What types of services are you not willing to self-host?

Google and other large scale providers have intentionally made it very difficult to self host your own email. It’s generally not considered a wise move these days and is very difficult to maintain.

I have an email server but it is not my main email account. I'm purely only using it to learn and to have email notifications sent out from a few services. I do not trust myself or my setup enough to have my main email account hosted on it

what's that? a federated service isn't immune from a corporate take over? colour me shocked.

This method supposedly works great too.

http://uu.ucw.cz/

CrowdSec has completely replaced fail2ban for me. It's a bit harder to setup but it's way more flexible with bans/statistics/etc. Also uses less ram.

It's also fun to watch the ban counter go up for things that I would never think about configuring on fail2ban, such as nginx CVEs.

Edit: fixed url. Oops!

I've been self-hosting a personal email server for about half a year now, and it was definitely challenging! But it also tought me quite a bit about how the system works, so I think it was worth it. There are solutions for everything, but you definitely need some time and patience.

I have a router, switch and older access point preconfigured and ready to just plug in.

I have some basic documentation and a short list of folks to call, along with admin creds should anything need untangling.

But mostly it’s a rip and replace network. Ditch plex and get cable.

Google workspace is basically just gmail. You can pay someone to migrate it or abandon.

I gave my wife a laminated card with explicit instructions on how to access my keepass DB and encrypted backups. The rest can die when I do.

I hadn't either until a few years ago. It's something worth considering.

I've managed to keep my KeePass database for almost 20 years going back as far as when I was a dumb teenager. Back then it was as simple as having a couple extra copies on usb drives and Google Drive, but now I keep proper backups.

My take is, I'd rather control it myself, I am responsible enough to take care of my data, and I actually wouldn't trust someone else to do it. That's a huge reason I selfhost in the first place, a lack of trust in others' services. Also, online services are a bigger target because of the number of customers, and maybe even the importance of some of their customers, whereas I'm not a target at all. No one is going to go after me specifically.

Eh, the clients all cache your vault. It shouldn't be a huge issue for it to be down even for a few days.

But I do upload encrypted backups of the server every 6 hours to cloud storage

Well with bitwarden/vaultwarden you can have a copy of your entire vault on your phone or computer or both... so even if your server was totally dead, you'd have access to your passwords. Solid backups is a must, I follow the 3-2-1 rule on super critical systems (like vaultwarden) and test that you can actually recover. Something as simple as spinning up a VPS, testing a restore, testing access, see if that could work in a pinch until you get your server back online, then tear it down. Linode is very cheap for this kind of testing, it'd only cost you a few pennies to run a "dr" test of your critical systems. Of course you still want to secure it, I'd recommend wireguard or tailscale instead of opening access to your DR node to the internet, but as a temporary test it's probably fine if your running patched up to date versions of docker, vaultwarden, and I'd always recommend putting a reverse proxy in front like nginx.

Usually the password are also stored locally.

I can definitely access all my passwords offline with bitwarden

I am hosting bitwarden myself (on a VPS) and I am not that concered about losing my passwords, because every device syncs all passwords locally regulary so that you don't need internet to access them.

So to loose all your passwords not only do you have to loose your bitwarden server and all the backups, you also have to loose access to all your bitwarden clients synchroniously.

I've never heard of joplin but it looks just like what I need

Because passwords are so critical I'd never give that to a third party.

Stuff like bitwarden is needlessly complicated, though - I nowadays have a vaultwarden instance for friends and family, but everything important is done via pass - which only needs a git server, which I have anyway.

I really want to use Bitwarden and I pay for the premium as well, but it's starting to bother me that a lot of basic stuff is missing despite years of user requests.

• An Auto-fill UI for the web interface
• Credit card auto-fill
• A way to refresh from the auto-fill menu on the Android UI

I just tried Proton Pass (I have unlimited anyway) and it's not better, but at least they seem to be working on these.

And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it's deployed).

At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn't think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I've got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.

Standing up email might not be that hard... but it's much harder to ensure that your mail will actually be delivered successfully. Plus it's not a service you can typically afford to go down. Any emails you miss during that downtime are gone forever, whereas even if my Vaultwarden credential vault goes down I can access passwords from a device that has things cached at least while I fix things.

Plus the big providers just treat small mail servers with a lot more skepticism than they did 20 years ago.

Email was one I figured I would get an answer for. I know plenty of people do it, but I’m not sure if I’d trust myself to do it right.

It's not even about doing it right. It's a PITA to manage when big players can just decide to block your server and then you'll be jumping trough hoops with Microsofts spam filtering program and whatnot just go get your messages trough. It's got very little to do if you've managed things right on your end, random issues with delivery just pop out of the thin air and it's your job to monitor it, swear by your mothers name to the big players that you'll play nicely and hope that their robotic overlords are satisfied with your time and effort.

And if you host email for anyone else it gets exponentially worse. I've been doing it long enough that apparently my server has a reputation now so those cases aren't as frequent as they used to, but they still pop up now and then and it takes time to figure it out with no other reward than the issue goes away, until it returns without any way to really know why.

@SocialDoki@lemmy.blahaj.zone what do you use now?

Sadly my server predated Docker or I would have done this. After I left the community I think they migrated to Docker.

They weren't asking, I was getting spammed with attempts. I changed the ports and locked down my server. In the end I switched to VPS's.

I want to be able to pick a song and say "give me a playlist of similar songs I don't know yet", and have that play immediately. That's just not something a self-hosted setup can do. :/

It largely is, but yesterday the Recognize app broke and I have no idea how to fix it. I think the environment got messed up from an apt-get upgrade? Its little things like that I have to figure out how to fix

Okay, but do you run it in containers or on bare metal?

Ouch that's brutal. You must have spent so much money on running all that and so much time collecting all that media.

It's not that hard honestly. I only have one TB though but it really isn't that much of a hassle.

Like a password manager, I can't trust myself for the seeds to get misplaced.

Authy, having paid bitwarden and 2FA in one app is a disaster waiting to be happen in case of a security breach.