You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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This is a bit out of date.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 .
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”
Well, there’s always, you know, mail.
Aah, the good ol‘ wooden variety
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $70-100/year during LowEndTalk Black Friday sales, so it’s definitely worth considering if your use cases can be better handled by a VPS. I have both - a home server for things like photos, music, and security camera footage, and VPSes for things that need to be reliable and up 100% of the time (websites, email, etc)
This sounds excessive, that’s almost 1.1$/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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
i mean, technically a home lab is just something you mess with. So if you’re setting up a home server to get into learning about this shit.
It would technically be a homelab.
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
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Trying to run your own nextcloud be like
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.
You are correct! That first leap into self hosting was a doozy! No regrets now tho ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think you dropped this: \
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)
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Are you planning on self hosting this article? Perhaps on writefreely?
