Why You Should Self-Host Everything

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This is a bit out of date.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.

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.

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.

Let's start with the basics: is dev.to self hosted? 😁

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. :)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An article telling people to self host read only by those who already self host. Okay.

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!

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 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.

Sigh, kinda… but don’t forget to factor in your backup costs too

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.

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...

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.

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?

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

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?

What about email?

Old ThinkPad with Win 10 Pro, Plex, Plexamp, and several 14TB drives so I can stream my home media library on the go.

Thanks to self hosting my wife hates me more than before. Thank you self hosting !

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

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