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What I Self Host
- zahlman 1y agoThere seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?
- Semaphor 1y agoBecause most people have multiple devices. I self host about 20 services, that get accessed from 7 different devices for just 2 people.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoI guess there are a few reasons: easier to develop cross platform, easier to reuse for non-self hosted, easier for programmers familiar with web development to implement, less activation cost for users, less friction to use with multiple devices.
- joekrill 1y agoMost people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.
- zahlman 1y agoI do have backup storage, of course. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync. And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.
- ZoomZoomZoom 1y agoHow come the connection is stable enough to be streaming on the go from the car? Or is there some serious caching happening?
- com2kid 1y agoMP3s are tiny. Just download + cache the n and n+1 song. On a modern 4g or 5g connection downloading an entire song takes seconds. Anytime a new song starts up, grab the n+1 song as soon as possible. But aside from that, inside any metro area even a 200ms or so buffer would likely suffice for streaming music.
- ZoomZoomZoom 1y agoYep, and OPUS files are even lighter. That's why I just sync a "currently listening" music folder with Syncthing and do not think about connection, caching and all that. (I have the rest reachable when I need it, of course.) 200ms and even n+1 won't cut it for a subway, a semi-basement pub, a tunnel, a train or an airplane trip, a hike, a countryside visit, etc.
- zahlman 1y ago> Not even listening to music in the car? I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally. > I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will. If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).
- manbitesdog 1y agoI guess to avoid having to install such dedicated programs for you and everyone you give access to, or just to have fun coding some little web project
- cma 1y agoYou'll need to port that to windows, linux, Mac, android, and ios for a typical device mix of someone doing self-hosting, and no access from more closed platforms that have a browser.
- zahlman 1y agoI can understand Linux programs not being easily made to work on Android, but I can't understand why I'd ever need or want a device that runs Android and a device that runs IOS. Unless they're test devices for development, but I wouldn't be using those to access services in my day-to-day life.
- cma 1y agoThink multi user households too. But many people have a few ios devices even if they primarily use android (apple tv, vision pro) and vice versa.
- Larrikin 1y agoI dislike the iOS experience and have used an Android phone daily for nearly 15 years. The iPad Pro is objectively better than any Android tablet, even with the limitations of the OS.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 0x01FE 1y agoSpecifically with the Spotify service, the problem with the Spotify API is that you can only request listening data for the last 100 played songs iirc. You can manually request the data from Spotify, but it will take them a month or two to give you the data and it will be a snapshot of it. So if you want live updates on statistics about your listening habits you need a service running 24/7 querying the Spotify API and storing the information in a database. Assumedly since most people don't have a computer to run this on 24/7, a server is necessary / preferred. I've actually written an application doing something similar, it's very annoying that Spotify's API works like this.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoI think people don't know what they want, but they like fiddling with computers. So, they imagine future scenarios where they would have problems (which they don't) and imagine solutions for those problems they don't have, and spend time implementing those solutions. For example. Whenever RSS comes up, I say that newsboat is the best thing. People don't like it because it doesn't synchronize devices. Really? Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I have newsboat on my laptop and I A) don't have to read on my phone, B) can't read on my phone, and C) don't have to spend my free time doing unpaid maintenance for a job which I created for myself. Win-win-win.
- npodbielski 1y agoMaybe for some. But for me I do not want giant corp own my data. Like I do give keys to my house to some company or I do not have people manage my own money. Just as a principle.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agonewsboat doesn't give anyone any data.
- npodbielski 1y agoNever heard of it. I just tried to explain to you why I DO THIS.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoI read RSS on my desktop when I'm at home, on my work laptop when I'm at work, and on my phone in-between. And that works perfectly. Why would I want to reduce my options?
- thiht 1y ago> Why not have a device for reading, and read there? I'm curious to know why you think this way of doing is "correct"? I like reading my RSS feeds on my phone. And on my laptop. And on my tablet, sometimes.
- npodbielski 1y agoOthers already answered with information that you usually have more devices then just 1. So you can have access to your data from PC, laptop and your phone. I for once also like to have my own data my own. I.e. I have: - my own email server - my own files sharing service - service for cardDav, CalDav etc. - service for editing my own office files on mobile - notes that are synchronized - streaming of movies and music - build and git server - my own smart home service - notification service - chat - VPN - desktop sharing service - my own DNS for blocking adds - and others
- leosanchez 1y agoCan you list out the names of services?
- mkayokay 1y agoYou could have a look at the following list, as there are a lot of options to choose from in each category: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
- npodbielski 1y agoSure but not here. It is too public forum. Drop me an email and I send you some examples.
- bjoli 1y agoI tried various Things to be able to access my own DNA while not at home and ended up using wire guard for my subnet so that I always have access to my DNA server. Right now I am solving it with mikrotiks "back to home" app., but the regular wire guard app does it as well. It uses very little battery.
- bjoli 1y agoSo, I am a victim of autocorrect. I mean DNS.
- 1y ago
- conor- 1y ago> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore
- zahlman 1y agoAs far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.
- conor- 1y agoYou can buy a mini pc for >$200 USD that is capable of running most desktop tasks and can also handle server tasks. Good quality integrated graphics APUs are also plentiful and fairly easy to come by these days.
- estimator7292 1y agoA lot of the stuff we're selfhosting just.... isn't a standalone application. My mastodon server has to run always to get messages. My nexcloud has to be always on to get my phone backups. The only thing that might make sense to be local is media, but only if you don't share with someone else and you want to maintain an offline copy of your library on each device you use. In general, it's stuff that needs to be shared or needs to run 24/7. A lot of that just doesn't make any sense as a desktop application. All rationalization aside, it's a hobby. It's fun. People spin up hulking enterprise gear at home and run jellyfin just for kicks. It's not supposed to be at all practical or to even make sense. It's silly nonsense on purpose.
- j45 1y agoI don't think it's a fad. Just more people talking about it openly that might be doing it. New to me might not mean new to others. Self hosting is not valued on what someone else self-hosts, it's about what you self host that's valuable to you.
- teddyh 1y agoI deplore this weakening and dilution of the term “self-hosting”. In my opinion, if your services had downtime today, you are not “self-hosting”. If you depend on anything which has “cloud” in its name, you are not “self-hosting”. If you cannot reasonably quickly access your hardware physically, like inserting or replacing an add-on card, you are not “self-hosting”. EDIT: It’s like saying “I don’t take the bus! I ‘self-drive’ my own car! (By which I mean that I employ an agency to provide a driver to drive a car for me, which I rent!)” or “I self-grow and self-harvest all my own food! By which I mean that I pay a farmer to grow food and harvest it for me.” Words have meaning. (Further: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240357>)
- rpdillon 1y agoWhat do you call what the author is doing?
- teddyh 1y agoIt would be good if there was a nice, simple, positive word for it; people might not feel the need to appropriate “self-host” otherwise. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any.
- rpdillon 1y agoI asked because I used the term self-host for both my services that I run on a VPS I rent from Dreamhost, as well as services that I host on my homelab and expose over tailscale. I don't have a good set of terminology to differentiate between the two, so I call both of them self-hosting. I was a bit surprised you felt so strongly about it.
- walterbell 1y agoSelf-admin
- pessimizer 1y agoThe same thing that somebody who clicked "install wordpress" in cPANEL did. They're installing software on a rented server hosted by a company that they rent from.
- rana763 1y ago[dead]
- tetrisgm 1y agoSelf hosting is great. The examples in this article are not exactly shining examples: an API that shows your Spotify stats? If we’re going to talk about self hosting music, I’d like to mention Roon, which is loved by audiophiles. It aims at creating a magazine like experience for navigating and discovering music. Been using it since COVID and it’s completely transformed my experience of listening to something else than the same playlist over and over.
- FredrikMeyer 1y agoThanks for the tip! I run these things mostly for fun - the Spotify stats thing isn't super useful, but it is fun to look at how my listening habits have changed over the years. It slightly more than just an API though: one can't aggregate directly from the Spotify API.
- sh3rl0ck 1y agoThe fact that it's a subscription is slightly off putting. Loved the UI photos, but I guess I'll continue with Navidrome + Feishin/Symfonium.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tetrisgm 1y agoI bought the lifetime membership half a decade ago and never looked back. It's a bit like the Plex one in that sense.
- mac-attack 1y agoJellyfin user but also leaning on the Feishin/Symfonium desktop/mobile combo. Two of the best UX in the game
- throwaway270925 1y agoHow is this Roon selfhosting when its 14,99€/m? Isnt this just another Streaming Service?
- busymom0 1y ago> I pay for a cheap droplet at DigitalOcean, about $5 per month, and an additional dollar for backup. Wait, I thought self hosting meant having your own hardware at like home running all your services. Not DigitalOcean.
- rpdillon 1y agoI didn't realize, but apparently this is a long-standing argument. I did just a tiny bit of digging because I'm sort of into self-hosting and I ran across the selfhosted Reddit's wiki on the topic. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted TLDR: they don't differentiate on whether you own the hardware or not.
- hunter2_ 1y agoBasically it sounds like IaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware and restricts OS choices), and even PaaS is fine (even though someone else manages the hardware, the OS, and the configuration of interpreters such as php / node.js / python / etc.), since these let you run your own code (which can include your instance of community code). Only SaaS would be excluded, as these don't let you run your own code.
- pluto_modadic 1y agoIaaS VPS's and rented colo VMs are definitely fine. PaaS is... slightly not? it's the grey edge! SaaS is definitely not you running stuff you control or could move anywhere. If it's a buck standard linux box, yeah that's self hosting!
- tallanvor 1y agoThere is always going to be a point of failure. For many of us, self-hosting on a dedicated server, VPS, or some sort of cloud service is much better than keeping the hardware to do it at home. My stuff is spread out among a dedicated server and 3 VPS's. --I could and should drop one of the VPS's, but if it'll take me a couple of hours, it's just not worth it until I actually have the time to spare.
- quest88 1y agoI’ve also been thinking of the product manual idea. I’ll subscribe to your rss and see if you beat me to it.
- tempfile 1y agoVery happy to learn about the Grafana Strava plugin. I have been worried about that data for a while!
- hk1337 1y agoLinkding is really nice. I have a bunch of bookmark shortcuts saved that I still need to import into it.
- craftkiller 1y agoI've taken this one step further: I self-host archivebox which is basically a self-hosted wayback machine. That way my bookmarks are immune to articles being taken down / moved / modified.
- mac-attack 1y agoAuto archive is already built into linkding fyi
- liqilin1567 1y agoI self-host a pretty lightweight bookmark website——readeck, it scrape original page to the local server while keeping the original formatting.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoHow come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
- wltr 1y agoWrite your own then, I guess. I prefer a developer to have at least some basic understanding of what they’re developing and why. And when they do, and when they themselves use their product, they do have opinions. In my opinion, especially if the project is open source, you’re free to do as you like. I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.
- zahlman 1y ago> I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it. What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).
- ajnin 1y agoWhat this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).
- account42 1y agoYeah it's more of a disclaimer than a sales pitch.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
- doublerabbit 1y agoJust wait until folk hear about colocation. Been colocating for 10 years now, the best of both worlds.
- pfych 1y agoI'd love to colocate some hardware but all the options near me (Sydney, Australia) are insanely expensive for no reason, how do you go about finding affordable rackspace?
- doublerabbit 1y agoShip it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby. Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee. Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts. WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0] One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well. [0] https://www.webhostingtalk.com/ https://www.webhostingtalk.com/
- account42 1y agoI don't think your options are going to have great latency to Australia - unless gp is mostly hosting things for other (worldwide) users they should keep the servers closer than that for the best experience.
- mathieudombrock 1y agoFor what it's worth, I wrote a very bare bones RSS reader in an afternoon. It really just renders a set of RSS feeds into HTML and nothing else. But it was fun to and educational to build and could pretty easily be extended to add more features. I would recommend just going for it if you are interested in writing one. It's not as hard as it sounds.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoSomething pikapods looked neat at first then soon I realised the costs add up and add up a lot. One day I was calculating it at pikapods at I realised I had crossed 27 USD/m and I wasn't even finished. Like those streaming services - everything on a new streaming service i.e a new pod and they cost separately. I wish there was a service which would take away the pain of installation and maintenance away from me but let me host a lot of absolutely single user (i.e. only I'd access that of course) and as light weight as it can get and as low in usage at it gets on one single "pod" or "instance" or "box" and charge for that. Also, it's not a pikapods or pikapods' problem, it's a general problem I believe.
- majora2007 1y agoI will say, Pikapods is really nice because they give a cut back to the developers of Open Source. I'm the maintainer of Kavita, a popular self-hosted reading server and pikapods gives me something like 10-15% cut of each user running Kavita.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoMy comment was not on integrity of pikapods or their functioning. Rather how even such a setup results in costs adding up and that could be a net negative to self hosting. PS. Your app's name kavita - does it mean poem/poetry or it means something else?
- sgt 1y agoSide note - Grafana actually looks quite a lot better in light mode.
- moondev 1y agoIs the infrastructure immutable or artisanal.
- liqilin1567 1y agoThis is my self-hosted list--all of which are hosted on a 1-cpu, 1G RAM VPS :) 1. siyuan - a lightweight note-taking website like obsidian 2. readeck - a lightweight bookmark website scrapes original page to the local server while keeping the original formatting. 3. leantime - a lightweight project management website