago
  I wish I did. My approach is that I have a ruby script that runs every five minutes and does a bunch of tests. The script takes a couple minutes to execute. It connects to servers via SSH to check things out, does end-to-end-tests, then it writes its result to a JSON file. It runs on a Linode instance with a webapp whose sole responsibility is to respond to Pingdom requests. There are two URLs that Pingdom looks for: one that returns a 500 if the JSON file indicates an issue that warrants texting me. A second that returns a 500 if the JSON file indicates an issue that warrants emailing me for a lower priority issue. Pingdom is configured accordingly. If for any reason the JSON file has not been written in the past 10 minutes (?) or cannot be read and parsed, both URLs return a 500. The script has a log file, so when I get an alert I can check the log file to determine what is wrong. This is likely atypical, but it works really well for me. My scripts do the work of monitoring the heck out of everything. I only need Pingdom (or a service like it) to monitor two URLs and do the texting/emailing. But my overall approach is to think of monitoring like unit tests or integration tests: when I think of something that could go wrong, I try to make sure there is monitoring that can detect it and alert me. When possible, before it becomes urgent. And when something does go wrong that is not automatically detected, it's a high priority to add monitoring around that.

skybrian 3y ago

Sandstorm would have been nice, but I think a reasonable way to go nowadays might be to write software so that it’s easily deployed on Netlify or Deno Deploy and encourage people to fork your repo and run their own website. You’re still writing software for others to use, but you don’t take responsibility for their uptime or content. It’s a little bit of a barrier because you need to create two free accounts (including GitHub) and learn your way around. Part of open source in practice is education and I think teaching people enough so they can edit a file on GitHub would be empowering, even if that’s as far as they go. Those are services I’ve used that have a free tier and seem pretty low-maintenance. What would be other good choices for this sort of thing?

saclark11 3y ago

This post resonates with me and briefly acknowledges the thing that scares me the most about self hosting personal stuff for myself and loved ones: the bus factor. I haven't heard many self-hosting proponents talk about their strategy to mitigate the bus factor. I really want to self-host, but it seems like such a headache and a risk.

rablackburn 3y ago
I think the only way is aggressively simplifying your solution, documenting the hell out of it (playbooks for rebooting, exporting data, etc), and leaving a notebook of passwords in a safety deposit box/safe.

js4ever 3y ago

I have created Elestio (https://elest.io https://elest.io) to address this pain, we take care of all aspects (infra, deployments, security, dns, smtp, backups, monitoring, alerts, updates, migrations ...) and we do it for a catalog of 233 open source software and also for CI/CD pipelines to deploy your own code from a Github/Gitlab repo

samsquire 3y ago
Wow this looks really good. Well done! Good work! Could you share how you think you compare to cloudron? Are you kind of a IaaS host coordinator?
- js4ever 3y ago
  Thanks for your kind words :) Main difference is the human support, catalog size, CICD from Git and we help users in case of anything going wrong or with advanced customizations. Also we include Hosting + management fees + human support in a price per hour, we also have BringYourOwnVM and BringYourOwnAWS account options.
miramba 3y ago
I have a few hand-written node apps with a small express API. Can I deploy those on elest.io without having to worry about the underlying OS and its security and network setup? That would be very interesting for me. Kind of like a simple and cheap webhoster with php: Upload your files, forget about the rest. Is it that what you offer?
- danieldifficult 3y ago
  hi, fellow Elest.io user here. Yes, that is a perfect use case, aside from a regular OSS deployment. The CI/CD feature is exactly what you’re describing - it’s basically a private netlify/vercel, but can run express on a server (vs. serverless only/no express) I myself run a Next.js app on it, it’s amazing how much faster it is than Vercel… even on the cheapest VM (1 CPU / 2 Gb RAM) I now get instant page loads vs. long long seconds of waiting with Vercel.

tombert 3y ago

I am basically in the camp of "it is impossible to have readily-accessible stuff that you don't have to constantly babysit". I have a server in my basement with like 35tb of zfs storage to hold my blu-ray rips. The movies are backed up onto tapes, and those are more or less durable but not really readily-accessible (and kind of a pain). A very large quantity of my time is spent mucking around with disks, and fixing data issues. Even when there's no data issues, there might be a transient read error which causes a fault and I have to spend time dealing with scrubs or at the very least checksumming files to make sure that they're fine. A masochistic part of me kind of enjoys it, but honestly it's gotten to a point where I'm debating just paying some money to Hetzner or Amazon and selling off the servers.

fragmede 3y ago
35TiB on Hetzner or Amazon isn't exactly going to be cheap, but regardless of that, even if you don't give up your local server, I'd still ask what your off-site backup situation is. Two friend's houses got broken into (different cities) and had their shit stolen, and another had their stuff destroyed in a fire, so at some point, I added cloud storage for off-site backup into my strategy.
- em-bee 3y ago
  amazon storage appears to be about 10 times as expensive as a comparative server at hetzner.
meatmanek 3y ago
Serious question: Why go to so much trouble to back up your blu-ray rips? Why not just keep the original discs in a binder / on a spindle, and re-rip them if your hard drive dies?
- tombert 3y ago
  I have over 400 movies, and about 30 complete TV series. Ripping movies isn't so bad, takes about 40 minutes on my laptop, but ripping TV series is a huge pain in the ass. Episodes appear to be stored in no particular order on Blu-ray, so I end up having to open the video file, pray for a title card, and match that against an episode order list on Wikipedia. For some shows (like most British shows) this isn't too bad, since there's a very small number of episodes so re-ripping doesn't take too long. For other shows (e.g. Adventure Time), there's a million episodes, and correctly labeling them takes a lot of effort that I do not want to duplicate. The thing is...I have re-ripped all my blu-rays. Twice. Because I didn't know what I was doing with ZFS and kept breakingu cluster. I don't really want to do it again.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I’m writing an app that relies on four different servers. I’ve written 3 of them. We’re unlikely to self-host, but we’ll almost certainly be doing some kind of cloud service for them. Thankfully, the scale is minuscule, compared to what a lot of folks, hereabouts, are used to.

kkfx 3y ago

I do as well and I want BUT I dislike two key facts: - the development and use of services useful at small scale is essentially ceased in the last decades, meaning it's harder to keep up. We still have emails (even if current antispam solutions makes hard to have personal mailserver able to communicate with anyone) but feeds are more and more useless since most sites or do not offer them or publish just titles and ads and so on; - older services got abandoned and modern ones try to mimic the giants ones, being needlessly complex and heavy for personal use. Let's talk clear: - we do not have modern MUAs, comfy enough. Yes, we have notmuch-emacs, Mu4E, but a proper setup demands few hundred SLoC at least, not something as simple a state: this is the root dir to downloads all my messages, keep them on server or delete, few filters and auto-refile rules, remote credentials and stop; - we do not have file sharing stuff the easy way, the least obscene is WebDAV that's supported by most OSes, but most people do not know it, so we just need web-apps to mimick a file manager Google Drive alike to makes others able to reach our files; - we do lost most of the desktop computing model, with people on limited and limiting mobile devices, who happen to be integrated only with cloud crap; - IPv6 is not that widespread in the form a a global per any device, and personal domains are not much used by most. Technically ANYTHING needed is there, but since most people do not know it and some bi&powerful want anybody on their servers we essentially have very little margin of maneuvers. Modern telephony is old classic VoIP, but most carriers do not offer few settings to connect any softphone or a personal PBX (Yate/Asterisk) to them, mails are still there, but for most mails means webmails, some big vendors have even buggy IMAP (GMail) or no IMAP/POP at all (TutaNota) or try to push their new favorite protocol (Proton Mail/JMAP). The value of having messages managed on personal iron, locally indexed, having a domain name with various subdomains and so on is unknown to most. Cars nowadays have wifi and mobile connections but nothing to be directly connected to their formal owner, anything goes through the OEM server, who happen to be the substantial owner. In the 2030 "you'll own nothing" is a THREAT TO THE HUMANITY but most seems to like it and few like the profitable outcome of that. That's the real issue.

jfdi 3y ago

Genuine q. The main thing stopping me from self hosting is security. Having a box in the cloud get hacked as long as data is properly encrypted and secured - not good but also can easily destroy and spin up anew. But having your home server hacked and then presumably your entire home network and everything in it - seems way too fraught to even attempt it. Thoughts on that? Am I just too unfamiliar with network security and this actually solved now — and there is already a well-defined trusted approach to this?

kyleyeats 3y ago
You have to cheat and compromise your morality somewhere to make it work with decentralizing, I've found. Here, the answer is a Cloudflare tunnel. Hail corporate.
PhilipRoman 3y ago
For all its faults, the term "zero trust" applies here - treat your local network as untrusted. Historically the security of Ethernet, IEEE802.11 and other such protocols has been full of half measures, laughably weak crypto and whatever WPS is supposed to be. Look at the history of wireless security if you want to have a good laugh. In the application layer, on the other hand, we have rock solid solutions like SSH which remain the gold standard for security.
- rendaw 3y ago
  That sounds like an ideal more than a reality. Windows has separate "Home network" firewall settings that it automatically detects, and I assume lots of other consumer devices make similar assumptions. Yeah you can lock everything down, _if_ you're careful, _if_ you don't mess up, _if_ some consumer hardware doesn't have a vulnerability
fungiblecog 3y ago
With 3 routers you can isolate your home network from external-facing services very securely. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-545.pdf https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-545.pdf

turtlebits 3y ago

The biggest reason for me is costs - for personal use, cloud/SaaS pricing is way to expensive. The second is having to read and learn provider specific documentation is a waste of time (ie deploying on fly/supabase/heroku/netlify, which all have their own cli tools and their own config syntax)

codazoda 3y ago
True for me too. The costs for cloud services _seem_ like they’re higher to get started _and_ I worry about the cost runs you hear horror stories about.

kelahcim 3y ago

For me, it turned our that buying hardware and hosting Minecraft server in a garage is simply much cheaper comparing to Cloud providers. This is why I am for self hosted stuff.

bluGill 3y ago

I wish there was someone I could trust to host for me. I use fastmail for email after giving up self hosting 15 years ago. I like that they take care of applying security updates and everything has just worked. They are also big enough that everybody accepts email from them so I don't end up in automatic spam land. Unfortunately they do email well, but they don't do a lot of other services I'd like - backup all my pictures as I take them for example. Google wants me to use them, but they have earn my lack of trust - between deprecating services that look useful, the algorithm locking a few people out with no way to get back in, random changes that make useful workflows break I'm not interested.

andrey_utkin 3y ago
What do you want to have hosted for you? Feel free to contact me for a totally not shady hosting :)
- bluGill 3y ago
  Something good for backing up my family pictures that I may or may not want to share with other family members or friends (but for sure don't want to share with random people). Not shady is important. As is reason to believe that you are contributing to make the software you host better (as opposed to mooching off free software)
  - andrey_utkin 3y ago
    Maybe Nextcloud with its E2EE can do that, but I am not sure if it works to share the files with other people while protecting the files from the host admins.

loughnane 3y ago

I used to expose my services to the internet. Now I use WireGuard through OPNsense to connect remotely. The attack surface is small and I’m still even able to stream videos that are located at home. I’m not a security expert but it makes me feel like keeping software up to date is less urgent. That lets me stick to one version for a while once it does everything I like. The stability of experience and ease of use is greet.

bpye 3y ago
Another option is to stick an authenticated reverse proxy in front of whatever you’re hosting. No software needed on the client beyond a web browser, and you only need to worry about say the security of Nginx…

fragmede 3y ago

There's just some stuff that to have to host yourself. In my case, it's my garage door. Instead of having to be there to press the button on my garage door remote, I hooked it into a microcontroller and can now control it over the Internet. I then expose it via a tiny PHP script and Tailscale, and now, not only can I let people into my garage remotely, but they can let themselves in with their password. An expensive business feature for an apartment complex if I were to make a product out of it, but I built it myself and self-host.

aloer 3y ago

I've recently mentioned* that I believe the serverless model to be a great fit for self hosting needs. It enables a kind of bring your own account (BYOA?) installation process. Where self-hostable services would be entirely built based on managed services. - Infrastructure as code. The installer takes in any <cloud_vendor> account and provisions + configures the required components - High availability built in - no need to support old or niche hardware - On-demand costs structure. Many self-hosted services don't need to run 24/7 My biggest fear with raspberry pi or VPS is the security. But self-hosting does not mean my-server-hosting. Some amount of vendor lock-in is acceptable and using the same APIs and processes as enterprise users sounds like a win. At least compared to not self-hosting at all. Of course many things are still missing: - self-hosted tools that actually work like this - connection between data center and home. To integrate with smart home/IoT and similar things - a reliable billing model for less technical users. It has to be impossible to rack up huge cloud bills For now I guess it's just not yet mature enough. But I would like to see the serverless mentality finding it's way into self-hosted software communities. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36986980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36986980 An example of what I mean: https://github.com/full-stack-serverless/conference-app-in-a-box https://github.com/full-stack-serverless/conference-app-in-a... I don't see any reason why that shouldn't also work for more typical self-hosted applications

Macha 3y ago
The problem for me is there's no "generic" serverless stack, so you're then locked into one single vendor which defeats a lot of the personal control appeal of self hosting for me.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

I think the web needs a bit of a redesign so that all of the responsibilities associated with hosting don't fall to a single entity. Responsibility and power go together, and power corrupts. I ought to be able to choose a person that I trust to not lose or leak data, a different person to curate code for use on my device, and yet another person for being authoritative about the problem domain. If I later decide that Jimbo has bad taste in client side code, I shouldn't have to also abandon Mary's excellent data handling track record. Yet somehow we've found our way to a corner of the design space where each entity that carries any of these burdens also carries the others.

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
How is this not already achievable today? You’re free to use Cloudflare to cache, AWS for your web servers and GCP for your DB. It’s just not as practical to do this from an IAM standpoint and cloud providers are offering incentives to get more of your hosting business.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Not really, I used ten or fifteen web apps today and I was totally at the mercy of whoever designed them re: who had access to the data I generated, re: which front end I used, etc. It's the user's trust preference that I want to matter, not the app developer's. My NAS appliance has plenty of storage available, I want to select it as my storage backend so that if the internet goes down everything that doesn't require collaboration still works for me. And not because I've been very choosy about what code I rely on, but because that degree of composability is built into the protocols.

FloatArtifact 3y ago

I've tried leveraging several self-hosting solutions like TrueCharts(A app catalog fop TrueNAS SCALE) or Unraid both of which can use the ZFS. Neither application has a built-in mechanism for backing up your application data that is anywhere near user-friendly. TrueCharts does not have the GUI backup mechanism besides to protect user data per application. One application that becomes corrupt? Good luck, you have to restore all applications to a single point in time if you used with their commandline tool. Unraid does not have any sort of backup mechanism relies on a community for setting up backups. ZFS replication is not enough special care must be given for applications to be in their correct state to prevent data corruption.

Timber-6539 3y ago

This is a very complete article that covers most of the pitfalls of self-hosting services. As someone who self-hosts a good chunk of the services that I use, I am in total agreement of the challenges that face the poor souls that seek alternatives to big tech. From Oracle (allegedly) randomly shutting down instances [0] to Google doing A-B testing [1] on how to further lock down Youtube videos. It truly is a treacherous journey for the self-hosters. [0] https://gist.github.com/yewtudotbe/c16a69ddad88a37c2a364a5ff5359197 https://gist.github.com/yewtudotbe/c16a69ddad88a37c2a364a5ff... [1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4027#issuecomment-1666940357 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4027#issuecomment...

deiu 3y ago

I have created Easypanel [1] to make it easier for developers to self-host applications. However, non-developer people started to use it for deploying open-source apps. Our "templates" [2] list is now at 200+ apps. I would say 50% use it to power their "homelab" and 50% are developers who use it for their apps. https://easypanel.io https://easypanel.io https://easypanel.io/templates https://easypanel.io/templates

_cenw 3y ago
backups are a paid feature? this feels one step down from the SSO tax.
- ozim 3y ago
  I see it differently. I am paying for hosting, I would have to spend time to make backups on my own, now someone with experience is doing backups for me. It is just like I can change oil in my car on my own if I go to the shop they are not going to do it for free because I can do it on my own. "SSO tax" is also because someone has to spend time to set it up and maintain for specific company. We slowly get to OAuth2 everywhere and Azure Active Directory/Other providers where it won't be a hassle but still bunch of big companies keep on their outdated SAML services thinking it is secure and they would like you do do their job.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    Some features ought to be essential. Being able to follow best-practices security and having backups ought to be included.
    - ozim 3y ago
      Yeah included in price - if you don't want to pay for backups you can pick $0 plan. I don't see how it is wrong not to include backups in $0 plan. If you open "Easy panel" pricing page.
      - 3y ago

XCSme 3y ago

Are the "security updates" really required? Let's say you are running Ubuntu 20 with nginx simply hosting some static websites, and you let it run for 5 years without any updates. Are there vulnerabilities so big found with the OS or very popular software (like nginx) that they could compromise your server and give root access?