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Comment by amjd | Hacker News Reader

Dokku [1] is a self-hosted alternative that can be hosted on any IaaS

...or, you know, on IaaP - to give the concept of having your own computer running under your own supervision on your own connection a fancy term. Infrastructure as a Property [1]. All you need is a computer - you're sure to have one of those laying around somewhere - and you're set. You'll be amazed at how much stuff you can host on that old laptop with the broken screen. It even comes with its own built-in UPS, imagine that! Add some external storage if needed and/or for redundancy and you're off to the races. Just make sure to set the thing to automatically install security updates and to make regular backups (rsnapshot configured for hourly snapshots with 3 months retention will go a long way here) and your stuff will be safe and secure - more safe and secure than when it is hosted at some big juicy target like Heroku.

Source: I've been doing this for more than 25 years. Never hot "hacked", never lost important data. I have seen countless drives and power supplies fail but always kept configuration and user-generated data safe (and that is all that matters, the rest can be easily re-installed from distribution media/the 'net).

[1] Maybe I should make a fancy content-less website with annoying scrolling habits for this to attract some VC capital

This comment is needlessly condescending, and you're already describing a ton of system administrator skills that you need to have, plus a good internet connection, plus hardware, which makes a lot of assumptions already.

> Never hot "hacked", never lost important data.

You got lucky. I'm not saying cloud providers are better, I'm saying you got lucky.

...or maybe the risk of "getting hacked" is not as big as it is made out to be given some simple precautions? I am not the only one who "got lucky" after all. Given an up to date distribution with only needed ports open to the 'net and a sensible password for those who use SSH password authentication you'll be safer than at most cloud providers. It is, after all, far more lucrative to try to gain access to the likes of Heroku than it is to JoeSchmoe.org.

Also, "needlessly condescending", give me a break. This site is called Hacker News so it is silly to call a call for exploration - the essence of the hacker spirit - "condescending".

I do not find it condescending. I find the perspective refreshing. Of course self hosting is not an option when building a product, you want to outsource what you do not expect to become an expert at and which is not part of your core business. Any form of operations and hosting quickly becomes such a thing.

Having said that I have also self hosted to 15 years. Arguably services that gave high utility, but never anything related to core business. I for one host everything on Digital Ocean. As a consultant I dont do enterprise cloud deployments very often, but when I do, I chose AWS and the client has the funding and pays for it.

I wish more people would write about how to do this.

We most certainly do over at https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab and https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted

Another comment mentions Dokku: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313898

This gives you a Heroku-like experience on a single machine and could be enough for your needs.

Most people don't have internet connections fast enough to handle running their own website. Sure, you might handle a low-traffic page fine, but all it takes is hitting the second page of HN to bring it down.

Until about 2 years ago, I was on a 30 mbps connection. Gigabit wasn't even an available option.

+1 for Dokku, super simple to port a client's simple Heroku workload over!

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