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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.
…Happy cake day?
I wasn’t aware it was on Lemmy too.
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.
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 .
Let’s start with the basics: is dev.to self hosted? 😁
touché
No, dev.to points to 151.101.194.217 which is an IPv4 that belongs to Fastly Inc
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.
Delicious irony
And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.
At the end of the day, those of us who are technical enough will take the risk and learn, but for vast majority of the people, it is and will continue to remain as a non starter for the foreseeable future.
There are actually easy solutions out there. For example CasaOS, it’s a oneliner and you get a docker orchestration with an app-store and built-in file and smb management. I bet even non technicals could use this.
And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.
and yet americans still drive cars.
I don’t disagree, but you just have to be aware that you can fuck shit up. And if you do, that’s not my problem, or anybody elses at the end of the day.
Not to mention, few people have the time, skill, money, and energy to do it. They’re happy to outsource in exchange for money and/or data.
The “layman” should fall back to old ways. Think local photo management with maybe some backup software
So just because they don’t know technology like you do, they should be left behind the times instead of taking advantage of advancements? A bit elitist and gate keeping there, don’t you think?
Everyone have their own choices to make, and for most, they’ve already decided they’d rather benefit from advancements than care about what you care about.
I think they should do what they know. Asking them to try to learn new things when they don’t enjoy it is not fun
With that being said, if they have the drive to spend time on it let them
I recently decided to get more serious about self hosting and gotta say,
use TrueNAS scale, just do it, literally everything is 1 click… While it can be complicated, it is most definitely worth it, not just to stick it to big tech, but because some of the selfhosted apps genuinely provide a better experience than centralized alternatives. NextCloud surprised me especially with how genuinely nice it is. Installed it, got an SSL certificate and replaced google services almost entirely in a few hours of work.I’ve still got a few things I wanna do which look very complicated… Stuff like a mail server and pfsense (the stuff of nightmares) are among the 1st on my list…
OPNSense is generally pretty easy, more powerful, and more open than pfsense. I started with pf but went to OPNSense and have loved it!
I’ve tried both and both were hell
genuine advice, i recommend you get into the nitty gritty of linux someday.
Guis, especially complex guis are just hell on earth. Actually sitting down and learning about what you’re doing, and familiarizing yourself with the underlying tools, is an incredibly good way to get around that problem.
It’s really hard to fuck up a CLI, and it’s really easy with a certain level of knowledge, to navigate more complex topics and concepts. It’s very worthwhile.
I am very much into the nitty gritty of Linux (I use Alpine fyi) the problem is, pf/opnsense aren’t based on Linux…
And I also don’t really know how to set them up… Yk as routers, mainly because my internet comes through PPPoE and I just cannot for the life of me figure out how to pass that through to a VM. I bound the VM to its own NIC, did everything, did not work…
Honestly, I found it really easy. I don’t have a background in IT or anything either.
What did you find difficult? Setting custom firewall rules is harder to understand, but the general functionality of setting up a NAT and even installing and configuring ZenArmor were super super easy.
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I already have my own network with stuff and things… it’s mostly just the simple stuff (TrueNAS scale, pihole, wireguard, nextcloud and other things like that). But yeah, outside my mac, I have literally 0 experience with BSD…
yeah, pretty much the same for me, just a little more primitive by nature.
I hear BSD is pretty nice since it’s one system, instead of a modular system, it makes the actual functionality of the system a little nicer, as well a improving security quite a bit.
I can’t imagine it’s much different than linux, they’re both unix related, and unix shares heavy ties with most unix related OSs these days.
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.
Old ThinkPad with Win 10 Pro, Plex, Plexamp, and several 14TB drives so I can stream my home media library on the go.
Why Win 10?
It’s the OS I know how to use. The Thinkpad is a P50 with a Xeon processor and lots of RAM so it runs it easily.
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?
I have similar specs and cost with ionos
buyvm/frantech
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
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.
I definitely trust Proton much more than I trust myself.
I agree that it would be very bad if your Proton account got compromised with so much data tied to it. However, I’m personally comfortable with a strong password and 2FA for my Proton account.
I nowadays manage my private stuff with the ansible scripts I develop for work - so mostly my own stuff is a development environment for work, and therefore doesn’t need to be done on private time.
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.
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Only if nothing on it is permanent. You can have a home lab where the things you’re testing are self hosted apps. But if the server in question is meant to be permanent, like if you’re backing up the data on it, or you’ve got it on a UPS you make sure it stays available, or you would be upset if somebody came by and accidentally unplugged it during the day, it’s not a home lab.
A home lab is an unimportant, transient environment meant for tinkering, prototyping, and breaking.
A box that’s a solution to something, that’s hosting anything you can’t get rid of at a moments notice, is just a home server.
I still use the label ‘homelab’ for everything in my house, including the production services. It’s just a convenient term and not something I’ve seen anyone split hairs about until now.
if nothing on it is permanent. You can have a home lab where the things you’re testing are self hosted apps. But if the server in question is meant to be permanent, like if you’re backing up the data on it, or you’ve got it on a UPS you make sure it stays available, or you would be upset if somebody came by and accidentally unplugged it during the day, it’s not a home lab.
A home lab is an unimportant, transient environment me
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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.
An article telling people to self host read only by those who already self host. Okay.
I think it’s so people here can give themselves a pat on the pack for self hosting lol.
Like how the Linux Lemmy community has so many “Windows is bad, Linux is good” posts. Practically everyone in there already knows that Linux is good.
Welcome to the internet, where people try their best to find people with the same opinions so they can feel good and get pissed when they can’t.
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Are we married to the same person?
Haha, wife bad!
Are you planning on self hosting this article? Perhaps on writefreely?
If self-hosting is going to become commonplace, then it needs to be easier than setting up a network printer. People should be able to just buy a computer (maybe a laptop for integral screen and UPS) preloaded with something like Yunohost, but with a sleek GUI. It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
Sounds like a market niche, you could start it up, call it something like “macrosoft”. … then start making scripts that do the work for the user, don’t release the scripts because people pay for them. Let this go on for many years and you find yourself shoving “AI” down your users throats and screenshotting their desktop without explicit permission…
Hopefully that path is mostly precluded if an open source project like Yunohost is used as a basis.
It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
i disagree honestly.
Part of the point behind self hosting is to empower people with the knowledge and capability that they can do this shit, and fix any problems that result.
You aren’t really getting people into right to repair, if they aren’t at least espousing it, and trying to engage in it themselves. Sure you can always go to a third party to do something at the end of the day, but with how broad right to repair is, there is almost certainly something in your life that you can fix and repair.
Like it’d be good that people are doing that, but you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells, and every company ever who will try to force proprietary buggy garbage on you, will pretend is good, and functional. Will try to sell you, because you don’t know any better. I think it’s just a cultural difference. Car guys that spend time working on their car simply wouldn’t understand the average persons conceptual understanding of repairing vehicles, and vice versa. It’s the same here.
What you are suggesting here, is a sold, turn key solution, except fully open source, no bugs, no issues, and wide reaching community support. I don’t think that’s reasonably possible.
I think ultimately, we need to make learning, and accessing learning materials easy (we already do a great job at it) and we just need to get people interested in this shit, some people won’t. That’s fine, they probably know someone that is though. And at the end of the day, that’s probably good enough.
you also need to remember that this is literally a turn key product, that literally every cloud provider sells
I am unaware of server products that I can just buy, plug in, and get up and running in minutes with my own ActivityPub instances, media storage/streaming, XMPP messaging, and etc. If they really exist, please share links.
There’s certainly value in doing this stuff the hard way, but the goal should be for self-hosting to be as easy as signing up with Google, Facebook, Spotify, etc. There aren’t enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
im not saying they do exist, i’m saying that what you’re talking about, is something that doesn’t exist, for good reason. Because this is literally already a market place that has done it’s job.
XMPP? Discord, it’s literally discord. Storage and streaming? The cloud, netflix, etc. It’s already a thing.
There aren’t enough people with the time and curiosity to figure out the current state of self-hosting and make a dent in the three website problem.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy. Funny how that works. You simply have to be willing to put in time and effort if you want to reap the benefits. You simply can’t wish for everything to be handed to you on a silver platter.
Jellyfin and Yunohost are two projects that have simplified self-hosting and made it accessible for me. I just think more progress can be made in that direction.
and yet, here we are, on lemmy.
As far as I can tell, you are not self-hosting the Divisions by Zero Lemmy instance, so I’m not sure what your point is there. I am actually self-hosting my lemmy.crimedad.work instance with the help of Yunohost.
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I feel attacked by this post. I self host Home Assistant, recursive proxy servers, RSS readers, photo managers, vscode, media servers, download managers, backup solutions, git, password databases, economy trackers… And if I need to print from my macbook I have to email the file to myself because in twenty years I haven’t ONCE been able to host my printer on the network in a way that works for more than three days before randomly breaking.
Lol I know what you mean. Maybe I am speaking more to the ideal of the home network printer than real life. My experience with them over the last twelve years or so hasn’t been as terrible as yours, but it hasn’t been perfect either.
I feel this post so hard. I’m always about 5 seconds from going Office Space on my printer.
Yeah! Fuck printers and scanners! Imagine one day going to your scanner, putting in it a receipt and then pressing the scan to PC button and actually getting it to work! Instead, you go to your computer and to the folder you named scans and there’s nothing!
I have yeeted printers out of non-ground level apartment windows before, so i feel your pain. i bought a brother laser jet printer and hardwired it to a switch port and have not had connectivity issues for years. i can easily print from my phone, pc, laptop, whatever.
Hello brother. 🙏 May I talk to you for a minute about our lord and savior Brother Laser Jet Printer.
For real, how is it that Brother makes the only printer that everything from my phone to my servers can use without problems. Bonus points for not gouging on toner.
Xerox has been great for me. They dont just make giant copiers you need a forklift to deliver and a giant service contract. They still make small home office desk printers.
After wiring up to my network and giving it a static, it’s just worked, for all devices for everyone. No need to download or install anything either.
I said I’ve been trying for 20 years. Obviously it’s a Brother.
What about email?
Former professional email host here. Email is like 90% spam.
If want to spend your free time battling the ever evolving landscape of spam, enjoy.
Otherwise, work with a pro mail provider you trust.
