Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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Self-hosting is weird. I hear a lot of people say it's so much work, but I put like an hour a month into my server at most. I think it's mostly fine from an administrative standpoint, as mentioned elsewhere, not much has actually changed from 2003. You definitely don't need kubernetes. If anything, I think most of what's changed since then is that there's been a flood of bad sysadmin advice making people believe they need cluster management stuff on a single computer. Cattle is plural. What you've got is a pet. Love it and it will love you back.

I host a lot of weird crap on my living room server including a publicly available Internet search engine, and server administration wise it's not a lot of work at all. The search engine requires a fair deal of babysitting, but that's on me for building shitty admin tools.

It's also great to have a beefy always-on computer to run compute jobs flooring all cores of the CPU for 200 hours on and not have to worry about bills later. Like I can't recommend this enough. There's so many cool projects gated behind taking more than a few hours to process.

What does give me a hassle is hosting stuff I didn't build myself though. Like gitea. Got a bunch of bots signing up creating spam profiles. I think as a rule I'd recommend against hosting anything that offers comments or sign ups. Cloudflare helps, but only just.

I used to keep a server in my room for a decade and I plan to retire it this year. An hour a month is actually a lot as this overhead is highly non-uniform; the server may work fine for months then need a whole day worth of work, which I can no longer easily sustain. [1] That said, I have of course run lots of softwares I haven't written, so maybe the actual takeaway from your experience should be that.

[1] For example, distro upgrades. Have a distro that somehow promises no breakage? Good! Now I can spend hours to migrate to that distro and learn all its quirks only to find that the promise didn't actually hold.

This is sort of true of owning a car or a home or basically anything. Of those things, my server requires by far the least amount of maintenance (even considering needing to take a day to do something more invasive maintenance once two years or so).

I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.

> I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.

I think this is the key takeaway: host at home unless you want good uptime.

I don't host from home when I want the page to be available even if:

1. There's a power outage at my home

2. I need to e.g. change a lightbulb, so I have to turn off the power (and therefore my router and server)

3. Someone accidentally switches off either the router or server

You turn off the power to change a lightbulb? It never occurred to me before that that could be a dangerous activity. You hold it by the glass and unscrew it, then do the reverse for the new one. Your hand should never goes near the socket, right?

I feel like there's a joke about sysadmins and lightbulb changes hiding in here somewhere

> host at home unless you want good uptime.

It doesn't even really take much to get 99.999% uptime from a home server. I have my server, cable modem, router, and firewall plugged into a small UPS that can keep everything going for about 30 minutes if the power goes. I've never had downtime due to power interruptions.

If I lived in an area where the power was less reliable, I'd use a bigger UPS.

In order for someone to accidentally switch off a critical piece of equipment, they'd have to go to my closet and remove all of the boxes and other crap I have stacked in front of it in there. Not likely to happen by accident.

You realize that 99.999% uptime is 6 minutes of downtime a year? How is your internet even that stable? And do you never restart the machine?

A UPS solves a lot of these problems. You may lose availability during a power outage, but you don't lose uptimes, and those hard shut-offs are nasty for harddrive longevity.

Self-hosting shouldn't be a chore. Self-hosting should be fun! Sometimes I just do maintenance because I can and I like it, not even because it's needed. I could be making the dumbest incremental changes that don't even net a profit in the end just because I like doing it so much.

To me they are definitely pets and I love them for it.

Same here!

It's a broad church I think, it depends on what you're self-hosting and why. Email is more work than Nextcloud, and an hour or two of maintenance work feels different when it's a hobby you're doing on a quiet weekend than when you're busy with life and some essential service has gone down unexpectedly.

Security, as well, is a very deep rabbit hole that can be hard to really get your head around unless you have specific training in it. I "self" host some stuff on a public-facing VPS but there are a couple of services I have moved back to third-party hosting because I had persistent anxiety about unexpected downtime or data breaches.

> It's also great to have a beefy always-on computer to run compute jobs flooring all cores of the CPU for 200 hours on and not have to worry about bills later.

What do you mean not having to worry about bills? Presumably flooring your CPU for 200 hours would generate a hefty enough electricity bill or am I misunderstanding?

> What do you mean not having to worry about bills? Presumably flooring your CPU for 200 hours would generate a hefty enough electricity bill or am I misunderstanding?

Not as much as you'd think. Looking at my power bills, the difference between a month with a relatively idle server, and a month with a very busy server somewhere around 30 KWh. As a year average, the server has added about 60 KWh to my consumption.

I don't think people usually complain about it being too much work in a sense that you have to put in several hours a week. People usually even like the initial setup procedure because it's fun. When I was studying self-hosting things was just another hobby.

For me it's now more about always having it in the back of my mind that I should do regular updates, make sure the disks are fine and everything is healthy. If something goes wrong the first thought will be "something broke" and not "oh I guess the provider has some issues, let's try again later". Or if in a few years I don't want to do it anymore I know I'll always postpone moving it to a provider because it'll be a hassle.

There's just so many other things to worry about or work on that I don't want to also add time to make sure my email server is running.

> I don't think people usually complain about it being too much work in a sense that you have to put in several hours a week. People usually even like the initial setup procedure because it's fun. When I was studying self-hosting things was just another hobby.

I wonder if this might not cause some enthusiasts to go for far more complicated set-ups than they really need, which in turn causes a bit of a hang-over when they have less time for the "hobby".

> There's just so many other things to worry about or work on that I don't want to also add time to make sure my email server is running.

I'd argue that of all the things you could self-host, email is probably among the ones where the juice is least worthy of the squeeze. It legitimately is a constant pain in the ass from set-up to the daily operations.

> having it in the back of my mind that I should do regular updates, make sure the disks are fine and everything is healthy.

All of that can be easily automated. If my system starts getting flaky, I get an email telling me well before it actually fails. Theoretically, if an automated update fails, I'll be notified of that as well, but that hasn't happened in 15 year or so, so it's been a while since it was tested.

Why not just disable signups to your Gitea? E.g. just invite people to it who you want on it, if anyone.

I have self hosted Gitea, but its for my team, and you can only reach it with my self hosted wireguard.

It is not a lot of work at all, I update the Gitea lib a few times every year and its as simple as replacing one binary file.

Yeah mine is publicly accessible, I should have probably added.

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