10 ms·
Why I self host my servers and what I've recently learned
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rented_mule 2y agoI self-host a lot of things myself. There is one scary downside I've learned in a painful way. A friend and I figured all this out together since we met in college in the 1980s. He hosted his stuff and I hosted mine. For example, starting in 1994, we had our own domain names and hosted our own email. Sometimes we used each other for backup (e.g., when we used to host our own DNS for our domains at home as well as for SMTP relays). We also hosted for family and some friends at the same time. Four years ago he was diagnosed with cancer and a year later we lost him. It was hard enough to lose one of the closest friends I ever had. In his last weeks, he asked if I could figure out how to support his family and friends in migrating off the servers in his home rack and onto providers that made more sense for his family's level of technical understanding. This was not simple because I had moved 150 miles away, but of course I said yes. Years later, that migration is close to complete, but it has been far more difficult than any of us imagined. Not because of anything technical, but because every step of it is a reminder of the loss of a dear friend. And that takes me out of the rational mindset I need to be in to migrate things smoothly and safely. But, he did have me as a succession plan. With him gone, I don't have someone who thinks enough like me to be the same for my extended family. I'm used to thinking about things like succession plans at work, but it's an entirely new level to do it at home. So, I still host a lot, but the requirements are much more thoroughly thought through. For example, we use Paperless-ngx to manage our documents. Now there's a cron job that rsync's the collection of PDFs to my wife's laptop every hour so that she will have our important papers if something happens to me. Thinking carefully enough to come up with reliable backups like this makes things noticeably harder because not all solutions are as obvious and simple. And it's not something that ever occurred to us in our 20s and 30s, but our families were one tragedy away from not knowing how to access things that are important soon after we were gone (as soon as the server had trouble). There is more responsibility to this than we previously realized.
- zeagle 2y agoI've given this some thought too and am doing some documenting for friends. Hard to know the answer. I have paperless photos seafile and a few other things copying to a usb drive nightly that my spouse may remember to grab unencrypted. I'm tempted to throw a 2tb ssd in her laptop to just mirror it too. But access my nas let alone setting it up somewhere else after a move or with new network equipment, email hosting for our domain, domain registration are all going to be voodoo to my spouse without some guidance. I'm tempted to switch to bitwarden proper instead of self hosted too.
- transpute 2y agoData recovery instructions can be documented on paper in the same physical location used for financial accounts, e.g. fireproof safe, trusted off-site records, estate attorney. These recovery instructions are also required for data hosted by third parties.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago> are all going to be voodoo to my spouse That's why you really need to rethink your 'if you are hearing this I musta croaked' procedure. Thing is, 99% of the files on your NAS and whatever never would be accessed after your death. And anything of importance should be accessible even if you are alive but incapacitated but your NAS is dead. So the best thing to do is to make a list of Very Important Documents and have it in the printed form in two locations, eg your house for the immediate access and someone's parents who are close enough. And update it every year, with a calendar reminder in both of yours calendars. You can throw a flash drive[0] there too, with the files which can't be printed but you think they have a sentimental value. [0] personally I don't believe SSDs are for the task of the long term storage, but flash drives I've seen to survive at least 5 years
- zeagle 2y agoFor sure. Good advice. It's a fool dream to think almost anything has value for more than pennies on the dollar or access after one passes as many of us have learned cleaning out elderly parents homes and estates. For what it's worth: my solution is having an external USB plugged into the NAS that gets nightly rsync'd copies of photos, phone backups, paperless' PDF archive and seafile's contents in a regular folder. Few people know to grab it. The second part is our laptops keep a copy of seafile's contents (all our documents and another flat file paperless backup in it). A few of my friends and a txt file on that drive have a list of stuff that will break in the midterm, namely: email hosting, domain renewal. A few things on my todo list are: probably stop self hosting calendar/contacts one day, put a large SSD in her laptop so it syncs the photo share from the NAS, switch to paid bitwarden instead of self hosted. Other things are gravy. My accountant and lawyer can figure out business stuff, corporate liquidation, and life insurance. Funny you say that about SSDs, just in the last day my <1 year old 990 is having issues.
- ipaddr 2y agoI went back and read some previous blog posts. He was part of the great 2023 layoff. I'm curious where such a talented guy landed. Did he find a position?
- ydnaclementine 2y agongrok apparently https://www.linkedin.com/in/chollinger/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chollinger/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- transpute 2y ago[flagged]
- yodon 2y agoPlease don't chase or promote conspiracy theories here. The place manages karma better than any other site, period. It's a very hard thing to do well. The fact that it's hard to do well is not evidence of conspiracies here, it's evidence that HN is in fact exceptionally well run an managed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- transpute 2y agoNo theory chased or promoted, only numeric data for the historical record. Have you seen any HN story go missing entirely from the list of stories? This is most likely a bug. If there is more than one instance of missing stories, it should be easier to find the root cause. Currently this story is: #276 on #new (10th page) not present in first 500 stories (17 pages) > HN is in fact exceptionally well run an managed. Absolutely. Which is why invisible-except-to-new is such an anomaly.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoMy thinking is not to get emotionally attached to the stories you submitted and the comments you wrote. I treat them as “fire and forget.” I like stories, and I’ve my niche of stories I bring to Hacker News—people like them, ignore them, hate them—the list goes on. If not mine, someone else’s got the attention, and it is loved—it is the same story. Have fun and continue to be curious.
- kkfx 2y agoA small suggestion about resources: try using NixOS/Guix System instead of containers to deploy home services, you'll discover that in a fraction of resources you get much more, stability, documentation and easy replication included. Containers now, like full-stack virtualization on x86 are and was advertisement stuff pushed because proprietary software vendors and cloud providers need them, other do not need them at all and devs who works for themselves and generic users should learn that: if you sell VPS et al. obviously you need them, if you made your own infra from bare metal adding them it's just wasting resources and add dependencies instead of simplify life.
- snowpalmer 2y agoI agree that removing the container would be better on resources. However, most self-hosted software is already "pre-packaged" in Docker containers. It's much easier to grab that "off-the-shelf" than have to build out something custom.
- transpute 2y agoNixOS improves the reproducibility of both self-hosted software and configuration state.
- kkfx 2y agoIn NixOS/Guix System there is no need of such package, the configuration language/package manager takes care of anything, configuration included. Let's say you want Jellyfin? jellyfin = { enable = true; user="whatyouwant"; }; # jellyfin under services and you get it. You want a more complex thing, let's say Paperless? paperless = { enable = true; address = "0.0.0.0"; port = 58080; mediaDir = "/var/lib/paperless/media"; dataDir = "/var/lib/paperless/data"; consumptionDir = "/var/lib/paperless/importdir"; consumptionDirIsPublic = true; settings = { PAPERLESS_AUTO_LOGIN_USERNAME = "admin"; PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE = "ita+eng+fra"; PAPERLESS_OCR_SKIP_ARCHIVE_FILE = "with_text"; PAPERLESS_OCR_USER_ARGS = { optimize = 1; pdfa_image_compression = "auto"; continue_on_soft_render_error = true; invalidate_digital_signatures = true; }; # PAPERLESS_OCR_USER_ARGS }; # settings }; # services.paperless Chromium with extensions etc? chromium = { enable = true; # see Chrome Web Store ext. URL extensions = [ "cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm" # ublock origin "pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp" # privacy badger "edibdbjcniadpccecjdfdjjppcpchdlm" # I still don't care about cookies "ekhagklcjbdpajgpjgmbionohlpdbjgc" # Zotero Connector # ... ]; # extensions # see https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/ extraOpts = { "BrowserSignin" = 0; "SyncDisabled" = true; "AllowSystemNotifications" = true; "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" = 3; # sino a 06/25 "AutoplayAllowed" = false; "BackgroundModeEnabled" = false; "HideWebStorePromo" = false; "ClickToCallEnabled" = false; "BookmarkBarEnabled" = true; "SafeSitesFilterBehavior" = 0; "SpellcheckEnabled" = true; "SpellcheckLanguage" = [ "it" "fr" "en-US" ]; }; # extraOpts }; # chromium Etc etc etc. You configure the entire deploy and get it generated, a custom live? With auto-partitioning and auto-install? Idem. A set of hosts in a network similar (NixOps/Disnix) and so on. The configuration language do all, fetching sources and build if a pre-built binary is not there, setting up a DB, setting up NGINX+let's encrypt SSL certs, there are derivation (package) per derivation options you can set, some you MUST set, defaults etc., it's MUCH easier than anything else, only issue is how many ready-made derivations are there, and in packaging terms Guix is very well placed, NixOS is more than Arch, even if something will be always not there or incomplete as long as devs do not learn alone the system and start using Nix/Guix also to develop, so deps are really tested in dedicated environments and so on, and users always get a clean system, can change and boot in a previous version and so on.
- bovem 2y agoJust today I had to sign up for a service and went to bitwarden app on my phone to generate password (linked to self hosted vaultwarden server) but the new password entry couldn’t be saved into the app because the server was unreachable. Then I had to go restart my VM and reconnect my VPN. I am now thinking about switching to bitwarden premium and opt-out of self hosting for password managers.
- transpute 2y agoVirtualization platform tooling can monitor VM operational status and restart when needed to maintain availability.
- greenavocado 2y agoKeepassXC on Syncthing is so easy to use even my girlfriend uses it without problems
- otter-in-a-suit 2y agoAuthor here. Bitwarden (as much as I appreciate them!) isn't something I self host, since it’s too critical an application for me (similar to email). I pay for 1Password.
- hypeatei 2y agoExporting your vault every so often to offline storage (like an encrypted hard drive) is a good happy medium IMO.
- sethammons 2y agoThis is one reason why I moved from self hosted to their paid offering. The other is that I trust their security better than mine
- renewiltord 2y agoI used to self-host a lot of things: 1. My blog 2. My friends' blogs 3. BIND for all this 4. A mail-server on this 5. A MySQL database on this All this was on a Hetzner server that was nominally set up to be correct on restart. But I was always scared of that because I built this up from when I was a teenager onwards and didn't trust my younger self and couldn't find the time to audit. 10 years afterwards, with 10 years uptime, and no consequences of data loss or theft (it might have occurred, just that nothing affected me or my friends) Hetzner actually warned me they were going to decomm the underlying instance and no longer supported that VPS. I backed everything up, copied it, and for the last 8 years have faithfully moved from home to home carefully transporting these hard-drives and doing nothing with them. When I finally set up everything again, I did it much more manageably this time, with backups to Cloudflare R2 for the database and resources, and Dockerfiles for the code. I restarted the machine and brought everything up. And now I use GSuite instead of my own mail. I use Cloudflare instead of my own DNS. There's a lot I outsource despite "self-hosting". It's just far more convenient. So the answer is that I had no BCDR on the old thing. Maybe I'll train my kids and have them be my BCDR for the new thing.
- wahern 2y agoThe nice thing about OpenBSD is that HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and many other common services are bundled into and developed with the OS. Every 6 months a new release comes out, and each release comes with an upgrade FAQ with step-by-step instructions for any service that might require configuration changes. Sometimes major changes in popular ports/packages, like PHP or PostgreSQL, are mentioned as well. See, for example, https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html. Note that it's a single page, and for a release with quite a few changes, fairly easy to read and understand--major changes within and across subsystems are planned to minimize the total amount of changes per release. This upgrade FAQ is priceless, and has accompanied each release for the past 20 years (since 3.5 in 2004). OpenBSD is deliberately developed for self-hosting all the classic network services. The trick to minimizing complexity is to keep your system as close to stock as possible, and to keep up with the 6-month cadence. Over the long haul this is easier with OpenBSD--most of the time your self-hosting headaches are some OpenBSD developer's self-hosting headaches.
- akira2501 2y agoHome labs are great. They are a good learning tool to understand systems in _isolation_. They're terrible for understanding emergent properties of production systems and how to defend yourself against active and passive attacks. Critically you also need to know how to unwind an attack after you have been bitten by one. These are the most important parts of "self hosting." Otherwise, you might be getting in the habit of building big rube goldberg machines that are never going to be possible to deploy in any real production scenario. Make it real once in a while.
- sgarland 2y ago> Otherwise, you might be getting in the habit of building big rube goldberg machines that are never going to be possible to deploy in any real production scenario. "Not with that attitude" – People I have worked with.
- zxexz 2y agoIf the feedback loop is tight enough, anything is possible! Every crash becomes a dopamine rush!
- apitman 2y agoI think we'll see some stratification in the self hosting community over the next few years. The current community, centered around /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab, is all about articles like this. The complexity and learning are sources of fun and an end in themselves. That's awesome. But I think there's a large untapped market for people who would love the benefits of self hosting, without needing to learn much if any of it. I think of it similar to kit car builders vs someone who just wants to buy a car to use. Right now, self hosting is dominated by kit cars. If self hosting is ever going to be as turnkey as driving a car, I think we're going to need a new term. I've been leaning towards "indie hosting" personally.
- telgareith 2y agoThe term is "managed vps" and/or some variation of "marketplace image", I think it's linode that has a particularly... Vibrant (not in an all positive way) selection. AWS' is pretty good, but not as diverse. I assume due to the increased technical aptitude of the average customer and the learning curve.
- apitman 2y agoOne thing I strongly agree with you here is being open to the cloud. Self hosting strongly favors running on your own hardware, but indie hosting focuses more about the tangible benefits, ie data ownership, mobility which breeds competition, etc. That said, I think the VPS marketplace is still too complicated. What about updates, backups, TLS certs, domains, etc?
- transpute 2y ago> Self hosting strongly favors running on your own hardware In comparison, tenant (storage, colocation, cloud, VPS) hosting contracts often encompass Terms of Service, metered quotas/billing, acceptable use definitions, and regulatory compliance. > data ownership, mobility which breeds competition Historically, the buyers of commodity "web hosting" and IaaS have benefited from many competing vendors. Turnkey vertical SaaS often have price premiums and vendor lock-in. If "indie hosting" gains traction with easy to deploy and manage software, there may be upward pressure on pricing and downward pressure on mobility.
- johnklos 2y agoI agree with Christian about pretty much everything here. We self-host for multiple reasons, and we don't necessarily need others to necessarily understand our rationale, although that'd be nice. For me, one thing that stands out as something driving the desire to self-host everything is that large corporations, given enough time, invariably let us down. Christian's experience with Contabo illustrates the one game that I will do any amount of work to avoid: people who pretend to know what they're talking about but who really only waste our time in hopes to put off dealing with an issue until someone else actually fixes it. The one place where I can't avoid this truly stupid game is with getting and maintaining Internet for my clients. You're not paying for "enterprise", with "enterprise" pricing of $750 a month for 200 Mbps? Then tough cookies - you'll get the same junk we force on our residential customers, and you'll never, ever be able to talk to a human who has any clue what you're talking about, but you'll be able to talk to plenty who'll pretend to know and will waste hours of your time. The more time they waste of mine, the more energy I'll expend looking for ways to subvert or replace them, until I eventually rely on corporations for the absolute minimum possible.
- transpute 2y ago> you'll get the same junk we force on our residential customers In locations with few competing providers for wired broadband, 5G "broadband internet" has brought some competition to entrenched telcos. While mobile data latency is not competitive with cable/fiber, it can serve as a backup for wired connections lacking an SLA.
- vel0city 2y agoThe 5G T-Mobile stuff in my area has often had latency at least as competitive as most cable providers in the area. I've had friends do cloud gaming on it no problem.
- xarope 2y ago"Contabo down for 4 days"... looks nervously at my contabo instance with 16GB of RAM and 600GB SSD storage. Just putting it out there, is contabo really that bad? I've had mine for just over a year, had a roughly 6 hour outage recently which did make me a bit nervous.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI love this but I'd like to know more about the hardware. As an aside, I find it amusing that commenters here say that they "self host" in the cloud. It ain't self hosting unless the server is under the same roof as the family!
- otter-in-a-suit 2y agoThat I can help with! :-) This is more or less still accurate hardware wise, although it predates me using proxmox: https://chollinger.com/blog/2019/04/building-a-home-server/ https://chollinger.com/blog/2019/04/building-a-home-server/ This is my SAS HBA setup for the zfs drives: https://chollinger.com/blog/2023/10/moving-a-proxmox-host-with-a-sas-hba-as-pci-passthrough-for-zfs--truenas/ https://chollinger.com/blog/2023/10/moving-a-proxmox-host-wi... The last node (besides the Pi 5 I mention) is a 2019 System76 Gazelle: https://chollinger.com/blog/2023/04/migrating-a-home-server-to-proxmox-truenas-and-zfs-or-how-to-make-your-home-network-really-complicated-for-no-good-reason/#the-redesign https://chollinger.com/blog/2023/04/migrating-a-home-server-... All re-used / commodity hardware. Drives are mostly WD Reds with mixed capacity zfs arrays (mirrored), as well as Costco sourced external drives for the laptop's storage (Seagate? I'd have to check) connected via USB (not ideal, but beats $1k+ for a rack mounted server w/ SATA or SAS drives).
- transpute 2y agoThanks for the additional detail. Your blog post inspired a discussion on "Coding on iPad using self-hosted VSCode, Caddy, and code-server" (80+ comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41448412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41448412
- sethammons 2y agoWould you consider a VPS like a droplet on digital ocean to be self-hosted?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoNo
- justsomehnguy 2y agoOne^W two things what makes self-hosting a bit more attractive: a) besides the some bootstrapping nuances you are not forced to have a working phone number to be able to use some resource. It's usually not a problem until... well until it became a problem. Just like for me yesterday when for whatever I tried but I couldn't register a new Google account. There is just no other option than SMS confirmation. b) there is way less things to change 'for your own convenience', like a quiet removal of any option to pre-pay for Fastmail. PS oh and Dynadot (which I was happy using for more than 10 years) decided (for my convenience, of course) to change the security mechanism they used for years. Of course I don't remember the answer for the security question and now I forced to never ever migrate from them, because I literally can't.
- floating-io 2y ago> quiet removal of any option to pre-pay for Fastmail Eh? I just purchased a new 12 month Fastmail plan for my business with no issue a few weeks ago. Up to 36 months is still listed on their pricing page...
- justsomehnguy 2y agoRefer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242945 For years I just uploaded a lump sum and it was spent as I used the service per year. This way I didn't need to bother what I would be without email when the paid period is over and I didn't need to overpay much in case I would need to cancel early. Now I need to be sure I be around with a working CC at the time the bought period is over... and what if won't? Do I need to jump through cancel-and-reorder hoops every couple of years? More importantly, am I sure what a couple years later these hoops would work or through some very unlucky coincidence it would wipe my decade+ emails? Sure, Fastmail guys would be so sorry but... that wouldn't help me.
- floating-io 2y agoOkay, I misunderstood what you meant. That said, I feel like you're asking for something that is fairly non-standard in the industry in general, though I could be wrong; I've never tried to do things that way myself. If I were fastmail, those tax issues they mention would definitely take precedence over other issues in any event. Writing your own sales tax/VAT/whatever software strikes me as a special kind of hell given all the tax laws that have to be supported (and kept updated!) for every different jurisdiction out there. For me, being able to pay three years in advance and only have to renew once every three years is fine, and they did offer a workaround for you, but to each their own I suppose.
- m463 2y agoI self host too. a couple points - proxmox hits an SSD pretty hard, continuously. I think with zfs, it probably hits even harder. A lot of it is every second keeping state for a cluster, even if you have only one machine. - I bought mikrotik routers for openwrt. I tried out routeros, but it seemed to phone home. So I got openwrt going and didn't look back. I am switching to zyxel since you can have an openwrt switch with up to 48-ports. - I used to run small things on a pi, but after getting proficient at proxmox, they've been moved to a vm or container. - the most wonderful milestone in self-hosting was when I got vlans set up. Having vlans that stayed 100% in the house was huge. - next good milestone was setting up privoxy. Basically a proxy with a whitelist. All the internal vlan machines could update, but no nonsense. - it is also nice to browse the web with a browser pointing at privoxy. You'd be surprised at the connections your browser will make. Firefox internally phones home all. the. time.
- dmateos 2y agoI noticed that with proxmox, my SSD wear out was going up about 1-3% a month. There are things you can do to minimize this even with ZFS tho in terms of arc cache and setting syslog to log to memory instead of disk etc. Now i get about 1-2% every 6 months.
- zxexz 2y agoI've been curious about a running something proxmox-like for a while, but I really want something a little more "hackable" without learning an entirely new system for managing configurations, yet still has an intuitive interface that people that don't understand all layers of the stack very well can still use without having to feel reliant on the others. I'm curious if you or others have any thoughts on that. It's probably too specific and complicated to exist.
- linsomniac 2y agoHas anyone tried those Lithium Ion UPSes? ~5 years ago we removed the UPS from our dev/stg stack because in the previous 5 years we had more outages caused by the UPS than issues with the utility power. A better battery technology sounds compelling. For production, of course, it's all dual feed, generator, UPS with 10 year batteries, N+1.
- zackmorris 2y agoNo but I did a quick search for capacity vs cycles for sealed lead acid (SLA) vs lithium ion phosphate (LiFePO4/LFP arguably the main type right now) batteries: https://lithiumbalance.com/lead-acid-and-lithium-ion-battery-comparison-for-forklifts-and-industrial-material-handling-applications/ https://lithiumbalance.com/lead-acid-and-lithium-ion-battery... https://www.power-sonic.com/blog/lithium-vs-lead-acid-batteries/ https://www.power-sonic.com/blog/lithium-vs-lead-acid-batter... https://ecosoch.com/lithium-ion/ https://ecosoch.com/lithium-ion/ Lead acid last about 3 years max before nearing 0% capacity, while modern lithium ion last indefinitely if run below 25 C (77 F) and still have 80% capacity after 3000 cycles. The lithium manganese oxide batteries in my Nissan Leaf are 11 years old and still at 10 of 12 bars or about 83% capacity. Lithium ion chemistry is chosen to optimize certain aspects like energy density, cycle lifetime, or environmental impact, but today doesn't make a huge difference, typically 10% as far as density goes, with cobalt still having the highest density but at a human cost due to difficulty mining it: https://dragonflyenergy.com/types-of-lithium-batteries-guide/ https://dragonflyenergy.com/types-of-lithium-batteries-guide... I think that sodium ion batteries will eventually be the mainstream battery backup. Also sodium sulphur batteries running above 300 C (572 F) for industry. I'm having trouble finding a sodium UPS: https://www.xpcc.com/xtreme-power-sodium-ups/ https://www.xpcc.com/xtreme-power-sodium-ups/ But sodium ion perform similarly to lithium ion so could be used as drop-in replacements. This one claims 6000 cycles: https://www.ebay.com/itm/166895369465 https://www.ebay.com/itm/166895369465 Unfortunately there seems to be industry pressure to slow the adoption of sodium ion. Probably to protect entrenched interests in lead and lithium. So sodium is mostly only available on Alibaba/AliExpress still. If I had money to invest, I would put it into businesses manufacturing sodium ion batteries and/or doing swaps of sodium or lithium into devices when their lead batteries wear out. Looks like the lithium ion battery market is $55 billion annually: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/lithium-ion-battery-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/lithium-... https://www.precedenceresearch.com/sodium-ion-batteries-market https://www.precedenceresearch.com/sodium-ion-batteries-mark... So sodium ion will eventually probably be a bigger bar on those graphs than lithium iron phosphate, the current most environmentally friendly battery. And those projections are almost certainly way too conservative. They are thinking $5 billion by 2030, but I would expect more like $20 billion due to the abundance of sodium granting easier entry by a large player embracing it. Probably CATL, BYD or LG will be the most profitable outside the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries-top-manufacturers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235323/lithium-batteries... US battery makers aren't well-known outside of Tesla: https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-battery-manufacturers-in-the-us https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-battery-manufactu... So sodium is one of the biggest opportunities I can think of, and returns will probably depend on how this next election goes. Looks like they are straightforward to manufacture: https://futurebatterylab.com/the-big-beginners-guide-to-sodium-ion-batteries/ https://futurebatterylab.com/the-big-beginners-guide-to-sodi... Unfortunately Google patented a method of manufacturing sodium ion batteries, so it will be interesting to see how their portfolio will be affected when they are broken up: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2017067994A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2017067994A1/en Like with all things tech these days, it's not about making things, but who has the most access to capital and lawyers. Apologies this got so long, I'm an organic LLM with OCD tendencies.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoThis is tangentally-related, but I feel it is very wrong that so many smaller governments (e.g. smaller US cities) host "public information" on private servers (e.g. links to PDFs from a Google Drive)... or even worse inside some walled-garden (e.g. Facebook). My own personal DNS does not resolve to any Google/Facebook products, reducing profiling; but by denying their ad-revenue, I also deny myself access to information which IMHO should be truly available to the public (without using a private company's infrastructure). I absolutely understand that many people will just say "don't block them, then." My argument is that governments should not host public items on private servers.
- transpute 2y ago> governments should not host public items on private servers Some works of the US federal government are not subject to copyright and can be mirrored freely. What licenses do city government use to release public information?
- stackskipton 2y agoDepends on the city/state laws but vast majority of the time, it's all public domain under FOIA laws. City/State won't say that because it's assumed.
- transpute 2y agoLocal newspapers could mirror public domain citygov content, providing a public service and growing their online traffic.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoI had body camera video sent to me over a "private" YouTube link. I would have welcomed GDrive over that. On the plus side, I took advantage of the automatic transcript generation to review the obnoxious things the officer said without having to watch it all.
- 2y ago
- rr808 2y agoSelf hosting makes you realize how insanely expensive cloud providers are. AWS charging for IP4 addresses was the last straw for me.
- Gigachad 2y agoI’ve found the opposite. Google drive costs me less than a VPS, and far less than a physical server to do the same job.
- shprd 2y ago> I’ve found the opposite. Google drive costs me less than a VPS, and far less than a physical server to do the same job. Can you share the web applications and databases you serve from your google drive? since you can "do the same job" and it costs less? You must be into something here. Ignoring any privacy concerns for a moment. Neither the comment you're replying to, nor the submission is talking about just storing documents in a storage. They're hosting applications, databases, services which you need a "server" for and can't do in Google drive. You might not the have the same use case, you might not need to host websites, databases, virtual machines, DNS, and other services, but then you're not doing "the same job". You just have a different use case. Just like you don't need an IDE if you just want to take notes.
- apitman 2y agoDepends how much you value your time. I think most self hosters do it for reasons other than money.
- pxc 2y agoIt's really not that hard to run a server with a handful of applications on it, especially for personal/home use. It seems to me that when developers talk about this kind of thing they often massively overstate how much work is involved in running a server and keeping it up to date while massively understating the inherent complexities of working with cloud services. I haven't really witnessed the cloud serving as a big time saver in my career. Cloud-centric ops teams seem to be consistently larger than those running applications on regular, shmegular servers (whether rented or their own), if anything. For self-hosting purposes, I'd expect serverless deployments of open-source apps to take more time for most people to figure out and get right than just running the same apps on a VPS, unless you had spent years deploying to the cloud at work and also never learned Linux usage basics. And if you deploy to a only a single cloud VM, you're just using an extremely overpriced VPS at that point.
- bmartin13 2y agoAnother great self-hosted app... https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden Also, if looking for a cheap/low power pi alternative. Check out used Wyse 5070s on eBay. They run DietPi easily and have M2 slots. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cloud-client/5070/spd/wyse-5070-thin-client https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cloud-client/5070/spd/wyse-5...
- FloatArtifact 2y agoThere are very few people or projects talk about actually backup and restore application data. This is especially true the open source systems like truenas scale. Any turnkey selfhosting software that's not implement a robust backup restore system is essentially holding your data hostage.
- bionsystem 2y agoWe used GCS (like S3 for GCP) for storing prometheus backups (via thanos) at $previous_job. That thing cost an arm and a leg for what it did (presumably, thanos was partially at fault but I didn't dig that much). I moved to minio (in a GCP VM) and reduced our overall GCP bill by 70%. Yes, using cloud storage was 2/3 of the cost of our cloud infrastructure. But overall, going too far in the self-hosted route has its costs. Hardware depreciation is one (and the author mentions UPS which seems huge in addition to being critical), cooling/powering, and of course the time for maintenance. If you are going this route you are doing this because you want to learn that stuff, not because you want to save the subscription. Otherwise, just use less services and keep price comparison lists updated.
- vidarh 2y agoThe sweet spot is renting dedicated services. Most of the maintenance is someone else's job, and you still just get a single bill. Compared to the big clouds providers, cost reductions of 50% to 90% are common. And devops costs often go down (I do contracting on this area, and those of my customers who opt for dedicated services invariably need less of my time)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iwontberude 2y agoNo mention of how many terrible routes there are to residential ISPs? The packet loss you get as a home enthusiast service provider to points of presence around the country is abysmal. VPNs become a requirement for accessing these non-cloud services. Always a troll toll.
- arcastroe 2y agoThe author mentions they use Komga for comics and calibre-web for ebooks. However I personally find the Komga is a much better eBook reader than calibre-web. I use it for all my books and works incredibly well on mobile. The only thing I don't like about Komga is the logo, which I simply replaced on my private instance.
- akho 2y agoI do not understand this. Why use a three-node Proxmox cluster to self-host services that would (generously) need one N100 (with straightforward LiIon battery backup)? Why all this complexity for a relatively barebone setup? They aren’t even self-hosting their own files, relying on Wasabi instead, and I do not understand why. Surely there is an HDD somewhere between those three nodes in the Proxmox cluster?
- slroger 2y agoThis is a very interesting blog post tbh.
- XCSme 2y ago> My VPS, hosted by Contabo, randomly went down for almost 4 days. Don't use Contabo! I have had this issue with different servers almost monthly, servers going down for 1 or 2 days, without any announcement or communication. They never say if anything is wrong, never apologies, have regular "unplanned maintenances", contacting support is almost impossible (or takes 3-4 days for a reply). As OP did, I am also migrating from Contabo to Hetzner.