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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This article, and a lot of others, seem to be using an overloaded meaning of "personal".

All the arguments stem from the assumption that personal projects have the same uptime, scaling, and deployment requirements as some large commercial site. Some personal projects might but I'd argue most of those are really commercial in the sense that you're developing them for a portfolio or the like. They're not personal.

It makes sense to use business tools like kubernetes when you're making a demo business site. It doesn't make it a good platform for personal projects.

The best platform for those is hosting from home on a single computer, for free, with total control. ie, personal.

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I disagree. Even for personal projects I want to be able to access them from my phone while out and about. Something running on my home computer (which is turned off when I'm not there!) doesn't help. Nevermind that my home internet isn't fast or reliable.

If you include running my own blog/mail/XMPP/matrix servers in "personal projects", then I would love to have perfect uptime.

Additionally, being able to reuse high quality helm charts here just makes things simple instead of having one set of instructions for "personal" use and one set of instructions for everyone else.

Why would you want to be able to access your personal projects from your phone? What context requires this over waiting and solving the problem at home?

What about work life balance? (yes, it's a personal project, but still)

i have a paperless filing system that i frequently access from the office for things like scans of bills that aren’t yet electronic, etc. it’s fantastic to be able to access it all (via VPN; never direct) wherever i like

A personal project might be something that is useful in your day to day life (e.g., a notes app, todo list, or calendar), or something that you want to be able to show to fiends/family when you see them in person (e.g. a photo album, or something related to a mutual hobby).

Sometimes the personal project is an app: it has an API it talks to.

Sometimes the personal project is a website: it has progress tracking that I want to check on.

Sometimes the personal project is for home automation, I want to check the status of it or tell my heater to turn on remotely.

Is your ISP and service really that bad? If it is I think you have bigger problems you should address before working on personal projects.

I've been running my personal website from home for almost 2 decades on Comcast and I've never had a problem. I can always access my sites when I'm not home. And additionally I can access all my other media. Even when I only had a megabit or so of upload it was more than enough. Downtimes have been very rare and usually only for a couple hours once per year in the middle of local night.

That said, of course you can't run a mailserver from home. For that, because of residential IP blacklists, I run from a rented VPS. In fact I run webservers on them too, but only for hosting large files. It's easier to just cp whatever ~/www than always have to upload things.

> Is your ISP and service really that bad?

What I can get commercially? yes. the best available to me is 14/1 ADSL. And I'm in a dense upscale urban area. As far as I understand it, this is relatively common situation worldwide.

> If it is I think you have bigger problems you should address before working on personal projects.

What I have done is set up my own wireless link using Ubiquiti dishes to a nearby location with a 100mbps net connection. But this is hugely unusual: both to have building access to add a dish to my apartment building roof, and to have a Line-of-sight location to connect to, that also lets me set up a dish on their roof, and connect it to their network.

> I can always access my sites when I'm not home.

I used to try and do that (subject to internet quality), but then I realised I was spending $50 a month on power bills for leaving my desktop powered on 24/7. The cost of a $5 dollar VPS is far less.

Often personal projects are for learning new technologies and applying them in a meaningful way. E.g. many people want to run their personal projects on Kubernetes to play around with Kubernetes and understand how apps can be operated with it.

I'll admit that Kubernetes Is a Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects when your personal project is to learn how to use Kubernetes.

Well yeah, I'm sure the time/money will pay for itself when he's looking for a job. I know I look favorably at homelabbers during technical interviews and DIY is often the only time you can get exposure to $new_hotness at some jobs.

> The best platform for those is hosting from home on a single computer, for free, with total control. ie, personal.

Or just get a cheap DO box. You can run quite a lot one, and have it always accessible, on the internet, etc...

how do you get a 'cheap DO box'?

I believe he is talking about digitalocean.com. Their smallest offering is $5/mo for 1vCPU, 1GB ram, 25GB ssd, and 1TB transfer.

Huh. This competes with a raspberry pi plugged into a home network (and is likely more reliable).

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