6 ms·

I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby. I was in an

I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby. I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh) Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.

cyberax 9mo ago
Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.
- SchemaLoad 9mo ago
  Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized. Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case) The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it. Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
    - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
      Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network. For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.
tehlike 9mo ago
Starlink backup sounds fun now!
- thrownawaysz 9mo ago
  Way too expensive for that imo (but then again might as well just go all in). Probably a 5G connection is more than enough
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?) They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually. That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
    - numpad0 9mo ago
      Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place. I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you. You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal. You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy. Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up > I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh) Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what
- CGamesPlay 9mo ago
JamesSwift 9mo ago
Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.
- bisby 9mo ago
  Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages... How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime. I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
  - bongodongobob 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - jmb99 9mo ago
    Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (<$400). Yes, they're used, and yes, they'll need ~$500 worth of batteries immediately, but they will run a "normal" homelab for multiple hours. Mine will keep my 2.5kW rack running for at least 15 minutes - if your load is more like 250W (much more "normal" imo) that'll translate to around 2 hours of runtime. Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours. Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option. > How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime. At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."
advael 9mo ago
Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
zrail 9mo ago
My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds. This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.
- rootusrootus 9mo ago
  Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes. Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should thank me.
  - kiddico 9mo ago
    Thanks for taking one for the team.
  - VTimofeenko 9mo ago
    We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes. A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes. Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.
    - rootusrootus 9mo ago
      Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.
      - VTimofeenko 9mo ago
CGamesPlay 9mo ago
I really enjoy self-hosting on rented compute. It's theoretically easy to migrate to an on-prem setup, but I don't have to deal with the physical responsibilities while it's in the cloud.
- Gigachad 9mo ago
  Depends what you are trying to host. For many people it’s either to keep their private data local, or stuff that has to be on the home network (pi hole / home assistant) If you just want to put a service on the internet, a VPS is the way to go.
newsclues 9mo ago
I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 9mo ago
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. If you are going to be away from home a lot, then yes, it's a bottomless pit. Because you have to build a system that does not rely on the possibility of you being there, anytime.
baq 9mo ago
I went with home assistant and zigbee smart plugs to restart the router and the optical terminator.
altmanaltman 9mo ago
I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services. I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.
gessha 9mo ago
Tailscale recently added passkey log in. Would that alleviate the SSO login? Tailscale also has a self-hosted version I believe.
digiown 9mo ago
Tailscale has passkey-only account support but requires you to sign up in a roundabout way (first use an SSO, then invite another user, throw away the original). The tailnet lock feature also protects you to some extent, arguably more so than solutions involving self-hosting a coordination server on a public cloud.
Aurornis 9mo ago
I thought I was smart because I invested in UPS backup from the start. Then 5 years later there was a power outage and the UPS lasted for about 10 seconds before the batteries failed. That's how I learned about UPS battery maintenance schedules and the importance of testing. I have a calendar alert to test the UPS. I groan whenever it comes up because I know there's a chance I'm going to discover the batteries won't hold up under load any more, which means I not only have to deal with the server losing power but I have to do the next round of guessing which replacement batteries are coming from a good brand this time. Using the same vendor doesn't even guarantee you're going to get the same quality when you only buy every several years. Backup generators have their own maintenance schedule. I think the future situation should be better with lithium chemistry UPS, but every time I look the available options are either exorbitantly expensive or they're cobbled together from parts in a way that kind of works but has a lot of limitations and up-front work.
- kalaksi 9mo ago
  My APC UPS self-tested and monitored battery status automatically. Then started to endlessly beep when it noticed the battery needed replacing (could be muted though). Eventually, I stopped using UPS since I rarely needed it and it was just another thing to keep and maintain.
- richwater 9mo ago
  Check out some non-lead acid battery solutions like: https://www.ecoflow.com/us/blog/use-portable-power-station-as-ups-power-supply https://www.ecoflow.com/us/blog/use-portable-power-station-a... Another maker is Goldenmate (less I be accused of being an ad)
timwis 9mo ago
You can self-host Pocket ID (or another OIDC auth service) on a tiny $1/mo box and use that as your identity provider for Tailscale. Here's a video explaining how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU
4k93n2 9mo ago
syncthing might be worth looking into. ive been using that more and more the last few years for anything that i use daily, things like keepass, plain-text notes, calendars/contacts, rss feeds, then everything else that im "self hosting" are just things that i might only use a few times a week so its no big deal if i lose access. its so much simpler when you have the files stored locally, then syncing between devices is just something that can happen whenever. anything that is running on a server needs user permissions, wifi, a router etc etc, its just a lot of complexity for very little gain. although keep in mind im the only one using all of this stuff. if i needed to share things with other people then syncthing gets a bit trickier and a central server starts to make more sense
neoromantique 9mo ago
For this reason I have hybrid homelab, with most stuff hosted at home, but critical things I'd need to have running are on a VM in cloud. Best of both worlds.
_the_inflator 9mo ago
I made the same revelation. Self hosting sounds so simple, but if you consider all the critical factors involved, in becomes a full time job. You own your server. In every regard. And security is only one crucial aspect. How spam filters react to your IP is another story. In the end I cherrish the dream but rely on third party server providers.

cyberax 9mo ago

Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.

SchemaLoad 9mo ago
Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized. Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case) The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it. Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
  - SchemaLoad 9mo ago
    Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network. For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.

tehlike 9mo ago

Starlink backup sounds fun now!

thrownawaysz 9mo ago
Way too expensive for that imo (but then again might as well just go all in). Probably a 5G connection is more than enough
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?) They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually. That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
  - numpad0 9mo ago
    Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place. I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you. You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal. You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy. Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up > I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh) Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what

CGamesPlay 9mo ago

JamesSwift 9mo ago

Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.

bisby 9mo ago
Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages... How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime. I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
- bongodongobob 9mo ago
  [dead]
- jmb99 9mo ago
  Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (<$400). Yes, they're used, and yes, they'll need ~$500 worth of batteries immediately, but they will run a "normal" homelab for multiple hours. Mine will keep my 2.5kW rack running for at least 15 minutes - if your load is more like 250W (much more "normal" imo) that'll translate to around 2 hours of runtime. Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours. Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option. > How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime. At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."

advael 9mo ago

Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones

zrail 9mo ago

My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds. This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.

rootusrootus 9mo ago
Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes. Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should thank me.
- kiddico 9mo ago
  Thanks for taking one for the team.
- VTimofeenko 9mo ago
  We had a 5 day outage last year, got a generator at the tail end of the windy season and made exact same jokes. A year later another atmospheric river hit and we had a 4 hour outage. No more jokes. Make sure to run that generator once every few months with some load to keep it happy.
  - rootusrootus 9mo ago
    Well, it's an EV with a big inverter, not a generator, but I get your point. And I do periodically fire it up and run the house on it for a little while, just to exercise the connection and maintain my familiarity with it in case I need to use it late at night in the dark with an ice storm breaking all the trees around us.
    - VTimofeenko 9mo ago

CGamesPlay 9mo ago

I really enjoy self-hosting on rented compute. It's theoretically easy to migrate to an on-prem setup, but I don't have to deal with the physical responsibilities while it's in the cloud.

Gigachad 9mo ago
Depends what you are trying to host. For many people it’s either to keep their private data local, or stuff that has to be on the home network (pi hole / home assistant) If you just want to put a service on the internet, a VPS is the way to go.

newsclues 9mo ago

I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 9mo ago

> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. If you are going to be away from home a lot, then yes, it's a bottomless pit. Because you have to build a system that does not rely on the possibility of you being there, anytime.

baq 9mo ago

I went with home assistant and zigbee smart plugs to restart the router and the optical terminator.

altmanaltman 9mo ago

I mean you're right in terms of it being a demanding hobby. The question is, is it worth the switch from other services. I have 7 computers on my self-hosted network and not all of them are on-prem. With a bit of careful planning, you can essentially create a system that will stay up regardless of local fluctuations etc. But it is a demanding hobby and if you don't enjoy the IT stuff, you'll probably have a pretty bad time doing it. For most normal consumers, self-hosting is not really an option and the isn't worth the cost of switching over. I justify it because it helps me understand how things work and tangentially helps me get better my professional skills as well.

gessha 9mo ago

Tailscale recently added passkey log in. Would that alleviate the SSO login? Tailscale also has a self-hosted version I believe.

digiown 9mo ago

Tailscale has passkey-only account support but requires you to sign up in a roundabout way (first use an SSO, then invite another user, throw away the original). The tailnet lock feature also protects you to some extent, arguably more so than solutions involving self-hosting a coordination server on a public cloud.

Aurornis 9mo ago

I thought I was smart because I invested in UPS backup from the start. Then 5 years later there was a power outage and the UPS lasted for about 10 seconds before the batteries failed. That's how I learned about UPS battery maintenance schedules and the importance of testing. I have a calendar alert to test the UPS. I groan whenever it comes up because I know there's a chance I'm going to discover the batteries won't hold up under load any more, which means I not only have to deal with the server losing power but I have to do the next round of guessing which replacement batteries are coming from a good brand this time. Using the same vendor doesn't even guarantee you're going to get the same quality when you only buy every several years. Backup generators have their own maintenance schedule. I think the future situation should be better with lithium chemistry UPS, but every time I look the available options are either exorbitantly expensive or they're cobbled together from parts in a way that kind of works but has a lot of limitations and up-front work.

kalaksi 9mo ago
My APC UPS self-tested and monitored battery status automatically. Then started to endlessly beep when it noticed the battery needed replacing (could be muted though). Eventually, I stopped using UPS since I rarely needed it and it was just another thing to keep and maintain.
richwater 9mo ago
Check out some non-lead acid battery solutions like: https://www.ecoflow.com/us/blog/use-portable-power-station-as-ups-power-supply https://www.ecoflow.com/us/blog/use-portable-power-station-a... Another maker is Goldenmate (less I be accused of being an ad)

timwis 9mo ago

You can self-host Pocket ID (or another OIDC auth service) on a tiny $1/mo box and use that as your identity provider for Tailscale. Here's a video explaining how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPUkAm7yDlU

4k93n2 9mo ago

syncthing might be worth looking into. ive been using that more and more the last few years for anything that i use daily, things like keepass, plain-text notes, calendars/contacts, rss feeds, then everything else that im "self hosting" are just things that i might only use a few times a week so its no big deal if i lose access. its so much simpler when you have the files stored locally, then syncing between devices is just something that can happen whenever. anything that is running on a server needs user permissions, wifi, a router etc etc, its just a lot of complexity for very little gain. although keep in mind im the only one using all of this stuff. if i needed to share things with other people then syncthing gets a bit trickier and a central server starts to make more sense

neoromantique 9mo ago

For this reason I have hybrid homelab, with most stuff hosted at home, but critical things I'd need to have running are on a VM in cloud. Best of both worlds.

_the_inflator 9mo ago

I made the same revelation. Self hosting sounds so simple, but if you consider all the critical factors involved, in becomes a full time job. You own your server. In every regard. And security is only one crucial aspect. How spam filters react to your IP is another story. In the end I cherrish the dream but rely on third party server providers.