this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
158 points (92.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40332 readers
526 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago

I'll parrot the top reply from Reddit on that one: to me, self hosting starts as a learning journey. There's no right or wrong way, if anything I intentionally do whacky weird things to test the limits of my knowledge. The mistakes and troubles are when you learn. You don't really understand the significance of good backups until you had to restore from them.

Even in production, it differs wildly. I have customers whom I set up a bare metal Ubuntu in some datacenter for cheap, they've been running on that setup for 10 years. Small mom and pop shop, they will never need a whole cluster of machines. Then at my day job we're looking at things like Kubernetes and very heavyweight stacks because we handle a lot of traffic.

Some people self-host a PiHole on a Raspberry Pi and that's all they need. Some people have entire NAS setups with smart TVs accessing their Plex/Jellyfin servers for the whole extended family. I host my own emails, which is a pain in the ass to get working reliably and clean your IP reputation.

I guess the only thing you should know is, you need some time to commit to maintaining your stuff if you don't want it to break or get breached (if exposed to the Internet), and a willingness to learn because self hosting isn't a turnkey experience. It can be a turnkey installation but when your SD card/drives fails you're still on your own to troubleshoot and fix it. You don't set a NextCloud server to replace Google Drive with the expectation that you shove the server in a closet forever. Owning your infrastructure and data comes at a small but very important upkeep time investment.