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Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

I'm not devops, but how hard is it to properly set up VPN / ssh ?

We have a gitlab server, and connecting requires being on VPN, which requires 2FA, and then ssh, which requires your keys to be properly set up.

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Parent comment is talking about self hosting “Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack“. Running all those things (and more) instead of focusing on your core business is probably a mistake for most companies.

I don't think so. The company I work for is really focused on digital independence. Their core business is industrial electronic component design. The whole supporting office runs on libreoffice, thunderbird, mattermost and nextcloud, all hosted on company premise. They employ two full-time admins, one for the windows clients, the other one for the linux clients (which one can ask for) and servers. This whole setup is, according to them, surprisingly easy to manage and maintain, you just have to find a boss who's willing to try it. Maybe it's different when you're a software shop and really need s3 or something

Indeed.

As long as you have decent hardware (cpu/ram mostly) and reliable storage (netapp or something similar) you can get stuff done very easily.

Also, most people seems to not have noticed how fast computers and disks got recently and how resources you can pack into a single physical machine: you can nowadays fill a 2u, 2socket machine with 128c/256t (2x amd epyc) and literally terabytes of ram...

Parent comment is also talking about small companies. Below a certain size all those things (well, equivalent services, not those exactly) don't need more than a single server which is fairly painless. When you grow to a size where you need it at scale, that's where the pain starts.

You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage.

> You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage.

Good luck finding one. The world is divided in 3 spheres of influence: US, China and Russia. To make business you must obey one of them.

Plus the EU, surely?

> Plus the EU, surely?

For most practical purposes, the EU is nested within the US sphere of influence.

US sphere of influence.

Ah, gotcha, agree that makes no sense. We only self-host gitlab and zulip.

It might not be hard, but now you need a number of skilled sysadmin devops people who can also be availble oncall.

Thats not a insignificant cost.

You have to do some planning, but it isn't too hard. The most issues arise from compromises between security and convenience. Cloud services can offer both in the best case, but aside from O365, which is really sluggish, we are actually in the process of migrating back to on premise solutions.

Nobody attacks code repositories of non-software companies anyway, people are after CRM and ERP data. There is the occasional issue with malware from mails and special users, but a backup solution with 15min snapshots solves that issue. Although the latter can cost a bit and might be too expensive for smaller companies.

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