> Self hosting is not something a normal person can just learn overnight and manage.
It's not something most tech people can really (properly) manage either.
It's not something most tech people can really (properly) manage either.
I'm sure of this because I've made a career of it and I do it professionally for a large corporation. I know how many engineers it takes to have a 24/7/365 follows-the-sun rotation that doesn't lead to burnout. I've personally seen and solved lots of failure modes that result in mysterious degredation. (Hey did you know there's firmware on the SAS breakout board itself?) I've read many more, with solutions I'd never have come up with, by people cleverer than me.
An individual tech person could theoretically manage to do it, but I'd rather have my team helping me while I help them. I'm only human, and can't always see my own shortcomings.
I can. But I know better than to try and self-host something mission critical for myself or (especially) family. I self-host the same way a car mechanic has a classic car in their yard that they'll aspirationally fix one day.
These days the bad actors have automated there exploit attempts to the point that its not even really about asking when you will get hit rather then if you will get hit anymore, its almost instant in most cases.
with so little leeway its just not viable to self host anything that is exposed to the internet, and then if you still have to deal with things like off-site backups if you care at all about your data.
I once got a nasty call from Comcast's net abuse department because I was gasp running a mail server. It was locked down tight, and only accepting mail from an old email provider.
They didn't care. I was told that if I had SMTP open or they saw SMTP traffic coming in, I'd be permanently banned from being a Comcast customer because I was "running a server."
Internet needs to be declared a utility and internet companies need to concern themselves only with reliably delivery of network packets and to otherwise completely fuck off. My power company, gas company, and water company don't give a fuck what I do with my electricity, gas, or water.
That's not really true, there are offerings on the market that make it a breeze. Take Synology. You get raid with dozens of terabytes, that is self managed and has got instructions on every aspect of usage. It's got Google Photos rip-off for every mobile platform, it's got LDAP, Email, Caldav and Cardav packages with GUI. It's got DNS server with easy to use GUI, it's got packages for NextCloud and it's got something like Dropbox that is made by Synology as well.
You don't need no port forwarding or fancy security, it can connect to Synology's cloud thingy that will route your traffic back home correctly, DDNS on steroids.
So if you really want to self host everything, it is couple grands out of pocket and couple of evenings of clicking around.
I am not affiliated with Synology, just a happy user (although I only use it as raid storage with SMB, NFS and as Docker server).
Also there used to be "Windows Home Server" thingy.