Ask HN: Are there any devs that do also self-hosting of services?

3 points·thepra··6 comments

Most(if not all) of the colleagues that I've encountered in my professional career don't have this kind of interest or will, which leaves me wondering about it.

ps: by self-hosting I mean with both a mix of services developed by others(ex. Gitea) and their own(for me it's collAnon.app)

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I self host gitlab (digital ocean) + gitlab runner (mac mini at home).

I set it up years ago on the same server I have my static website. Since then I've hired few people and we keep using the same instance and we added a mac runner to it. Upgrades were pretty painless. We see no reason to migrate to SaaS right now.

Earlier in my career I self hosted all kinds of stuff, but these days I prefer to pay and forget about operations side.

Services I'm using personally yes - and I suspect there's a few people here who do it as well.

As for the services for customers... unless it makes financial sense and you're happy to be effectively responsible for it 24/7 - why would you? Others can do it better and cheaper and you can charge for the initial setup.

They are no customers if the service is free, like in my case.

I don't think viraptor meant free, but rather that for the ongoing maintenance to be worth it for them, they'd have to charge a price that'd be too high for it to make sense for the customer, especially when "others can do it better and cheaper".

I know a few devs who are hosting opensource alternatives of popular service like Dropbox. Other more extreme are hosting their own dns on pi-hole, email servers, etc.

We host our own gitlab runners. It gives us more punch for less € and it was relatively easy to set up and is easy to maintain/upgrade.

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