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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you'd self-host a public site from home when you can get a VM from https://www.hetzner.com/cloud for € 4.81 /mo (1vCPU / 2GB RAM / 20 TB bandwidth) with much better internet access. Residential internet connections are more unreliable, have poor upload speeds and requires running a server 24/7 with ongoing electricity running costs.

Or if it's a static rendered website you can publish on GitHub Pages for free and use a CNAME to use a custom domain which is what we do for our docs https://docs.servicestack.net created with https://vitepress.vuejs.org that uses GitHub Actions to automatically build and publish the site on commit.

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You don't control a VPS, uptime doesn't matter, and even my 5 Mb/s upload is just fine. Electrical costs are marginal. But most importantly there is nothing more convient than $ cp photo.jpg ~/www/ and sending someone the link example.com/photo.jpg. Plus you have tons of space.

That's not to say that a VPS in addition isn't useful or fun. https://indieweb.org/POSSE and all. It just isn't at all required.

I mean is scp any more difficult?

Or git push if you are using GitHub pages?

It’s strange to compare self hosting and GitHub pages.

In most case the main factors to choose self hosting are independence, fun and learning by tinkering. That’s three items that GitHub Pages doesn’t provide.

Just recently I linked my home LAN with my VPS with WireGuard. I needed to configure queues on my home router because I got consistent 100MBps on the wire and this is a bit too much for my VPS provider (too much to pay, not to handle).

I don't think people are seriously doing self-hosting for practical reasons - it's more for the fun and pride of setting something up yourself.

I run a basic commercial site on my home because after 2 years, my co-op owned fiber ISP has never had so much as a blip of downtime. If they did, I can spin up a cloud server, pop the backup down there, and redirect via Cloudflare in probably less than hours.

Some people have symmetric gigabit (or faster) home internet these days.

Renting slices of someone else's shared HW hardly compares in terms of price to owning the full machine. Expected lifetime of some cheap SBC you'd use for hosting your personal projects is ~10 years. It can cost say EUR 50-100 to run it that long these days. 10 years of that hetzner VM is EUR 577. That's 500 EUR I can do something else with per machine.

Whenever I try calculating HW ownership vs renting in the "cloud" for personal usecases it at worst comes up to paying off in a year, and usually sooner.

There are also many other benefits of having physical access to the HW.

Just right now about 7 SBCs I run have total cost of ownership at $20 on average each and I've been running them for 5-7 years...

> if it's a static rendered website you can publish on GitHub Pages for free

Reminder that if you are going to do this, then it has to lie within the subset of uses deemed acceptable by the GitHub terms, which forbids hosting on GitHub Pages for e.g. e-commerce or any other business reasons; GitHub Pages is not a 1-to-1 substitute for e.g. Cloudflare Pages or Netlify.

I want to self-host a public site because I can be fully in control of the stack. It gives satisfaction to distribute a website to the entire world without depending on third parties other than your utilities company and internet connection. It's fun and I learn a lot from it. But from a business perspective, your solution is ofcourse better, just not as fun.

Hetzner is a good provider, but you can get some resources for free as well. https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

These free tier offers will kill you on the bandwidth costs.

Two alternatives: cloudflare in front or oracle (which has ridiculous free traffic)

He said it’s a static page too… don’t even need a VM. He can just dump it into Amazon S3 and put cloudfront on top of it. Unlimited scaling across the globe, 1TB free of data transfer, free SSL.

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