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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I think the whole "self hosting isn't easy" meme gets repeated so much that people just take it as given now and default to managed software. Or, someone might argue "Well, my grandmother who knows nothing about tech cannot self-host, so it's not viable!" ignoring there is a huge spectrum of competence between grandma and a seasoned Linux sysadmin. People aren't morons, and there's enough info out there on how to do it. I agree it's not organized very well, but it's not like setting up a web server is dark wizardry.

With all the tools out there and easy access to VPS services and even bare metal for your basement, there's never been a better time to self host. And not just web servers, but E-mail, git, photos and media, and so on, it's very accessible.

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I agree it's overblown. It's amazing how robust of a setup (more than sufficient for residential use!) you can get with little effort given how easy things are nowadays.

I've been self-hosting a lot of load-bearing household stuff (I have stuff on the "wife-critical" path: if it goes down, "the internet goes down" and I get a text from her) for almost 10 years and I've only had 2 incidents of particular reputational-risk note:

1) a routine reboot of the main server triggered a BTRFS bug that blocked mounting it again. This took an evening and a reboot into an arch linux ISO to fix (arch had a new-enough version of the btrfs tools that had the ability to fsck/repair the fs).

2) my proxmox setup was initially installed with zfs and zfs-on-root. This exploded and the "on root" part stopped working one day. This was the most annoying thing to fix so far because I ended up dumping any interesting data to an external HDD and just re-paving the server, this time reinstalling with just ext4 and lvm (which is admittedly a setup I'm much more comfortable debugging). No issues since then.

Both these events are from over 3 years ago, so it's been smooth sailing in recent times.

The complaint is fair though. Trying to find a complete or the "correct" guide to something is very difficult even when you already know roughly what you are doing.

I took me ages to work out how to setup postfix properly from about 10 slightly different "guides". The Postfix book wasn't even that helpful. There are also lots of very out-of-date guides that might have been OK for 2015 but not anymore. They don't get deleted because "link juice"

It is sad but true but you get one little bit wrong and you potentially leave a door wide-open.

Postfix is a special kind of hell though, in that getting a good setup requires wading though decades of legacy stuff and patching together a bunch of non-default stuff to get, for instance, dkim signing and stuff working right. I've done this before myself, and agree it was super annoying and not fun, but I also think it is potentially the biggest outlier in self-hosting difficulty I've encountered.

Lots of services are barely more than - apt install, systemctl enable --now, ufw allow 8080 (if you even firewall within your network).

I actually found Postfix fairly easy to configure once you have a solid understanding of Email (which took me a good while at first). Dovecot on the other hand...

Majority of the documentations I came across usually have the mantra of "Do this and you are golden". I know it is not dark wizardary, it just the documentations are aiming for someone who have the experience and the technical knowledge of this. Whereas there are people who are pushing "self-hosting is the answer! Even your tech-inept grandma can do it!" without providing documentations for inexperienced people like me. Annoyingly that some guides have parts that have a links to other guides that barely provide information about this. It is like "I know how to set it up but I am not gotta tell you how to do it, so here the link that might help" and it didn't help at all.

When I have begun to install and manage servers, more than 20 years ago, I did not have any kind of prior experience and I did not have anyone whom I could ask.

So I have just read the handbook, but I have read it completely, which needs more than a day.

It is likely that there are also other operating systems and Linux distributions that have good documentation, but I can testify only about those that I have used in the beginning, the FreeBSD handbook and then the Gentoo Linux handbook.

Both handbooks were good enough to convert anyone into a system administrator.

Unfortunately, both handbooks are not as good in 2022 as they were e.g. in 2002, because they have not always been updated after every change, or the updates have not been as detailed as the original parts of the handbooks.

Even so, both handbooks remain reasonably good today.

Especially the FreeBSD handbook is good for someone who lacks experience, because FreeBSD is much more self-contained, i.e. there are a lot of choices that have already been made for you and you do not have to worry about them.

So for someone who is inexperienced, I believe that the fastest way to managing a server remains to read the complete FreeBSD handbook and install and configure a server based on that.

There are programs which are available only on Linux, but the administration of a Linux server requires much more work than for a FreeBSD server (even if much less than for a Windows server), so for a beginner I think that FreeBSD with its more complete documentation and less possible choices is easier to try.

I'm skeptical that your layperson would be able to keep self-hosted applications secure constantly. Hell, huge corporations have a difficult time with it.

I have this issue too. When I tried to set up self-hosting, I assumed that there are steps that requires me to expose it to the internet. Turn out that it already exposed and didn't (or barely) provided the information of how to close it off securely and keep it private network only. When I tried to find information about it, there was always guides that are not consistent with it. Some will say I have to go in php.ini to do this, then go to SQlite to do that, then go to other files do there, then adding 20 steps to keep it secured. I'm just wondering why there are not any centralized options to do this. I just want a option that I can tick in the software and left it off as that.

I understand those documentations are not for laypeople for me. However it is annoying when people out there kept pushing the self-hosting for beginners narrative without providing the necessary tools for laypeople to keep themselves secured and reliable.

>I understand those documentations are not for laypeople for me. However it is annoying when people out there kept pushing the self-hosting for beginners narrative without providing the necessary tools for laypeople to keep themselves secured and reliable.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

A few clicks, a configuration form and integrated tools to set up external dependencies (i.e., LetsEncrypt certs), et voila! You're running a self-hosted application.

AFAICT, this is more about developers not creating the packaging/configuration/management tools necessary for effective use by non-technical users.

Sure, I can write a sql query to modify the schema of an applications' database, but my highly educated and intelligent physician brother would just throw up his hands in disgust.

Make self hosting easy and people will use it. And Docker-compose isn't "easy" for a lay person.

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