4 ms·

I have bad memories of SOGo, from one company that insisted on self-hosting absolutely everything (including email, git, issues, Nextcloud, etc) on their own ha

I have bad memories of SOGo, from one company that insisted on self-hosting absolutely everything (including email, git, issues, Nextcloud, etc) on their own hardware. It wasn't even like a gov't institution, but a normal commercial webdev shop with strange whims. All of it was poorly maintained: several versions behind, suffered from unplanned downtime, performance issues... the choices were also questionable. Rather than gitlab or gitea, we've been using something like gitosis - except it wasn't gitosis or gitolite (these can work for very small teams, which we weren't), it was something way worse (can't even remember the name). Of course I didn't stick around there for too long. I guess this is a pretty big risk factor for self-hosted projects, that nobody seems to be talking about. I'm fairly certain SOGo is a great piece of software, but its name has been tarnished for me (and many of my ex-coworkers) by people that have nothing to do with the project.

wvh 3y ago
Good point. I work in security and although I care about privacy and self-sufficiency, sadly enough most (usually smaller) companies that have a dogmatic self-host policy tend to have a complete mess as infrastructure. Old software, servers that haven't been updated in ages, known vulnerabilities, semi-configured services, non-existing documentation or contingency policies, the list goes on. Companies should focus on their core business, and not underestimate the efforts involved in straying off the beaten path. You might be a master in gluing technological solutions together, but you might end up under a bus and woe upon those that have to figure out your handiwork. Even I myself have stopped self-hosting stuff like email for personal use because at some point, life happens, you have kids and jobs and deadlines and other responsibilities, and something might break just at that moment you really don't have time for it, and you just don't want to have to worry about stuff like if emails are getting through. Luckily there are some more ethical alternatives to the big industry leaders, for whatever your interpretation of ethical might be. It's always possible to support companies that are contributing something back to open-source software by choosing their paid services.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Also maybe I'm wrong but business to business relationships tend to care more about privacy since 1. You're paying buckets 2. The loss or leak of info can have more serious fiscal harm.... I try to offload everything at my job
jeroenhd 3y ago
If you're going to self-host, you're going to need to dedicate people to keeping your infrastructure up to date, whether that's SOGo, Gitlab, or Microsoft AD. Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. I'm not so sure if a company gimped by a badly managed SOGo environment would be able to keep their hosted Exchange working smoothly for long.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. Fair point! It's also fair to say that managing hosted Office365/Exchange is a very different skillset/background than a traditional Linux sysadmin role, and that they were making use of the resources they've had at hand (considering how finding a reliable IT partner can be challenging by itself; I've seen many shops struggle with that). Still, my original post was how your branding/perception as a self-hosted project can be ruined by someone else's mistakes in setting up said self-hosting. I've been on the other side of that fence, trying to convince the management of a different company, to host a particular service - one of the execs had a horror story, and our team had a hard time working out a compromise. For open source projects, which rely on contributions, this external perception by decision-makers (or decision-makers-in-the-making) can have real impact.

wvh 3y ago

Good point. I work in security and although I care about privacy and self-sufficiency, sadly enough most (usually smaller) companies that have a dogmatic self-host policy tend to have a complete mess as infrastructure. Old software, servers that haven't been updated in ages, known vulnerabilities, semi-configured services, non-existing documentation or contingency policies, the list goes on. Companies should focus on their core business, and not underestimate the efforts involved in straying off the beaten path. You might be a master in gluing technological solutions together, but you might end up under a bus and woe upon those that have to figure out your handiwork. Even I myself have stopped self-hosting stuff like email for personal use because at some point, life happens, you have kids and jobs and deadlines and other responsibilities, and something might break just at that moment you really don't have time for it, and you just don't want to have to worry about stuff like if emails are getting through. Luckily there are some more ethical alternatives to the big industry leaders, for whatever your interpretation of ethical might be. It's always possible to support companies that are contributing something back to open-source software by choosing their paid services.

calvinmorrison 3y ago
Also maybe I'm wrong but business to business relationships tend to care more about privacy since 1. You're paying buckets 2. The loss or leak of info can have more serious fiscal harm.... I try to offload everything at my job

jeroenhd 3y ago

If you're going to self-host, you're going to need to dedicate people to keeping your infrastructure up to date, whether that's SOGo, Gitlab, or Microsoft AD. Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. I'm not so sure if a company gimped by a badly managed SOGo environment would be able to keep their hosted Exchange working smoothly for long.

rollcat 3y ago
> Of course you'll still need to appoints someone to manage your hosted environments if you decide to go with external services. Fair point! It's also fair to say that managing hosted Office365/Exchange is a very different skillset/background than a traditional Linux sysadmin role, and that they were making use of the resources they've had at hand (considering how finding a reliable IT partner can be challenging by itself; I've seen many shops struggle with that). Still, my original post was how your branding/perception as a self-hosted project can be ruined by someone else's mistakes in setting up said self-hosting. I've been on the other side of that fence, trying to convince the management of a different company, to host a particular service - one of the execs had a horror story, and our team had a hard time working out a compromise. For open source projects, which rely on contributions, this external perception by decision-makers (or decision-makers-in-the-making) can have real impact.