7mo ago

Why You Should Self-Host Everything

dev.to Why You Should Self-Host Everything

In today's digital age, it seems like everything is subscription-based. If you're not paying for a...

148 comments

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This is a bit out of date.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 .

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  Yeah yunohost is pretty great for less than 10 users. Perhaps more depending on the service. Its very easy to get setup in a weekend with a plethora of services. And its pretty stable.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  Hello brother. 🙏 May I talk to you for a minute about our lord and savior Brother Laser Jet Printer.
  
  I feel this post so hard. I'm always about 5 seconds from going Office Space on my printer.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
- On top of that, most ISPs block port 25 on residential IP addresses to combat spam, making it impossible to go full ”DIY”
- Well, there's always, you know, mail.
  
  Aah, the good ol‘ wooden variety
- I self-host mine using Mailcow, but I use an outbound SMTP relay for sending email so I don't have to deal with IP reputation. L

Are you planning on self hosting this article? Perhaps on writefreely?

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.
- Perhaps this was written much earlier than v5.
  
  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.
  
  May 27th 2024? O.o
- was this article even written when the pi5 was out? The pi4 was out, and pretty good for quite a while, but really expensive in the last four years. The pi 5 is up there, but the price almost makes sense, so.
  you can do quite a bit on these machines, but they are inherently limited, running a proper nas is going to be rather goofy, and probably just justifies getting proper hardware at the end of the day.

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.

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.
- Unraid does this via docker. It's amazing. You can do this live and on the fly.
- 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.
- Cloudron does that,not for free, though. But cheap

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.

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.
  
  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?

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
  
  I solved this by installing solar panels. They produce more electricity than I need (enough to cover charging an EV in when I get one in the future), and I should break even (in terms of cost) within 5-6 years of installation. Had them installed last year under NEM 2.0.
  I know PG&E want to introduce a fixed monthly fee at some point, which throws off my break-even calculations a bit.
  Some VPS providers have good deals and you can often find systems with 16GB RAM and NVMe drives for around $70-100/year during LowEndTalk Black Friday sales, so it's definitely worth considering if your use cases can be better handled by a VPS. I have both - a home server for things like photos, music, and security camera footage, and VPSes for things that need to be reliable and up 100% of the time (websites, email, etc)
  
  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.
  
  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.

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

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.
- 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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DHCP	Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NAT	Network Address Translation
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SMB	Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
XMPP	Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging
nginx	Popular HTTP server

17 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

[Thread #773 for this sub, first seen 30th May 2024, 10:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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.

Unfortunately he is not talking about security?

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.

Thanks to self hosting my wife hates me more than before. Thank you self hosting !
- Are we married to the same person?
  
  Haha, wife bad!

Buying a used desktop is very nice for these things. You can set up a steam gaming thing.

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