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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

As someone who self-hosts a lot of different apps, self-hosting is really a slippery slope. Once you start enjoying the control over the system and data, you want to self host everything.

The most important aspect is the security and you learn this by doing it.

My entire self-host apps are hosted behind a private VPN called Pritunl, it provides self-hosted corporate VPN like setup where you can manage users and access to servers.

I host these following apps/products right now:

- Pritunl (corporate like VPN)

- Superset (Analytics)

- Bitwarden (Password Manager)

- OpenVPN with Pihole (Personal VPN with Adblock)

- Wireguard with Pihole (Personal VPN with Adblock)

- Drone.io (CI/CD)

- Posthog (Web Traffic Analytics)

- Papercups (Web chat support)

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I think the team dynamic can be just as important from the “host everything” standpoint. Hosts generally have incentives to automate manual processes, and a diverse set of customers pushing to make that automation sane, for some value of sanity.

There’s a struggle against manual processes in self hosted environments, or aggressive automation with bespoke or otherwise incomplete tools. What you want is glue code holding together open source tools without too much abstraction over the top. You should always have a hint what’s going on underneath. I find myself having to spend way too much social capital on this.

While I much prefer self hosted, there is a clear advantage of third parties inasmuch as you can bond over the stupid things their solutions do, instead of driving wedges between teams by engaging in that kind if catharsis.

Out of curiousity, what is reason to host three different VPNs?

I have my own bootstrapped startup since a year and half and I manage the entire infrastructure for my startup.

My startup focuses on big data projects and is currently building a web-based Bloomberg Terminal alternative(https://quantale.io) which is an infrastructure heavy project.

here is why I use 3 VPNs:

1. Pritunl is used as an enterprise VPN setup. Using this VPN, I provide access to different webapps/self-host to different users in my team/clients. for eg, the stage version of Quantale is hosted on a server(with ufw rule to only allow connection from pritunl VPN IP) and I can provide access to you by creating a vpn config for you and you will only be able to access stage server, you wont be able to access any other servers behind this VPN.

2. OpenVPN with Pihole, I use this VPN as a personal VPN. This VPN blocks ads and trackers using PiHole and my self-hosted password manager is only accessible via this VPN

3. Wirehole with PiHole, this is a backup VPN to access my password manager in case I loose access to my OpenVPN server.

Is this for personal use, or to supplement other activities? Probably to use with something else — I really don't see why you'd want analytics stuff for just yourself.

I have my own bootstrapped startup since a year and half and I manage the entire infrastructure for my startup.

My startup focuses on big data projects and is currently building a web-based Bloomberg Terminal alternative(https://quantale.io) which is an infrastructure heavy project.

The Superset self-host analytics is used to provide analytics services to a client in manufacturing sector.

Nice, Posthog is just what i was looking for. Awesome!

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