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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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?

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!

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