Indieweb and self-hosting my own space | Hacker News Reader

Indieweb and self-hosting my own space

axbom.com

55 pointsdoener18 comments

Self hosting is cool, but my main gripe is all the administration you have to do. I self host at home for content like music, my contacts and password management and my pictures and all that kind of stuff, and I've found a good minimal bullshit way of setting everything up. Self hosting a public presence is a different story.

It's not that hard, but it's not set it and forget it. So over time I've offloaded that work onto people that are already doing it. I put my social media presence on a fediverse admin who's doing it already, same with my code hosting. That's really all I need, maybe one day a blog.

If I decide to self host all this stuff, I'd probably run a Gemini server, a honk server and cgit for code, if I don't need a lot of collaboration on what I do. If I host for other people my needs would be more, but I don't foresee that.

Self-hosting can be made as complex as one wants to make it.

Self hosting is best kept simple so it runs like an appliance that can maintain itself.

Some people just use dreamhost for the basics already done for them. Lots of one click apps.

The OP should have their vps mirrored between more than one service provider. Because it’s not a backup if it’s only one copy or just in one host.

It’s not too far fetched to run docker with portainer, or even proxmox on a debian box. Both are solid and I save hundreds of hours if not more in setup and maintenance manually.

My past complex hosting experience made me think twice about self hosting. It’s been much easier than it used to be. Very little maintenance unless using brittle languages and cutting edge frameworks.

The question is often more about whether there’s inrerest to learn.

You could do a similar 4GB RAM server setup for around $7/month using the Yunohost server app manager (free) + a VPS server host like Hetzner (or see lowendbox for others).

See the instructions on the bottom of this page, for example: https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...

Here's a list of all the server apps Yunohost supports: https://yunohost.org/en/apps?q=%2Fapps

Risky to host all of this on a single-entity business that's only operated for 1 year.

They are around since 2014 - https://www.cloudron.io/imprint.html . So, yeah, around for more than most google products :-P

That is correct and we are determined to stay as well :]

But you're not the hosting provider of the VPS, I meant ofc https://hostup.se

Can't you download backups regularly, rsync them to your local system that you physically own? If the single-entity business disappears you can just get a new VPS from another business and restore the services from backups, can't you?

I know Cloudron supports backups, but I don't know if it's per service and if it includes the config or not. But then, yes!

Is it really self-hosting if it is on someone else's server?

This is an honest question for which I am curious about other's thoughts. I am all for Indie web. If we all took the time to put our own content (self-hosted or not) out there it would be more like the web of yore!

Maybe I'm being too pedantic. For me a better term or statement would be "I maintain a blog/website".

I self-host at home on a RPi and I use a VPS to redirect to it. I don't do much with it. I go in fits and starts where I update and add new stuff to just letting it sit and be.

I use Kamatera for $4/month. They hooked me with there 1 month free trial!

There are various degrees to self hosting. If you say I made this bread from scratch, one can always ask if I planted the wheat plant or grounded the flour or squeezed that oil etc. The fact is still that I made this loaf of bread. Self hosting is such a term, it's a matter of degree, people just get very pedantic about this. The alternative is to not "just buy bread from amazon".

Exactly, the most important step is to get your own domain so that you CAN take more control when needed. The more you do yourself the more you are prepared for if you need to take full control. Its not binary yes/no if you are selfhosting and unless you want to setup direct cables/radiolinks to everyone you want to talk to you are always relying on some kind of external service.

> What I have now at about €20/month:

> 80 GB SSD Storage

> 3 Cores @ 3 GHz

> 4 GB ECC RAM

> 4 TB traffic

This is kind of a bad deal?

Hetzner Cloud gives you for 9.7€

2 vCores

8gb ram

80gb storage

20TB bandwidth

Ahem, self-host and VPS on someone else datacenter is a bit an oxymoron... Sure, you own your part of the infra so you can migrate from a VPS vendor to another, but you also need a homeserver with an equivalent albeit eventually less reliable infra to "self-host".

$15/m for cloudron is a hefty price…

And what was gained here? You have to rely solely on "cloudron" for patching / maintaining the services. Why not go fully managed and be done with it?

What is fully managed in this context? Using SaaS?

Depends on what the use case is. I rely on a classic shared Webhost with classical LAMP stack (with a few additions I don’t use like nodejs,python), mail server and so on. The Webhost takes care of certificates, system security and so on.

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