If you’re not paying for a service, you’re likely being monetized by watching ads or providing personal data to companies that don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.
This is a bit out of date. Nowadays, you pay for the service and are monetized by watching ads and providing personal data to companies that definitely don’t have your best interests at heart.
People said it back then too. The ad and tracking industry will always invade more and more of our privacy. When will there be enough tracking to make them stop and be happy? Never. Never is the only answer.
Username checks out .
Oh, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. The “fun” of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that’s not usually how it works.
Self hosting isn’t super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.
With Proton you could get emails, calendar, contacts, drive for a fair price and good privacy, for example.
I like the idea, but I don’t like that everything is tied to a single account. If it’s compromised so are your emails, calendar, contacts, files, and passwords. But the service is good enough to replace Google, and choosing between the two, I’d choose Proton.
Mail servers are the one thing I refuse to self host. Years of managing enterprise email taught me that I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life
I agree. I was thinking about using different services for different tasks instead of putting everything into the same basket. I’m not self-hosting an email server either.
If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically
I definitely trust Proton much more than I trust myself.
That’s true. But as we were speaking about an external service (Proton), I was thinking about diversification. I use Proton for emails, but I don’t use Proton Pass opting for another external password manager.
Let’s start with the basics: is dev.to self hosted? 😁
No, dev.to points to 151.101.194.217 which is an IPv4 that belongs to Fastly Inc
Delicious irony
Fastly is also a CDN. The fact that a website is behind Fastly doesn’t imply that it isn’t selfhosted at all.
So you mean Fastly is providing CDN servers which cache the content of dev.to and then serve them to the visitor on their servers?
Well yeah that’s not self hosting.
Of course it would be self hosting. If the website isn’t hosted on fastly, and is hosted by an individual, that would be the definition of self hosting. You’re also assuming that Fastly is caching responses, do you know that for certain?
Literally all you’ve done so far is resolve the host name to a DNS record. You think you’ve done something, but you haven’t.
lol what the fuck is your problem? How about you do something and explain to me how you self host a CDN hosted by fastly???
When did I resolve the Hostname to a DNS record? Are you fucking stupid you obviously don’t know what you are talking about. I resolved it’s domain to an IPv4 address which points entirely to a fastly server. It’s not a resource that get’s delivered by CDN, it’s the whole fucking website they are serving, which is a service they sell and that’s not self hosting.
God damn why am I even spending my time arguing with someone that didn’t understand the basics yet. If you think a domain is a hostname and an IPv4 address is a DNS record, just back off and return to the books. You probably feel so cool and think you have done something, which you did, you ridiculed yourself.
You clearly don’t understand a single thing about how the internet works and are very confused. Let me help you out.
how you self host a CDN hosted by fastly???
You don’t? The website is what would be self hosted. Not Fastly.
When did I resolve the Hostname to a DNS record? … I resolved it’s domain to an IPv4 address which points entirely to a fastly server
Right there. You resolved the host record, probably an A record or ANAME for the website (dev.to) into an IPv4 address, using DNS.
It’s not a resource that get’s delivered by CDN, it’s the whole fucking website they are serving, which is a service they sell and that’s not self hosting.
Here’s what you’re critically misunderstanding about this. Just because you resolve the record for a website and the IP that’s returned belongs to fastly does not mean fastly is hosting the content. You literally haven’t done anything to prove that the website isn’t self-hosted on a computer in some guys garage. You’re making assumptions based on ignorance and using those assumptions to gatekeep self hosting because you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s very possible that site isn’t self hosted, but so far you haven’t actually found any proof of that like you think you have.
If you think a domain is a hostname and an IPv4 address is a DNS record
A domain can have several host records of different types including one at the root of the domain. What you’re resolving isn’t “a domain” it’s a single record for that domain, and its associated IP address is contained in the DNS record. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with this system, try this: https://www.dummies.com/book/technology/information-technology/networking/general-networking/dns-for-dummies-292922/
It’s clear that you’re a hobbyist with very little understanding of how the internet and self hosting works on a fundamental level and that’s ok. But I recommend instead of wasting your energy being confidently wrong very publicly for the purpose of gatekeeping, you use that energy to learn how these things actually work instead.
touché
I’m tired of the argument that the solution to fight tracking/ads/subscription/gafam is self hosting.
It’s a solution for some nice people that have knowledge, time and money for.
But it’s not a solution for everyone.
We need more small nice open source association and company that provide services for people that don’t know the difference between a web search engine and a navigator or just a server and a client. I think that initiatives like “les chatons” in France are amazing for that!!! ( https://www.chatons.org/en )And just to be clear, I think that self-hosted services are a part of the solution. :)
Agreed. Most people online think having a personal website on their own domain is too much of a hassle, they won’t have the knowledge or time to setup a homelab server.
We need more of the nice people you mention — with the tech knowhow and surplus of time — to maintain community services as alternatives to corporate platforms. I see a few co-op services around where member-owners pay a fee to have access to cloud storage and social platforms; that is one way to ensure the basic upkeep of such a community. I’m not sure how Chatons is financed but they certainly have a wide range of libre and private offerings!
I’m hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We’d need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap–tons of used servers on eBay are out there–but monthly costs are not.
It’s a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.
I get that. And I self host the things I care about. But for the average layman? I don’t see self hosting as a real option. Unless you are decently tech savvy, and have an aptitude for troubleshooting, most people aren’t gonna put in the time or effort of initial setup. Even if maintenance is minimal once it’s running. That first leap into self-hosted is daunting.
I think of it this way… would I expect my dad to be able to do it? Absolutely not. And my dad is decently tech savvy for 70.
The first step is normalising the idea of privacy so people can even see the point of paying for something they can easily get for free.
The next step would be to make products people can easily use without being tech savvy. A synology NAS has been great for me and I praise the setup to anyone who will listen, but even with something like Synology people will need some basic knowledge.
Don’t forget that self hosting without proper knowledge is more dangerous than just giving away data to the big techs!
YunoHost is trying to make it easier than a synology NAS to install services and get them setup properly but I agree that to configure your network properly is difficult and everyone’s setup is different so specific knowledge is required.
Trying to run your own nextcloud be like
Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven’t had an issue since.
That first leap into self-hosted is daunting.
the first leap you take into anything is daunting.
This is just called complacency. You can literally just pick up whatever the fuck you want, and start learning it.
I don’t get this counter-argument. Is TFA actually suggesting that the average grandma quit using Yahoo mail or Facebook and set up her own email server and mastodon instance? The only people even considering self-hosting are people with technology interest and reasonable passion. It’s an article written for a niche techie website, and we’re discussing it on a forum for self-hosting nerds.
The counter-argument is like saying the average layman should stick to televised football, because they don’t have the physical savvy or aptitude for the game, and most people aren’t gonna put in the time or effort to build their strength & endurance to compete. It may be an accurate statement, but the people you’re addressing (grandma) weren’t TFA’s target audience and weren’t even going to try in the first place, and you discourage people who might really enjoy giving the hobby a try.
IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.
That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.
We need something better than email.
On top of that, most ISPs block port 25 on residential IP addresses to combat spam, making it impossible to go full ”DIY”
We need something better than email.
Say everyone agrees and the entire world swaps to some alternative. Email 3.0 or whatever.
Wouldn’t we just have the same issue? Any form of communication protocol (that can be self host able) will get abused by spam. Requiring a lot of extra work to manage.
Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.
Isn’t the current email system kind of a web of trust. Microsoft, Google etc… trust each other. But little me and my home server is not part of that web of trust making my email server get blocked.
Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.
Realistically I don’t see how it would ever not be managed by a corporation. Your average person doesn’t know how and doesn’t want to manage their own messaging system. They are just going to offload that responsibility to a corporation to do it for them. We are just going to have exactly the same system we have now. Just called some else besides email.
I wish there was a better solution but I am not seeing a way that doesn’t just end up the same as email.
Well, there’s always, you know, mail.
Aah, the good ol‘ wooden variety
I stopped reading after this line.
Raspberry Pi won’t do unfortunately, unless you run up to 4 lightweight containers.
Does the author know how much compute power a Raspberry Pi 5 has? If the software that just hosts personal data can’t run in Raspberry Pi 5, that should be a terrible software. For most people and their families, a RPi5 is enough to host anything that they would ever need.
How good is it? I have a raspi5 and wonder where it’s limit is
I’ve ran multiple containers on a Pi 3 before “upgrading” to a Pi 4. Yes not even a Pi 5. Sure it’s not rapid and drags it’s heels at times but for the most part it’s great for hosting stuff for my household.
Home assistant, Plex, Syncthing, Wireguard, Ad Guard, nginx, nginx proxy manager, duckdns, mongodb and unifi network appliance. I was also running Jellyfin along side Plex but it keeps causing the Pi to lock up.
Perhaps this was written much earlier than v5.
May 27th 2024? O.o
It says posted 4 days ago, updated yesterday.
For most stuff the pi4 is also enough. Jellyfin (no transcoding) works fine on mine. It takes a bit to generate the chapter images and the timeline peek images when ingesting a new movie, but I’ve never had any issues with playback.
Someday I hope we have a server technology that’s platform-agnostic and you can just add things like “Minecraft Server” or “Email Server” to a list and it’ll install, configure, and host everything in the list with a sensible default config. I imagine you could make the technology fairly easily, although keeping up with new services, versions, security updates, etc. would be quite the hassle. But that’s what collaboration is for!
As someone who has had a career in hosting: good luck.
Don’t forget backups, logging, monitoring, alerting on top of security updates, hardware failure, power outages, OS updates, app updates, and tech being deprecated and obsolete at a rapid pace.
I’m in favor of a decentralized net with more self-hosting, but that requires more education and skill. You can’t automate away all the unpleasant and technical bits.
You can’t automate away all the unpleasant and technical bits.
But it’s our job to try
But if we hide the complexity, surely we won’t ever have to deal with it! /s
Honestly at this point that is docker and docker compose.
As to what to run it on that very much depends on preference. I use a proxmox server but it could just as easily be pure Debian. A basic webui like cockpit can make system management operations a bit more simplified.
Docker is in theory nice, if it works. Docker doesn’t run on my computer(i have no fucking clue why). Every time I try to do anything I get the Error “Unknown Server: OS” also there is literally nothing you can find online about how to Fux this problem.
What computer and OS do you have that can’t run docker? You can run a full stack of services on a random windows laptop as easily as a dedicated server.
Edit
Autocorrect messing with OS.
I use EndeavourOS, but had the same problem on Arch.
Hardware wise I have an 75800x, a RX 6700XT and 32GB 3200mhz Ram.
The weird thing is, that some time ago I was actually able to use docker, but now I’m not.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. It can be installed directly from pacman. It may be something silly like adding docker to your user group. Have you done something like below for docker?
- Update the package index:
sudo pacman -Syu- Install required dependencies:
sudo pacman -S docker- Enable and start the Docker service:
sudo systemctl enable docker.service sudo systemctl start docker.service- Add your user to the docker group to run Docker commands without sudo:
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER-
Log out and log back in for the group changes to take effect.
Verify that Docker CE is installed correctly by running:
docker --versionIf you get the above working docker compose is just
sudo pacman -S docker-composesudo pacman -S docker-compose
I did all the steps you mentioned and now it works(at least if use sudo to run the commands).
I thought it would. If it still requires sudo to run it is probably just docker wanting your user account added to the docker group. If the “docker” group doesn’t exist you can safely create it.
You will likely need to log out and log back in for the system to recognize the new group permissions.
I didnt start docker and didn’t add it to my user group. Maybe this will fix it.
Unraid does this via docker. It’s amazing. You can do this live and on the fly.
Cloudron does that,not for free, though. But cheap
Sounds kinda like NixOS, although that’s not platform-agnostic.
Funnily enough I do use NixOS for my server! It’s not quite what I was describing but it does allow me to host easily.
It really bugs me in general how often the term “home lab” is conflated with a “home server”, but in the context of what this article is trying to communicate, it’s only going to turn the more casually technical people it’s trying to appeal to off.
For many people, their home lab can also function as a server for self hosting things that aren’t meant to be permanent, but that’s not what a home lab is or is for. A home lab is a collection of hardware for experimenting and prototyping different processes and technologies. It’s not meant to be a permanent home for services and data. If the server in your house can’t be shut down and wiped at any given time without any disruption to or loss of data that’s important to you, then you don’t have a home lab.
Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.
Oh yeah like that’s part of it. If this article is supposed to be a call to action, somebody who starts looking into “homelabs” is going to get confused, they’ll get some sticker shock, and they won’t understand how they apply to what’s said in the article. They’ll see a mix of information from small home servers to hyperconverged infrastructure, banks of Cisco routers and switches, etc. my first home lab was a stack of old Cisco gear I used to study for my network engineering degree. If you stumbled upon an old post of mine talking about my setup and all you’re looking for is a Plex box you’ll be like “What the fuck is all this shit, I’m not trying to deal with all that”
“Self hosting”, and “home server” are just more accurate keywords to look into and actually see things more closely related to what you want.
Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.
I do self-host some services but it bugs me that a lot of articles that talk about costs do not factor in a lot of additional costs. Drives for NAS need replacement. Running NUCs means quite an energy draw compared to most ARM based SBCs.
And it dismisses the time component of self hosting. It’s not going to be zero.
Sigh, kinda… but don’t forget to factor in your backup costs too
On a financial aspect, self hosting is more expensive most of the time, if you convert time to money, even if you calculate using less than 100$ per hour (In my country we charge about 200$ per work hour)
Should we do that though? I’m choosing between playing PS5 and configuring my home server. I’m not being paid for either of that. But skills I obtain while tinkering with the server actually help me with some tasks at work.
Sure, you can compare to what else you would do in that time slot, but money would be the more general thing (you can compare better, since everything is in the base of money)
Back to your example: time spent on each task is equal -> same value invested but output may have different value (game skills/progress vs IT skills/progress)
So since investing value is the same for both task, you can ignore that part and concentrate on the output.
Depends on how you calculate costs. Like, I have Kodi running on a RPi for home entertainment/theater. There’s no way to outsource that, but the RPi is idle most of the time. Adding services to it is effectively or marginally free, except for my time, and there’s still a significant time cost to get paid, off-site cloud services set up.
But charging for your own time is kind of disingenuous. You don’t include your time in the cost of eating (a Big Mac worth $60??), watching a video, or going on vacation. The only people self-hosting have a personal, hobby/entertainment interest in it, and I think it’s more accurate to compare the costs of self hosting with the costs of other forms of entertainment. Do you get more fun-value out of the costs of self hosting or out of a theater ticket?
Well, you can calculate how much money you would make in the time you do hobby, entertainment and eating. And I bet, “everyone” includes some people, that see setting up home/private IT not as hobby, for those people the comparison is like spending time x or paying amount x (data or/and money) (you could compare it to housekeeping) In such cases it makes sense to give the spent time a value in data or money, so that it is comparable
Maybe you spend time on selfhosting and now you have less time for other things that need to be done and now you have to outsource it (for money) giving time as well calculateable value
I self host a lot, but I host a lot on cheap VPS’s, mostly, in addition to the few services on local hardware.
However, these also don’t take into account the amount of time and money to maintain these networks and equipment. Residential electricity isn’t cheap; internet access isn’t cheap, especially if you have to get business class Internet to get upload speeds over 10 or 15 mbps or to avoid TOS breaches of running what they consider commercial services even if it’s just for you, mostly because of of cable company monopolies; cooling the hardware, especially if you live in a hotter climate, isn’t cheap; and maintaining the hardware and OS, upgrades, offsite backups for disaster recovery, and all of the other costs. For me, VPS’s work, but for others maintaining the OS and software is too much time to put in. And just figuring out what software to host and then how to set it up and properly secure it takes a ton of time.
Residential electricity isn’t cheap
This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7
This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.
This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/day, amounting to more than 2kWh/24hrs, ie ~80W/hr? You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build. I’m running a AMD APU (known for shitty idle consumption) with Raid 5 and still hover less than 40W/h.
This isn’t speculation on my part, I measured the consumption with a Kill-a-watt. It’s an 11 year old PC with 4 hard drives and multiple fans because it’s in a hot environment and hard drive usage is significant because it’s running security camera software in a virtual machine. Host OS is Linux MInt. It averages right around 110w. I’m fully aware that’s very high relative to something purpose built.
You will need to invest in a TDP friendly build
Right, and spend even more money.
I think the main culprit is CPU/MB, so that’s the only thing needed a replacement. Many cheap alternatives (less than 200$) that can half the consumption and would pay itself in a year of usage easily. There is a Google doc floating around listing all the efficient CPUs and their TDPs. Just a suggestion, I’m pretty sure after a year it would payoff its price, there is absolutely no need for a 110w/h unless you’re running LLMs on that and even then it shouldn’t be that high.
Omg, I pay 30€ for 1Gb/0.7Gb (ten more for symmetrical 10Gb, I don’t need it and can’t even use more than 1Gb/s but my inner nerd wants it) and 0.15€/KWh.
BTW the electricity cost is somewhat or totally negated when you heat your apartment/house depending on your heating system. For me in the winter I totally write it off.
I self host mail/smtp(opensmtpd)+imap(dovecot), znc (irc bouncer), ssh, vpn (ipsec/ikev2), www/http (httpd), git (git-daemon), and gotweb, on an extremely cheap ($2 a month, 512M ram 10G storage) vps all very easily on openbsd. With all these servers I’m using an immense 178M/512M of my available memory.
what VPS provider are you using?
buyvm/frantech
I have similar specs and cost with ionos
I do host some stuff myself 😉 but there’s one thing to keep in mind.
Don’t self host stuff that your family still needs after you’re gone. Unless they are self host nerds like you. I stopped self hosting our mail and docs for example.
Would you agree?
I agree, and I think there’s some reliability arguments for certain services, too.
I’ve been using self-hosted Bitwarden. That’s something I really want to be reliable anywhere I happen to be. I don’t want to rely on my home Internet connection always being up and dyn DNS always matching. An AWS instance or something like that which can handle Bitwarden would be around $20/month (it’s kinda heavy on RAM). Bitwarden’s own hosting is only $3.33/month for a family plan.
Yes, Bitwarden can work with its local cache only, but I don’t like not being able to sync everything. It’s potentially too important to leave to a residential-level Internet connection.
Is your home connection down that much? I’d think that even syncing once every day or so would populate everything fine, and if you’re at home it should update over wifi.
I might just be spoiled because I’m the only one using mine and only for a handful of devices.
Not really, I just have trust issues with my ISP, and I’m willing to spend three bucks a month to work around them.
I’d agree but you can expand this quite widely then. You think they don’t need their pictures anymore, in case you host something like Immich/Photoprism? If you host movies, series, games, they may not need them anymore but it would still be noticeable that they are not accessible anymore.
Not that I am saying you are wrong or what a good way of doing that would be. I don’t know myself.
Ideally you want something that gracefully degrades.
So, my media library is hosted by Plex/Jellyfin and a bunch of complex firewall and reverse proxy stuff… And it’s replicated using Syncthing. But at the end of the day it’s on an external HDD that they can plug into a regular old laptop and browse on pretty much any OS.
Same story for old family photos (Photoprism, indexing a directory tree on a Synology NAS) and regular files (mostly just direct SMB mounts on the same NAS).
Backups are a bit more complex, but I also have fairly detailed disaster recovery plans that explain how to decrypt/restore backups and access admin functions, if I’m not available (in the grim scenario, dead - but also maybe just overseas or otherwise indisposed) when something bad happens.
Aside from that, I always make sure that all of all the selfhosting stuff in my family home is entirely separate from the network infra. No DNS, DHCP or anything else ever runs on my hosting infra.
…Happy cake day?
I wasn’t aware it was on Lemmy too.
All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.
The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.
