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Comment by spansoa | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried it, but Piwigo[0] looks promising for photo albums & management. That or Ente[1] although Ente doesn't have a self-hosting option like Piwigo.

If you really want true self hosting you would run it off your own on-prem machine and use your ISP to push & pull content. Putting things on a VPS is not really 'self' hosting as you're entrusting a third party to not get their datacenter burned down, or the hard-drives corrupted, etc

That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped, so having /BOTH/ a VPS and an in-house on-prem solution means you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and you have a contingency plan in place, which one day may be worth it. It buys you peace of mind because of the redundancy.

[0] https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo

[1] https://ente.io/

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> That said, the only caveat to hosting in your own house is it could suffer a fire, and your data is wiped

Well, there are other reasons to prefer using external hosting. Home connections are typically port‐filtered, have dynamic IP addresses, and have a low IP reputation, and your ISP selection is very limited. Whereas if using a VPS there are so many options that it’s easy to shop around.

But you can still self‐host while getting the benefits of a VPS. Just forward ports from the VPS over a WireGuard tunnel to your real machine. Then all the actual infrastructure is on hardware you control, and the cloud provider has no access to your TLS private keys.

Yes, and you can even do this quite cheaply. Oracle cloud free tier has a nice traffic allowance: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . Add tailscale/cloudflare tunnel/plain wireguard for connecting your home server to the cloud instance.

I am comfortable re-building my self hosting setup from scratch/backup. I enjoy the sense of agency being able to fix something myself vs wait for a cloud service to return. As I rely on my self hosted setups more, I also build in the appropriate amount of high availability features required. You will learn a TON of skills that are sideways related to software engineering. It's very empowering to be nearly entirely self sufficient with your profession. I can write/test/deploy software (ie pay the bills) and never have some critical service or infrastructure carpet pulled out from underneath you(ie dockerhub,github) and prevent you from doing your work.

This is such a niche attitude/market but it has been incredible to see the surge of self-hosted applications/services over the last 5 years.

It is also relatively easy these days with modern ci/cd tools to have a "portable" enough stack that in the event of an emergency you could purchase a few linode instances and be migrated to a vps environment in an afternoon.

IANAL but I believe another reason to true self host, at least in the US, is that rules for things inside your house have extra protection. Sure they can still get a warrant, but this is a totally different level than what they need to get the same data off of a VPS.

Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?

> Do you really have any search and seizure protections on a VPS?

I'm aware of this, which is why I do full disk encryption of any VPS instance I operate. See the Third Party Doctrine[0] which applies to the US only AFAIK.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

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