Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

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For most things we want to do there's more than one way to do it. Ultimately it comes down to having freedom to try different things, to experiment with web technologies as my interests evolve. I really really dislike having to bend to unnecessary restrictions. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.

A VPS is a great way to go. IMO managing a VPS is hardly burdensome, the amount of effort it requires is minuscule. Certainly far less than dealing with Windows on this laptop.

Currently I'm self-hosting a videoconferencing server (jitsi.org, with customizations) that is used pretty heavily. Also run a server for a website created with my own software, call it developmental, experimental, whatever. Keeps me interested and teaches me a lot.

No way I could do this stuff in conventional setups. While this approach works for me, certainly easy to see how it wouldn't work for many others.

It's good to have such great options to choose from at truly affordable cost.

Are you using Jitsi via Docker? I was self-hosting a Jitsi instance for a while for my friends, but among all the services I'm hosting, it required the most work and broke all the time. At some point I gave up and we're now using either Signal or, if Signal can't do what we need, some public Jitsi instance that we trust.

I'm self-hosting jitsi in a "regular" VPS (4GB/4cpu). Though Docker is a popular and supported option. In the years I've been using jitsi it's improved immensely. The current stable version is quite usable, works fine when participants have good internet connections. I mostly use it with 2-5 people. Once installed and configured very little attention has been required.

I'd agree that for larger meetings the public server at https://meet.jit.si is a better option. AFAIK it's trustworthy, but of course my own instance provides greater assurance of privacy. Anyway I'm confident that's true, though I couldn't give a 100.000% guarantee...

Thanks a lot. Might try it again at some point.

> I really really dislike having to bend to unnecessary restrictions. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.

You aren't. I'm one who actually moved from a more managed product to a VPS precisely because I couldn't get what I needed from the managed solution.

It's great we have options, but it's absolutely a false dichotomy that the author is presenting. You can have SaaS solutions for things that fit well, while having VPSs to research and develop things that don't fit into a neat little package (yet).

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