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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

your own computer.

I understand why some are downvoting this but, with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down and a threadripper giving you like 100 cores for a few bucks, this can be a very handy solution, with quicker deploys and easier management.

security might be too much of a concern for some applications

It's ok if you're ok with your service being down for days at a time. On vacation and the server breaks? Gotta wait till you get home. Internet down? Mine gigabit was just down for five days, a squirrel ate through the fiber and they had to a pull a new one.

Running a server at home is fraught with peril but if those downtimes are ok, then go for it.

I've had a server made of old desktop parts running in my basement for years. Its rarely gone down, and never during vacations. I've added a UPS two years ago, so unless I have an hours long power outage, everything still hums along.

Yes I too have had multiple Frankenstein servers in my house with UPSs, for over 25 years. And most of the time they work great. Except when they don't.

Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service.

You can also buy two.

> Still more reliable and orders of magnitude more powerful than any free service.

I don't think so. AWS Lambda has a generous free tier and runs on infrastructure that has constant monitoring by professionals, spread across thousands of machines in multiple datacenters all over the world, with an SLA.

Your one (or two) servers that share a single consumer internet connection (with no SLA) will never be more reliable.

Yes, you can get more powerful, but again, that's a business decision you have to make. Do you want power or reliability? If uptime is important to your business, then running it at home off of consumer internet is not a good idea.

Either way, relying on free services you typically need a backup plan anyway. And I hardly imagine tailoring everything for amazon can be considered cheap nor sensible.

> you typically need a backup plan anyway.

You need a backup plan for paid services too.

So, what happens when the SLA is violated in the free-tier?

It works until your internet connection and electricity are up. They will go down in any unexpected moment.

5 days?

Was this a business or consumer account?

Do you only have one ISP?

I think it’s hard to justify running your own setup in 2019 when you can get Linode/DO for 5$ a month.

Sure, CPUs are cheap and (if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that’s offers it) consumer internet can be absurdly fast. But if youra app goes down at a critical moment because your consumer-grade ISP has an outage, or someone tripped over the Ethernet cable, or you had a brown out because you live in the UK and everyone put the kettle on at the same time, you’re going to look like a bit of an idiot.

I have that stack and security concerns are holding me back. Any suggestions for ways to secure a home network for public hosting?

Cloudflare Argo tunnels. Reverse HTTP tunnel, similar to ngrok and others.

Put the server on its own DMZ network. If your router doesn't support this, you don't have a good setup for self-hosting.

I did all of this for my family's software company 20 years ago. We were serious about it, too: SDSL line (good at the time!) with an SLA, natural gas standby generator, redundant hardware... never again. I spent all my time futzing with infrastructure rather than producing any business value.

I did learn a ton, and that continues to be valuable (it surprises me how often I'm the only dev in the room that has experience configuring IP routing). But it's a huge time-sink, and I'd never consider doing it to save money (the amount of money saved would be marginal, at best).

Definitely not a money-saver, but being in control and knowing how the underlying pieces fit together is quite valuable.

It’s not a bad idea if your ISP gives you a static IP and you’ve got some spare hardware lying around (just in case closing your laptop causes downtime). If you can isolate that box from the rest of your home network, even better.

Personally I’ve been using $3 Lightsail instances on AWS. There’s a lot you can do with one CPU and half a gig of RAM. An MVP Rails app will squeeze into that easily enough.

Even without a static IP, a free dynamic DNS service is good enough to prototype on a local machine as long as you aren’t using enough bandwidth to tip off your ISP. At that point, however, you’ve probably got enough market validation to move to another host.

Cloudflare free tier is really good for that :-) Since all traffic ends in Cloudflare you can change an IP address and it redirects the traffic in seconds whithout having to wait for dns propagation. Try it.

I will! This is a good tip.

> with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down

Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble and recognize that this doesn't apply to everyone.

I only have 30 megabit up/down with Frontier. I can get faster, but it gets expensive quick, and I don't need more than 30 mbps, even as a gamer. Xfinity only offers 150 megabit down in my neighborhood, with a puny 15 megabit up, and for twice the price.

And as others have mentioned, it creates a single point of failure and if you get hacked, your entire home network is compromised. The last thing you want to have happen is for some unsavory type to decide they don't like you or your services and DDoS your home internet connection. I've had it happen to me and it's not fun.

I'm in Texas

I disagree, but I do have Frontier w/ 12Mbps down, 768kbps up.

I worked on a startup, out of a dude’s house, he also owned the house next door.

I had three separate FiOS ONTs connected to the rackmount server in the living room.

Lots of live video streams.

The accounts were business, so when the gardener slices one of the fiber cables, it was fixed in a few hours, and the other ONT was still working.

My other buddy lives 2 hours away and has symmetric 1Gbps service for $50/mo in a rural area.

I would love to be able to have a symmetric connection.

"Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble" ... I have Business Fiber Internet package from Bell in my house in Toronto. Residential area far from city core with an old houses, definitely not a Silicon Valley. 1000 up and down. It costs me $80 Canadian pesos. Not bad.

Im in the same boat as you (350/350 for $35 tho) but we are outliers even in the Canadian market. Fast internet is just now getting to everyone at affordable prices, even though ive personally had gigabit for 4 years.

Reasons this might be a bad idea:

* Electricity costs for networking/compute hardware often equal VPS costs

* Massive single points of failure WRT power, compute, networking

* ISPs don't like when people run their businesses over consumer networks and will retaliate (forced to change to business plan, account terminated, etc)

* Vastly increased overhead managing the full infra stack (power, HVAC, networking, compute, firmware, OS, etc)

* Massively increased security liability (your site goes viral and now Hacker News and Reddit are sending traffic to your house, on the same network where your personal laptop with your CC info saved on it lives)

XaaP services abstract away so very many of these concerns for prices that oftentimes are below what you pay for the electricity to run your own infrastructure.

I think this works for university student when 99.99% uptime isn't your highest priority. My university has static IP and near 700 up/down speed to each dormitory. So by investing in an old workstation I can easily work on various ideas and built MVP for it. I finally ended up running a crawler service for months before I migrated to a vps.

You can't really do NAT traversal on a university network though, so it's pretty useless for servers.

Each dorm student at my university had a public IP assigned to them.

I also remember downloading quite a bit of MP3s hosted on an SFTP server in a friend of friend’s dorm in Philadelphia.

Can get a $5 vps and set it up as a reverse proxy and vpn host then vpn to it from your locally hosted server to get around that. Not "free" but this method allows you to use whatever fancy hardware you have which would be significantly cheaper than an equivalent vps.

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