6 ms·

Self-Host Everything

40 points by pavs 14y ago

testimoney2 14y ago
I can be fun if you have your own server, I have webhosting with 1and1 but no virtual/dedicated server. So hosting everything myself would cost me money to take the server. Also I don't find it very secure, you would need to have multiple backups to make sure nothing gets lost if your server gets erased.
- DoubleMalt 14y ago
  What is the backup guarantee of 1and1 ? Usually hosting providers don't give any guarantees for that. And even if it feels safer because you assume they have people working on it that know what they're doing, in many cases this is a very bold assumption.
i04n 14y ago
self hosting an e-mail server is a headache.
- yogo 14y ago
  Generally you don't want to host email or DNS yourself but I think if done right and you keep them on their own servers it can be great in the long run.
- quesera 14y ago
  Well, the headache is in making careful selection and configuration choices. Done properly, it really requires very little ongoing maintenance. Maybe a few hours per year. DNS requires even less.
  - glomph 14y ago
    Spam filtering? Security updates?
- frustratedmike 14y ago
  I am a fan of self-hosting, right up until the point it crashes on you and you have to spend a weekend fixing it. You are right, email is one of the biggest headaches out there.
- druiid 14y ago
  Depends on your experience level. If you have never setup postfix/exim/sendmail to do more than accept local mail then it will indeed be a giant headache. With a bit of work with dovecot and postfix you can have yourself a very nice mail-server. That said, there is a point at which the self-hosting pain point is not necessarily realistic, and if you have two accounts you need and they're $4/month elsewhere, why bother would be the discussion to have.
asb 14y ago
Have to admit, I smirked that SlashGeek is outsourcing its comments system to disqus. Edit: even better, the Disqus comments are now failing to load with the message "Sorry, we're undergoing temporary maintenance."
iuguy 14y ago
I wouldn't use something like owncloud as a dropbox replacement right now if you were looking to go ahead with this. It seems to be going through that phase where the security bugs are being identified and fixed.
crisnoble 14y ago
How would one go about self-hosting a website? I have shared hosting but would love the challenge of setting up a LAMP server that is physically in my possession and have full control over it.
- yogo 14y ago
  I'd say get a cheap VPS from a service like linode or digital ocean (there are many others listed on lowendbox.com but I would recommend sticking with the well-known/bigger providers) then take it from there. Most major distributions have tutorials in their wikis for setting up commonly used software--linode even has a community resources section with a lot of material for server software. Edit: My comment was slanted towards linux and I forgot to mention that maybe some familiarity with linux would be useful, but windows is also an alternative (usually more expensive).
- kordless 14y ago
  If you have a spare computer laying around you could put Ubuntu server on it. The stack setup can be pretty easy for something like PHP or Django.
  - dhimes 14y ago
    You'll probably be behind a dynamic ip, so go to dnsdynamic.org and set up your server to be "followed." (You set up a cron job to ping dnsdynamic.org periodically, and dnsdynamic.org updates its record of your ip. So you get to your server by going to myproject.dnsdynamic.com rather than myproject.com.) Set up your router so the only port(s) that is/are forwarded is/are to the port(s) you want to access (perhaps, ssh and http ports). Configure your ssh daemon to allow only private keys to log in (that is, turn off password 'logging in') and don't allow root logins. Set up rkhunter and denyhosts. Then, sit back and watch the logs as the attacks come in.
    - nwh 14y ago
      Some ISP will assign you a static IP if you ask. I've never been turned down.
kordless 14y ago
For me it's not so much about hosting it myself as it is having control of my data. It's a trust issue. I used http://github.com/coto/gae-boilerplate http://github.com/coto/gae-boilerplate to write a few sites which host data objects in GitHub gists. Here's my OpenStack blog which uses it: http://StackGeek.com/ http://StackGeek.com/, and an example of a raw post stored in a gist: https://gist.github.com/kordless/93e491c4880a416907be https://gist.github.com/kordless/93e491c4880a416907be. I still rely on GitHub for keeping my data safe, but most of my code there also lives on my desktop in the form of cloned repos.
ridruejo 14y ago
Small plug related to the learning curve. Many of the most popular apps, like ownCloud, WordPress, etc. you can get free, easy to install packages at http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org You can choose to self-host (downloadable installers) or run on Amazon/Azure
WayneDB 14y ago
Couldn't we start a co-op where every member user/company/organization owned the servers? That way nobody is hosting on a third-party server where the federal government feels that they have eminent domain?
- kordless 14y ago
  A hosted OpenStack controller node which controlled a bunch of servers sitting on people's refrigerators in their garage would do the trick. Would have to figure out routing.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure the financials would add up to just renting you're own 1u collocation space with bandwidth. It's an extremely cheap setup if you don't need to worry about downtime in the event of hardware failure
- TheCowboy 14y ago
  There's also Project Byzantium which was started by the hacker space in DC: http://project-byzantium.org/ http://project-byzantium.org/ They were asked to assist with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts as well, and the project seemed to be successful.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  Whether the servers are owned by a co-op or a big company, if the U.S. federal government comes calling, you will have to answer if you or your servers are in the U.S. That is just the nature of a government.
cmsj 14y ago
I would say you should own your own domain and only use services which can hang off your domain. That way you get the convenience of third party services, but any time you want/need to, you can shift to self-host without having to change your email/blog/whatever addresses.
- reidrac 14y ago
  I totally agree. I started on the Internet circa 1998 and I've always regretted using popular free services back then, because most of them didn't survive to our days (the popular "X got acquired by Y, X was closed"). I got a domain in 2002 and since then I've used it as part of my identity. It costs some money, but not much and it's totally worth it. Non technical people may freak out a little bit when they ask you for your mail address because you don't answer with the expected gmail.com (and hotmail.com before that), but that's all right. EDIT: typo
fiatpandas 14y ago
Self hosting is fun and fulfilling. It's simple and cheap. The problem of course is replicating the services you already use. Web hosting is painless but email is absurdly involved if you want to make sure that gmail etc. accept your messages as non-spam. The rules are not made clear and there doesn't seem to be a universally accepted way of setting up email where you can say "this message I'm about to send will 100% be accepted by the recipient's mail server"
- reidrac 14y ago
  I've never had problems to get my email accepted by gmail, but well... I don't think Google gets a 100% either. There must be a checklist somewhere, but off the top of my head: - Your server's IP must be static and must have a reverse map (IP -> name); check your IP is "clean" and not in a blacklist, specially when you get it from your ISP range (may be someone used it before you and it has a poor reputation). - Setup your DNS correctly using MX records. - Use SPF or DKIM so other servers can detect forged emails not coming from your server(s); besides this is nice to filter backscatter spam. - Obviously don't configure your mail server as an open relay, use SMTP with SSL or TLS, always with user authentication. I've been using this setup for years and most of my problems are receiving mail and never sending it (ie. misconfigured servers not playing nice with graylisting, Google servers blacklisted by my DNSRBL, etc). EDIT: formatting
  - fiatpandas 14y ago
    Thanks for sharing the tips. Will give email another attempt soon, and maybe write something up
- tquai 14y ago
  email is absurdly involved if you want to make sure that gmail etc. accept your messages as non-spam. I've self-hosted DNS, mail, web, etc. for years, and several people have posted the same kind of comment here, so here's what people will need to know/do to self-host their own mail. First, you'll almost surely need a non-end user IP address, as many/most of such address ranges are in the Spamhaus PBL list [0]. To see if your IP address is listed in PBL, for the example IP address 192.0.2.200, do dig 200.2.0.192.pbl.spamhaus.org Here, the octets are reversed and prepended to pbl. While you're doing this, you may as well also do dig 200.2.0.192.zen.spamhaus.org Again, replacing the above IP address with your own. This checks the Zen list [1]. For a non-end user IP address you'll most likely need a datacenter machine, a business line, a VPS, or a machine hosted at a large organization. A home Internet connection won't cut the mustard for mail. Second, you'll need FCrDNS [2], or at least rDNS. rDNS is just short for reverse DNS, which means having a PTR record in DNS for your IP address. It could be anything, but something non-generic is best, such as mail.example.com, or puffy.example.com. wireless-cust-0-200.example.com is generic and will score "bad" points on some remote systems. It's best if you can do FCrDNS, which is trivial. All that entails is matching PTR/A records. This is all you need for Gmail or any other serious mail provider to accept your mail. Unfortunately it makes self-hosting from home more difficult, but the upside is a huge reduction in spam. Last thing, you should check http://dnsbl.info http://dnsbl.info or a similar site to see if your mail server's IP address is listed in any DNSBLs. 0. http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ 1. http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fcrdns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fcrdns
dhimes 14y ago
Totally OT rant here: more and more I'm seeing certain grammatical mistakes crop up that disturb the hell out of me. I understand that the first two 'w's in www are for 'world wide,' and that not everybody is a native speaker of English. But these things are creeping into native speakers' use also. They are: 1) Confusing the words 'lose' and 'loose.' Lose is the word you use when you mean the opposite of 'find.' It is also used to mean the opposite of 'win.' Loose is something that is the opposite of 'tight.' There is no 'loosing,' (EDIT: a1k0n corrects me here, see his comment below) there is 'loosening,' however, as in what you do to your belt after a large meal. OP makes this error. 2) Using apostrophes for plural. Apostrophes are used to show (a) possession and (b) contraction (leaving letters out of a word). Writing "I'm buying two car's" is incorrect. Replacing your car's winshield wiper blades is ok. So is leaving out the car entirely when drawing a 'toon.
- a1k0n 14y ago
  To be even more pedantic: There is 'loosing', as in releasing, but it's probably not what you mean unless you can already spell 'lose'.
  - dhimes 14y ago
    I had to look this up and you are correct.
  - TillE 14y ago
    My favorite mistake along these lines is "payed", which is a nautical term and not synonymous with "paid".
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      AFAIK both forms are acceptable [in en_GB] for both the past participles of caulking your boat and making a financial transaction, cf http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English or http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2 http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2. This IMO highlights why one shouldn't get too anal about specific word forms as long as the intent is apparent. Of course one can generate inaccuracies this way but generally an honest attempt to receive the communicated information doesn't gan aft agley.
perlgeek 14y ago
One problem with self-hosting is that getting security right and tight is really hard. You have to be aware of all the components used in your stack, and monitor them all for known security problems. And then know how to react to them. And then you probably want backups, and monitoring, and what not. Ideologically I'm fully a favor of self-hosting many bits, but having some experience with it, I'm also acutely aware of the downsides.
jvehent 14y ago
Coincidentally, I just gave a talk last tuesday at the Philadelphia LUG on DIY email hosting at home. http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY-eMail@Home-PLUG20130212-jvehent.pdf http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY-eMail@Home-PLUG... [PDF, 4.5MB]
SirSkidmore 14y ago
I self-hosted for a long time, knowing it breaks my ISP's ToS. just recently, I received a letter regarding the web server and an extremely throttled connection until I shut it down.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
Somebody needs to come up with a universal self-hosting plan that automatically captures everything I create on to a box where I have total ownership. I'd pay for that. So if I reply to a friend on FB, it captures the thread including my reply. If I tweet, it captures that. My email would be a separate folder. And so forth. Heck even lifelogging would go there. In this fashion the things I create in my life would be under my control, at least to a certain degree. Computers are an extension of our minds, and we deserve to own and control our output in one place, even if we choose to share lots of things in various forums.
- michaelbuddy 14y ago
  interesting you want a box with total control but your 2 examples are using social networking with a history of increasingly locking out 3rd party tools. with that said you can download your facebook and twitter history. I have for facebook and the static html output isn't that bad. could be worse anyway.
- wfn 14y ago
  Have you considered (for the time being) moving to e.g. Tent (https://tent.io/ https://tent.io/) and/or Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/)? Of course the whole trouble is migrating your current implementation-dependant social circle (e.g. facebook friends), but I've seen people tweet their last messages along the lines of "I'm not staying in twitter for reasons X,Y; moving to Z (join me if you'd like [to follow me])"; my (very limited) exposure to these cases would seem to show that it might just work (to an extent / YMMV) for (at least) folks on twitter with significant amounts of followers. In any case, I like Tent as they are developing / have developed a generic distributed social networking protocol (with some sample implementations etc.) [/old news]
- icebraining 14y ago
  That's the goal of the Locker Project: http://lockerproject.org/ http://lockerproject.org/ It seems it has stalled, though :(
ricardobeat 14y ago
If you use just a couple services, good. Now imagine self-hosting all of these: - version control - bug tracker - invoicing app - document sharing - project management - file server - mail server - static server - ruby/node server - php / wordpress blog Just off the top of my head. That will cost you a lot of time and head-banging.
- autarch 14y ago
  I do at least some of this with the server in my basement. * version control - git and gitweb - I mirror all my repos to github for discoverability though * invoicing - I've done this with text files to track hours and PDFs for invoices (via LibreOffice) - low tech but simple enough * document sharing - my home dir on my server (weak, I know, but simple) * file server - see above * mail server - postfix, amavis, and spamassassin aren't too hard to set up * static server - apache or nginx are trivial to set up * ruby/node - well, I mostly serve Perl stuff, but same deal using Starman - this isn't too hard either * wordpress - yep, installed this too Things I don't host myself: * bug tracker - I mostly use rt.cpan.org and github * project management - I use Hiveminder Now if I had to learn all this from scratch it would indeed be a lot of time and head-banging, but I've learned about this stuff over many years of using Linux and hosting my own stuff. And they're all useful skills to know as a developer. I think any developer who's working on web apps should understand at least the basics of how web and mail servers work. Even if you outsource this stuff to a CDN and something like Sendgrid you should know the tradeoffs involved instead of just picking the outsourcing because you can't set it up yourself.
- michaelbuddy 14y ago
  a home made home server with amahi / tonido / own cloud would take care of a few. Add pancakeapp for invoicing, bugify for bug tracking. The mail thing still a problem.
casca 14y ago
I've self-hosted as much as I can since 2000 and as with everything, one should weigh up the costs of self-hosting versus the benefits. First, honestly assess your own level of skill. Then pick a service and decide what it would cost you to host and the cost of failure. For example, let's look at hosting your own email service. The cost of hosting for someone not comfortable with email is quite high. Setting it up correctly requires many steps and if you get it wrong, perhaps your emails don't get delivered and you lose business. Compare this to the cost of using Gmail - effectively zero. However, this does not take the risks into account. Google owns your email and email address. If they, or one of a number of governments decide that the service should no longer be available to you for whatever reason, your email is lost. You could mitigate this by mirroring all your Gmail through IMAP/POP3 and using your own domain name. In security terms, the risk of Google taking away your account is low, but the impact is very high. As an aside, I'd love to use Owncloud but after a incidence where it deleted files, I decided that it's not yet ready for production use.
tlrobinson 14y ago
Add to the list of reasons it's a bad idea: Security. Unless you're confident you can securely configure your network and services AND stay on top of patches, etc it's probably a bad idea to self host.

40 points by pavs 14y ago

I can be fun if you have your own server, I have webhosting with 1and1 but no virtual/dedicated server. So hosting everything myself would cost me money to take the server. Also I don't find it very secure, you would need to have multiple backups to make sure nothing gets lost if your server gets erased.

DoubleMalt 14y ago
What is the backup guarantee of 1and1 ? Usually hosting providers don't give any guarantees for that. And even if it feels safer because you assume they have people working on it that know what they're doing, in many cases this is a very bold assumption.

i04n 14y ago

self hosting an e-mail server is a headache.

yogo 14y ago
Generally you don't want to host email or DNS yourself but I think if done right and you keep them on their own servers it can be great in the long run.
quesera 14y ago
Well, the headache is in making careful selection and configuration choices. Done properly, it really requires very little ongoing maintenance. Maybe a few hours per year. DNS requires even less.
- glomph 14y ago
  Spam filtering? Security updates?
frustratedmike 14y ago
I am a fan of self-hosting, right up until the point it crashes on you and you have to spend a weekend fixing it. You are right, email is one of the biggest headaches out there.
druiid 14y ago
Depends on your experience level. If you have never setup postfix/exim/sendmail to do more than accept local mail then it will indeed be a giant headache. With a bit of work with dovecot and postfix you can have yourself a very nice mail-server. That said, there is a point at which the self-hosting pain point is not necessarily realistic, and if you have two accounts you need and they're $4/month elsewhere, why bother would be the discussion to have.

asb 14y ago

Have to admit, I smirked that SlashGeek is outsourcing its comments system to disqus. Edit: even better, the Disqus comments are now failing to load with the message "Sorry, we're undergoing temporary maintenance."

iuguy 14y ago

I wouldn't use something like owncloud as a dropbox replacement right now if you were looking to go ahead with this. It seems to be going through that phase where the security bugs are being identified and fixed.

crisnoble 14y ago

How would one go about self-hosting a website? I have shared hosting but would love the challenge of setting up a LAMP server that is physically in my possession and have full control over it.

yogo 14y ago
I'd say get a cheap VPS from a service like linode or digital ocean (there are many others listed on lowendbox.com but I would recommend sticking with the well-known/bigger providers) then take it from there. Most major distributions have tutorials in their wikis for setting up commonly used software--linode even has a community resources section with a lot of material for server software. Edit: My comment was slanted towards linux and I forgot to mention that maybe some familiarity with linux would be useful, but windows is also an alternative (usually more expensive).
kordless 14y ago
If you have a spare computer laying around you could put Ubuntu server on it. The stack setup can be pretty easy for something like PHP or Django.
- dhimes 14y ago
  You'll probably be behind a dynamic ip, so go to dnsdynamic.org and set up your server to be "followed." (You set up a cron job to ping dnsdynamic.org periodically, and dnsdynamic.org updates its record of your ip. So you get to your server by going to myproject.dnsdynamic.com rather than myproject.com.) Set up your router so the only port(s) that is/are forwarded is/are to the port(s) you want to access (perhaps, ssh and http ports). Configure your ssh daemon to allow only private keys to log in (that is, turn off password 'logging in') and don't allow root logins. Set up rkhunter and denyhosts. Then, sit back and watch the logs as the attacks come in.
  - nwh 14y ago
    Some ISP will assign you a static IP if you ask. I've never been turned down.

kordless 14y ago

For me it's not so much about hosting it myself as it is having control of my data. It's a trust issue. I used http://github.com/coto/gae-boilerplate http://github.com/coto/gae-boilerplate to write a few sites which host data objects in GitHub gists. Here's my OpenStack blog which uses it: http://StackGeek.com/ http://StackGeek.com/, and an example of a raw post stored in a gist: https://gist.github.com/kordless/93e491c4880a416907be https://gist.github.com/kordless/93e491c4880a416907be. I still rely on GitHub for keeping my data safe, but most of my code there also lives on my desktop in the form of cloned repos.

ridruejo 14y ago

Small plug related to the learning curve. Many of the most popular apps, like ownCloud, WordPress, etc. you can get free, easy to install packages at http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org You can choose to self-host (downloadable installers) or run on Amazon/Azure

WayneDB 14y ago

Couldn't we start a co-op where every member user/company/organization owned the servers? That way nobody is hosting on a third-party server where the federal government feels that they have eminent domain?

kordless 14y ago
A hosted OpenStack controller node which controlled a bunch of servers sitting on people's refrigerators in their garage would do the trick. Would have to figure out routing.
EwanToo 14y ago
It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure the financials would add up to just renting you're own 1u collocation space with bandwidth. It's an extremely cheap setup if you don't need to worry about downtime in the event of hardware failure
TheCowboy 14y ago
There's also Project Byzantium which was started by the hacker space in DC: http://project-byzantium.org/ http://project-byzantium.org/ They were asked to assist with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts as well, and the project seemed to be successful.
snowwrestler 14y ago
Whether the servers are owned by a co-op or a big company, if the U.S. federal government comes calling, you will have to answer if you or your servers are in the U.S. That is just the nature of a government.

cmsj 14y ago

I would say you should own your own domain and only use services which can hang off your domain. That way you get the convenience of third party services, but any time you want/need to, you can shift to self-host without having to change your email/blog/whatever addresses.

reidrac 14y ago
I totally agree. I started on the Internet circa 1998 and I've always regretted using popular free services back then, because most of them didn't survive to our days (the popular "X got acquired by Y, X was closed"). I got a domain in 2002 and since then I've used it as part of my identity. It costs some money, but not much and it's totally worth it. Non technical people may freak out a little bit when they ask you for your mail address because you don't answer with the expected gmail.com (and hotmail.com before that), but that's all right. EDIT: typo

fiatpandas 14y ago

Self hosting is fun and fulfilling. It's simple and cheap. The problem of course is replicating the services you already use. Web hosting is painless but email is absurdly involved if you want to make sure that gmail etc. accept your messages as non-spam. The rules are not made clear and there doesn't seem to be a universally accepted way of setting up email where you can say "this message I'm about to send will 100% be accepted by the recipient's mail server"

reidrac 14y ago
I've never had problems to get my email accepted by gmail, but well... I don't think Google gets a 100% either. There must be a checklist somewhere, but off the top of my head: - Your server's IP must be static and must have a reverse map (IP -> name); check your IP is "clean" and not in a blacklist, specially when you get it from your ISP range (may be someone used it before you and it has a poor reputation). - Setup your DNS correctly using MX records. - Use SPF or DKIM so other servers can detect forged emails not coming from your server(s); besides this is nice to filter backscatter spam. - Obviously don't configure your mail server as an open relay, use SMTP with SSL or TLS, always with user authentication. I've been using this setup for years and most of my problems are receiving mail and never sending it (ie. misconfigured servers not playing nice with graylisting, Google servers blacklisted by my DNSRBL, etc). EDIT: formatting
- fiatpandas 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing the tips. Will give email another attempt soon, and maybe write something up
tquai 14y ago
email is absurdly involved if you want to make sure that gmail etc. accept your messages as non-spam. I've self-hosted DNS, mail, web, etc. for years, and several people have posted the same kind of comment here, so here's what people will need to know/do to self-host their own mail. First, you'll almost surely need a non-end user IP address, as many/most of such address ranges are in the Spamhaus PBL list [0]. To see if your IP address is listed in PBL, for the example IP address 192.0.2.200, do dig 200.2.0.192.pbl.spamhaus.org Here, the octets are reversed and prepended to pbl. While you're doing this, you may as well also do dig 200.2.0.192.zen.spamhaus.org Again, replacing the above IP address with your own. This checks the Zen list [1]. For a non-end user IP address you'll most likely need a datacenter machine, a business line, a VPS, or a machine hosted at a large organization. A home Internet connection won't cut the mustard for mail. Second, you'll need FCrDNS [2], or at least rDNS. rDNS is just short for reverse DNS, which means having a PTR record in DNS for your IP address. It could be anything, but something non-generic is best, such as mail.example.com, or puffy.example.com. wireless-cust-0-200.example.com is generic and will score "bad" points on some remote systems. It's best if you can do FCrDNS, which is trivial. All that entails is matching PTR/A records. This is all you need for Gmail or any other serious mail provider to accept your mail. Unfortunately it makes self-hosting from home more difficult, but the upside is a huge reduction in spam. Last thing, you should check http://dnsbl.info http://dnsbl.info or a similar site to see if your mail server's IP address is listed in any DNSBLs. 0. http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ 1. http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fcrdns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fcrdns

dhimes 14y ago

Totally OT rant here: more and more I'm seeing certain grammatical mistakes crop up that disturb the hell out of me. I understand that the first two 'w's in www are for 'world wide,' and that not everybody is a native speaker of English. But these things are creeping into native speakers' use also. They are: 1) Confusing the words 'lose' and 'loose.' Lose is the word you use when you mean the opposite of 'find.' It is also used to mean the opposite of 'win.' Loose is something that is the opposite of 'tight.' There is no 'loosing,' (EDIT: a1k0n corrects me here, see his comment below) there is 'loosening,' however, as in what you do to your belt after a large meal. OP makes this error. 2) Using apostrophes for plural. Apostrophes are used to show (a) possession and (b) contraction (leaving letters out of a word). Writing "I'm buying two car's" is incorrect. Replacing your car's winshield wiper blades is ok. So is leaving out the car entirely when drawing a 'toon.

a1k0n 14y ago
To be even more pedantic: There is 'loosing', as in releasing, but it's probably not what you mean unless you can already spell 'lose'.
- dhimes 14y ago
  I had to look this up and you are correct.
- TillE 14y ago
  My favorite mistake along these lines is "payed", which is a nautical term and not synonymous with "paid".
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    AFAIK both forms are acceptable [in en_GB] for both the past participles of caulking your boat and making a financial transaction, cf http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay#English or http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2 http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pay--2. This IMO highlights why one shouldn't get too anal about specific word forms as long as the intent is apparent. Of course one can generate inaccuracies this way but generally an honest attempt to receive the communicated information doesn't gan aft agley.

perlgeek 14y ago

One problem with self-hosting is that getting security right and tight is really hard. You have to be aware of all the components used in your stack, and monitor them all for known security problems. And then know how to react to them. And then you probably want backups, and monitoring, and what not. Ideologically I'm fully a favor of self-hosting many bits, but having some experience with it, I'm also acutely aware of the downsides.

jvehent 14y ago

Coincidentally, I just gave a talk last tuesday at the Philadelphia LUG on DIY email hosting at home. http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY-eMail@Home-PLUG20130212-jvehent.pdf http://jve.linuxwall.info/ressources/taf/DIY-eMail@Home-PLUG... [PDF, 4.5MB]

SirSkidmore 14y ago

I self-hosted for a long time, knowing it breaks my ISP's ToS. just recently, I received a letter regarding the web server and an extremely throttled connection until I shut it down.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

Somebody needs to come up with a universal self-hosting plan that automatically captures everything I create on to a box where I have total ownership. I'd pay for that. So if I reply to a friend on FB, it captures the thread including my reply. If I tweet, it captures that. My email would be a separate folder. And so forth. Heck even lifelogging would go there. In this fashion the things I create in my life would be under my control, at least to a certain degree. Computers are an extension of our minds, and we deserve to own and control our output in one place, even if we choose to share lots of things in various forums.

michaelbuddy 14y ago
interesting you want a box with total control but your 2 examples are using social networking with a history of increasingly locking out 3rd party tools. with that said you can download your facebook and twitter history. I have for facebook and the static html output isn't that bad. could be worse anyway.
wfn 14y ago
Have you considered (for the time being) moving to e.g. Tent (https://tent.io/ https://tent.io/) and/or Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/)? Of course the whole trouble is migrating your current implementation-dependant social circle (e.g. facebook friends), but I've seen people tweet their last messages along the lines of "I'm not staying in twitter for reasons X,Y; moving to Z (join me if you'd like [to follow me])"; my (very limited) exposure to these cases would seem to show that it might just work (to an extent / YMMV) for (at least) folks on twitter with significant amounts of followers. In any case, I like Tent as they are developing / have developed a generic distributed social networking protocol (with some sample implementations etc.) [/old news]
icebraining 14y ago
That's the goal of the Locker Project: http://lockerproject.org/ http://lockerproject.org/ It seems it has stalled, though :(

ricardobeat 14y ago

If you use just a couple services, good. Now imagine self-hosting all of these: - version control - bug tracker - invoicing app - document sharing - project management - file server - mail server - static server - ruby/node server - php / wordpress blog Just off the top of my head. That will cost you a lot of time and head-banging.

autarch 14y ago
I do at least some of this with the server in my basement. * version control - git and gitweb - I mirror all my repos to github for discoverability though * invoicing - I've done this with text files to track hours and PDFs for invoices (via LibreOffice) - low tech but simple enough * document sharing - my home dir on my server (weak, I know, but simple) * file server - see above * mail server - postfix, amavis, and spamassassin aren't too hard to set up * static server - apache or nginx are trivial to set up * ruby/node - well, I mostly serve Perl stuff, but same deal using Starman - this isn't too hard either * wordpress - yep, installed this too Things I don't host myself: * bug tracker - I mostly use rt.cpan.org and github * project management - I use Hiveminder Now if I had to learn all this from scratch it would indeed be a lot of time and head-banging, but I've learned about this stuff over many years of using Linux and hosting my own stuff. And they're all useful skills to know as a developer. I think any developer who's working on web apps should understand at least the basics of how web and mail servers work. Even if you outsource this stuff to a CDN and something like Sendgrid you should know the tradeoffs involved instead of just picking the outsourcing because you can't set it up yourself.
michaelbuddy 14y ago
a home made home server with amahi / tonido / own cloud would take care of a few. Add pancakeapp for invoicing, bugify for bug tracking. The mail thing still a problem.

casca 14y ago

I've self-hosted as much as I can since 2000 and as with everything, one should weigh up the costs of self-hosting versus the benefits. First, honestly assess your own level of skill. Then pick a service and decide what it would cost you to host and the cost of failure. For example, let's look at hosting your own email service. The cost of hosting for someone not comfortable with email is quite high. Setting it up correctly requires many steps and if you get it wrong, perhaps your emails don't get delivered and you lose business. Compare this to the cost of using Gmail - effectively zero. However, this does not take the risks into account. Google owns your email and email address. If they, or one of a number of governments decide that the service should no longer be available to you for whatever reason, your email is lost. You could mitigate this by mirroring all your Gmail through IMAP/POP3 and using your own domain name. In security terms, the risk of Google taking away your account is low, but the impact is very high. As an aside, I'd love to use Owncloud but after a incidence where it deleted files, I decided that it's not yet ready for production use.

tlrobinson 14y ago

Add to the list of reasons it's a bad idea: Security. Unless you're confident you can securely configure your network and services AND stay on top of patches, etc it's probably a bad idea to self host.