> Self hosting is when you do everything yourself and that can be really cheap
“Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.
“Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.
Especially since it was originally used in the Linux desktop context.
If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense.
I am far more productive with a Linux desktop and self-hosted / managed "solutions" than their commercial alternatives.
For example: My media server setup far outperforms Netflix and Spotify in terms of ROI and /even/ convenience.
Similarly my Linux desktop PC is better for work and play compared to any off the shelf MacOS or Windows experience.
If you have the perseverance and initial time to invest, you end up over time saving so much time and money.
We're coming a full circle. At work, we just installed a couple of massive 64-core Xeon machines. On prem. Like it is 2002.
I self host a ton of stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent writing code, but, ultimately, I think having good sysadmin and network admin abilities makes a difference in the quality of software development.
Sometimes I see developers that barely seem to know how networks and DNS work.
And the whole argument about time spent is getting weaker. My stuff has gotten to the point where it's a bunch of Docker containers that I could auto-update if I wanted. The hardest part is picking containers that are maintained, but all the official ones are nowadays.
Building the skill requires an investment of time, which has to be compared against more productive (read: profitable) alternatives. Remember that all endeavors have opportunity costs.
Every time I've done the math, this only comes out ahead financially if you already have a huge library or if you are willing to torrent.
Is there something I'm missing?
hmmm... Let's count : 8 hours of work = 8 hours + 1.5 hours traveling to work + 1 hour for noon break. Then I sleep 7 hours. Then I need 1 hour to get ready in the morning. In the evening, it takes about 1.5 hour to cook (don't tell me it's my choice to spend time cooking instead of eating pre-made-full-of-sugar-and-fat food). Total = 20. So 4 hours left. But somehow, work is sometimes hard, so I need about an hour of rest. So in the end 3 hours left per week day. On the weekend, I'll spend 2 hours doing groceries, 2 hours keeping the house clean and doing repairs. Unless you are alone, you'll have time spent socializing, which is not exactly a choice neither, you need it for your mental health. And if you do some sports, again because it's fun but also because, at some point, it's for your health (i.e. being able to use your non-working time in a useful way). So well, it's not like there's much left. And I don't even count the kids... (but that was a choice :-) )
A raspberry pi is not sufficient for running things like nextcloud in any kind of performant way.
Most servers with enough GB of RAM and powerful processors can cost in the 50/100 USD range to rent per month. It's much cheaper to self host beyond a rock bottom VPS. Leaving a modern PC on the whole time will not cost that much in a month, and what you invest in hardware will pay for itself with the difference over time.
I think people see those ridiculous rack-mount servers some people run at home that suck down 300+ watts and assume that's just normal!
I went for even lower power usage, with an i3-7100u box that uses about 2W most of the day and cost $75 plus some extra RAM.
I'm guessing you're looking at the preowned market?
For those prices, people might consider themselves lucky to get an underpowered Celeron with BYO RAM and storage, brand new.
These days power usage might be workable with something like a mac mini server. I did a test and my ryzen 5 server with 3 HDDs was drawing 75w minimum and my area has quite expensive power so it just didn't make sense to keep running it.
A VPS also comes with a lot of really useful advantages. You aren't tied down to the hardware. As your needs change, you can change the scale of the VPS. Right now I still have the homeserver sitting here waiting to be sold as well as some other previous machines which were not powerful enough.
A VPS is also relatively unaffected by things like power and internet outages. It just keeps working. It's more convenient when you move house since you don't have downtime in the process. It has a dedicated fixed IP address and ipv6 with no fucking around with CGNAT or blocked ports.
Just buying a fixed IP address would cost an extra $5/month.
Once you consider every cost, a VPS can seem pretty good value in many cases.
That's a ridiculous take, because the skills you get through self-hosting are actually marketable afterwards.
As Chaucer would have it: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne”
That said, the learned skills are only actually valuable if you can use what you learned later on in life. I've done my fair share of fiddling around with raspberry pis and kernel compiling when I was younger, but can't think of a single time in the last few years where I had to use that knowledge in my day job now that everything is containers+k8s+<some cloud hoster>. Maybe we can argue that it gave me a slight speedup when trying to grok the container execution model or something like that, but I could have gained that knowledge much more efficiently in other ways.