Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.

We use:

* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)

* OpenProject for project management (linear alternative) (deployed on VPS so we can shim their premium token check)

* Kimai for time tracking and invoice generating (VPS)

* Crater for financial tracking (VPS)

* Outline for wiki (we tried bookstack and it was just too weird) (VPS)

* Vaultwarden for password management ("managed" hosting through elestio)

* EspoCRM for CRM and as a CMS for marketing sites for our members (VPS)

* Coolify as a PaaS (heroku / vercel alternative) (VPS) <- my favorite recent addition, lets any member just chuck projects up with whatever resources they need super easily, for "free" (we have a fatass VPS we got on sale from racknerd)

* Cal.com for meeting invites (vps)

* Baserow for basic cms (airtable alternative) (vps)

* docuseal for document signing (docusign alternative) (vps)

We usually deploy via docker containers and manage all our various VPS and containers with portainer.

I have a member that keeps pestering us to self-host emails as well but google already has us by the shorthairs with us on Migadu: clients often tell us our emails go to spam. Not much we can do about it we have like 50 email handles and no budget (yet) to give google the new price per email they're charging.

> None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

That is an excellent and comprehensive list, but is it targeted at individuals or organizations? Every area lists dozens of projects with a short description but no ranking, comparisons, skill-set required, or editorial recommendations.

Personally I rely on resources like https://alternativeto.net or "best of" lists to pick a couple options to evaluate in more depth. If I analyzed 10 times as many options I might discover really wonderful projects I would have otherwise missed, but I struggle to imagine having that kind of time.

Thanks for sharing how you are self-hosting everything at your co-op. I'm curious, are you able to manage all of these with a small team or did you have to add more members? Also, your easy it is for your team members to develop expertise in supporting these self-hosted solutions?

Adding members to the co-op for now has basically 0 onboarding cost because all revenue is through subcontracting, so, some members are revenue driving (because they're working a gig) and others aren't so they cost us nothing but also aren't earning anything. A lot of people joined regardless because working on stuff as a group is usually more impressive than what one can accomplish individually. For example we have a relatively junior member that's basically obsessed with DevOps and site reliability, but they don't get have application development experience so they have nothing "real" to deploy and manage. But with us they got to set up a really cool portainer setup and got us all routed through cloudflare, monitoring setup, etc, for a bunch of very real services that about 50 people use every day.

In terms of developing experience that's basically one half of our reason for existing: a good environment for career and personal growth. We try to make it as easy as possible to pick up new skills or further develop along existing skillsets. So I'd say it's very easy for members to develop the skillset necessary, if they have interest, because everything is transparent, we work hard to write good docs, and anyone can ask anyone else anything and get knowledgeable answers.

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