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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

I second your self-hosted life. "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer running Apache instead of mine. I will never pay for someone else's servers. That just makes no sense to me.

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Maybe someone else's servers wouldn't be down when you post a link to your blog on HN.

As someone who hosts a lot of his own stuff, that's the real selling point of cloud hosting. Not having to care about things like spam filtering, or how some blog you want to publish is going to scale in the face of unexpected traffic.

Also price. I'm not sitting next to a giant hydro dam or solar install where the price of running a server and keeping it cool is near zero. I still want to be able to take advantage of that.

Meh. It's not really a hosting issue, just poor web dev fundamentals. He's clearly using a non cached, basic wordpress installation on mysql. Just the basics of using a varnish or nginx cache + cloudflare would have prevented this. Pretty incredible to believe that people are hitting a database on their index page a for static site in 2016.

None of that is in any way an argument against cloud hosting. Do you think anyone who uses say Blogspot has to care about any of that?

The entire point of using cloud hosting is to pay money to not have to care about stuff like that.

Do you homeschool your kids? Grow your own produce? Kill your own cows?

I mean, why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?

Unless you do servers. In that case, sure. Whatever.

Lots of people home school their kids, grow their own produce, and kill their own cows. One doesn't need to do everything themselves to want to do some things themselves. And if your premise is that one needs to be an expert, before doing anything on their own, then how would people learn? How do people become experts?

I never said that. If you want to learn to manage servers, by all means. The industry needs more good people!

But to suggest that everyone should do (or will do it, as some people are commenting here) it is bananas.

  I never said that.

The implication in your original comment is quite clear, "why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?". So, you actually did say that...

  But to suggest that everyone should do (or will do it, as some people are commenting here) it is bananas.

The comment you replied to didn't suggest that everyone should self host, it simply stated a preference. Your comment, however, was the exact opposite, and suggested people shouldn't self host "unless they do servers"

Sometimes, yes. And in each of those cases, the right and motivated person can produce a better product that institutions.

Personally, I self host services on IaaS (Vultr). At least then I have full ownership of my data, and it guarantees I'm running on open source software that can be modified for data extraction at any time.

I do the same. And some times it goes down and I'm busy so it stays down for a day. And I never find time to keep everything updated to the latest security patches, etc. Fun hobby, but I wouldn't trust that as my only repository of data.

Your attitude includes an implicit "trust the smart people."

But the smart people are proving again and again that they are not worthy of our trust. They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us so they can influence and move against us in the future. Why should we trust anyone who sees us as a product?

You lost me on how you went from "They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us" (which I agree with) to "move against us in the future". Care to elaborate?

Or to put it a bit more shortly, extreme data collection is a trojan horse, for a brave new world where individual taste, free will, and unpredictability are nearly completely quantified.

You do own your own phone right? Owning a server on the cloud is no different. There will be a future shortly where everyone keeps their data on their own servers instead of handing out to all these corporations.

I own my phone, but the data is still in the cloud.

I'm not sure I agree with your version of the future. People don't know enough ( and don't want to) about security, scalability, availability, etc.

OK, since you own your phone. Do you have any clue about security and availability of your phone? Why do you think millions can own and "run" their own phone but not own and run their server?

You should read the terms of service with your Cloud provider again. When you go out and buy a phone with cash, nobody can take that from you. When you go out and spend money on Cloud servers you will not walk away with that data should you stop paying your bill, or the company is hacked, or there is a scandal and they go out of business, or they decide you're breaking their rules and they delete it. When you setup an externally available NAS from home the only thing stopping you from accessing it is your ISP and your electric company, and those are already common denominators of accessing any Cloud storage medium. And lets not forget Uncle Sam and random Google execs picking up the hood every so often to see what's under there. It's a lot of work, and it isn't for everyone, but the benefits outweigh the risks for me.

"...why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?"

I think, mainly, because life is more interesting when you do things you are not an expert of.

Sure. And that's called a hobby. You can do whatever you want, but the point here is this is not what the masses are going to do. Or should do, for that matter.

> "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer running Apache instead of mine.

Yes, plus a bunch of engineers keeping the thing running.

Plus a whole bunch of new operational techniques, security concerns, development paradigms, scaling opportunities, service offerings, integration possibilities, failure modes, billing options.

That phrase, "just someone else's computer", has long seemed to me a piece of recklessly dismissive arrogance. Engineering cloud-based systems is simply not the same as off-cloud, and assuming otherwise will lead to dissimilar outcomes.

Makes sense to me.

I can't afford a wide pipe, I can afford Digital Ocean.

If I want to spin up a server for a day or two it's much more economical to pay for a virtual server than buy one and install it in my home.

The clincher for me is email. I'm happy to configure and run a web server, maybe with a caching reverse proxy, couple of synced db servers, whatever. But configuring email just isn't worth it - I've tried. Whilst it can be setup the big players in email seem to regularly blackhole you 'just because' anyway. So the amount of time in setup and servicing just isn't worth it for a handful of domains (basically me + immediate family) unless you've got time to waste. It if a good learning experience, and I do like the control, particularly over span handling.

Even using a (small) ISP, having DKIM and SPF setup, mail sent, even as a reply, still gets spam binned often by Google, Live, be etc..

Practically it just doesn't seem to be something to do on your own.

I've been using Mail-In-A-Box for self-hosted email for about a year and a half, and it's been very low maintenance and fairly easy to setup.

It did take some time at the beginning to get all of the DNS stuff right, but that's a one-time cost. And, so far, I haven't noticed any spam binning once I finally got the DKIM & SPF stuff correct.

I guess part of it could be that since I'm using a lesser known ISP my IP hasn't been blacklisted as part of a large block.

If you still have an interest in self-hosting email, I highly recommend Mail-In-A-Box (https://mailinabox.email/).

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