Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide | Hacker News Reader

Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide

ente.io

65 pointssetalp36 comments

I think it would be very cool if a company sold a box that lets people self-host really easily.

Basically some mid-spec box that comes preinstalled with some nice web UI that lets you easily install popular self-hosted applications (immich, nextcloud, jellyfin, wireguard, etc..).

Ideally it'd let you host an at-home iCloud without having to go through the headache. A lot of people I know (including hobbyists & swes) don't self host because setting up a linux vm/box and configuring everything + maintenance would take too much time.

I think the biggest weakness with this is HA. Residential internet/power isn't the most reliable and even though my homelab server is up ~98% of the time, the 2% is VERY annoying and always happens at the worst times.

Security would also be another large concern. I'd imagine a bad actor would have a harder time getting into my iCloud/Google Photos than my immich server.

Have you checked out Umbrel[1]?

You can self-host Umbrel on your own hardware[2]. I'm not sure if they allow for multiple nodes to stay in sync. If (/once) they do, it'd solve for disasters / availability as well.

[1]: https://umbrel.com

[2]: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

I have not. It looks extremely interesting and is basically what I was thinking of.

While we haven't made a box, we made the software side in GoLang [1]

This lets you host the most popular self hosted apps with a click[2] and you get an IP from us. :-)

[1] https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjklYTxE8ks

Don't forget backups. They should probably be offsite and cost of that is generally what pushes me into keeping my Dropbox Plus account.

Dropbox was the hardest of my data subscriptions to drop. I needed a new NAS (well a first real one), and got a "cheap" synology and 2 7TB drives. I then used their dropbox sync to synchronize my NAS with DropBox and vice versa, and then to also sync to my backblaze b2 storage account.

After a few months of it working without a hitch, I killed my dropbox subscription. Now I pay a few pennies for my NAS a month, and $3/mo for backblaze.

Good point. Another issue I'm worried about.

I'm suprised at how many of my homelab friends don't maintain proper backups.

Every time my homelab friends get more drives, the discussion is always "what else am I going to store/host?", which is a more exciting topic/prospect than a "just in case" backup. And every time they grow their storage, the cost of an equal or larger sized backup solution increases as well, making the likelihood of purchase even less.

In that sense, I guess we aren't as far off from the SMBs that don't have backups in place, although if you ask the homelab people about it the answer is usually "I can live without most of this if it gets lost".

> the answer is usually "I can live without most of this if it gets lost"

I'd imagine 90% of homelab storage is movie/tv show 'backups' and aren't that sensitive

https://www.freedombox.org/

I think Synology lets you do that? I'm sure I've seen someone running things like Pihole on them. Not necessarily as integrated as you're talking about though.

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/dsm/feature/docker

I struggle with the difference between "lab" and "production". You may start messing around with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi but when your partner can't turn on the lights with a voice command you're going to find that you need something more resiliant.

Yeah I'm more thinking of something everyday consumers could use.

As long as you stick to what's in Synology's package manager it's pretty end-user friendly. Though that only covers the normal file/photo/video/contact/calendar/backup management stuff. To set up a pihole you'd have to configure the docker image or run a VM, which is probably beyond the standard user's repertoire.

For friends and family unraid is nice because it has a much bigger repertoire of "Apps" (mostly docker containers with some minimal UI integration). It demands a lot more from the user than Synology and looks a lot scarier, but there are no difficulty spikes. Once somebody knows how to use it it's pretty smooth sailing without having to learn anything new.

Unraid does look pretty nice. Synology definitely has difficulty spikes, and then you have to search for some article or tutorial.

That's fair, Synology can be confusing, and it's permission system is frustrating. However, my experience has been that many people use Synology, and I have found detailed articles about everything I've ever wanted to do with it, including adding unsupported 5GbE USB ethernet adapters. It's docker support is nice and makes it easy to setup and run infrastructure like MySQL, postgres, redis, iperf3, and apps like nextcloud, firefly III, only office, etc. It manages certs per-domain (import existing or have it use lets encrypt), and the reverse proxy handles multiple domains and sub domains and makes it easy to remotely access individual apps (or hosts and ports) by redirecting port 80 to 443 and then 443 to whatever the particular docker port is (or IP address and port of something else on your LAN). I also like that the apps can run on my SSD-only RAID storage, and then I have a separate large RAID on spinning disks for NAS storage. Then the Synology devices, fiber ONT, router, main switches are plugged into my UPS backup. For personal stuff I like the Synology platform because it's hassle free, and I think the tutorials by random users makes it approachable to consumers.

Start9 offers this. No experience with their servers, but looks interesting: https://start9.com/

Nice! I'll have to check it out

additionally, a cloud version of what I described above would be cool too. Would also eliminate a the HA concern and partially the security concern.

The cloud version of that is pretty much shared web hosting. Lots of providers use Softaculous [1] or similar solutions to offer one-click install for popular apps. Of course that won't run wireguard and you are pretty locked in to PHP (and sometimes python), but for Nextcloud etc. it's an easy solution.

Or you can go one step further and just go with a managed solution. For example Hetzner has a managed NextCloud, then you don't even have to worry about updating that.

https://www.softaculous.com/

Best of both worlds: replicate across friends and families similarly self-hosted all-in-one boxen.

I don't think people want to replicate their photos library to boxes that their friends have admin access to

I love this idea so much!

Some more resources on self hosting and homelab: https://www.avni.sh/posts/homelab/building-your-own-homelab/...

And my advice to someone considering to start self hosting: Start with a setup that consumes less power and once you have the 80% the idea of the services you want to keep running 24x7 then you scale up your server or build/buy a new one.

This ticks 9/10 boxes on my detector for typical LLM generated SEO content spam. :\

OP here.

Honestly, I got similar feedback when I got this reviewed internally. At this point I am not sure how to write so that it doesn't seem LLM generated.

Would be helpful if you could share why you thought this was LLM generated. The suggestions I have gotten so far has been to remove bullet points and sections - which I feel breaks readability.

I don't think it's so bad, but if I had to guess, it's from the division / breakdown of sections and lists, which reads a lot like the formulaic approach you get from an LLM (which is not necessarily bad, just common in the output). E.g. "Docker and Docker Compose can simplify the process of installing and managing services. They allow you to:" etc etc. This may sound like an LLM covering all its bases rather than a human explaining subject matter.

That's just my take, again I don't think it's that bad. The article would be a useful breakdown for beginners.

(Also, I'm sure you know, LLM content sounds that way because the LLM was trained on content just like this, so it's not really surprising that a guide generated by an LLM would sound like the kind of guide that was used to train an LLM...)

Not parent commenter, but I've been trying to verbalize why it feels LLM-like.

- h2 titles feel as basic as possible, just "what self-hosting, who self-hosting, why self-hosting, ..."

- SEO spam often overuses keywords; on this page, it feels like "self-hosting" is used a bit too often, even if it's well-intentioned

- the text ends in a classic LLM warning "remember to be careful"

- predictable sentence patterns

Some of these things are good for readability. I guess this article feels a bit too plain? I think tech company blog posts add a unique style and voice these days, because otherwise they'll blend in with the average SEO/LLM content.

Also editing nits:

    > self hosing
    > Self Hosting 
    > atleast

Good self-hosting tips, though. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks. This is really helpful.

The overuse of "Self Hosting" is fair. Better H2 titles would have made it less frequent. Will be more thoughtful about this the next time.

The unique style and voice is where I am struggling with. Have always been instructed to write in a plain tone and simple English so that its easier to read through.

I tried reading the article with the GP's comment in mind. For most of the sections it didn't feel like there was anything that would flag it as LLM generated for me.

But when I got to "How to Start Self-Hosting?", which is the section I was most interested in, I got a strong sense of déjà vu.

Reading this section felt exactly like I feel when I hit a bad prompt on ChatGPT. I feel I'm being given a huge dump of keywords but nothing that lets me make any progress. Reading it I felt the same frustration I do with ChatGPT as I have to prompt it again with "Can you elaborate on bullet point 6" to get anything useful out of it.

With ChatGPT the reason is usually a prompt that was either too broad/open-ended or a difficult topic for ChatGPT to answer. And it has a tight limit on how long the answer can be, which is understandable. For an article though it feels a bit jarring and there is no immediate way to ask for details.

I think the rest of the article is fine really. Sure the word of caution is exactly what LLMs do but unlike LLMs, which usually state the obvious, it has a lot of useful information.

Normally I'd not pay too much attention to these comments but the assessment here is spot on. I'd say LLMs articles in general are:

  1- Always longer than necessary with a lot of fluff

  2- Favor lists and hierarchy

Because they're trained on mostly SEO spam and buzzfeed-style articles

I asked Gemini to "write an article about self hosting" and the output structure and content is eerily similar

Here is a side by side comparison: https://i.postimg.cc/kXXpWgnZ/why-it-look-like-LLM-generated...

Isn't getting a static IP address a problem?

A dynamic IP + DDNS is fine for 95% of use cases.

The bigger issue is if your ISP puts you behind a CGNAT in which case you’ll need a product like cloudflare tunnels or you can roll your own with a vpn tunnel and a vps with a static IP.

Some ISPs provide static IPs for an additional fee. Also, there are services like Cloudflare[1] and NoIP[2] that provide Dynamic DNS (DDNS) so you can tie your dynamic IP to a static address.

[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/operations/dns-records...

[2]: https://www.noip.com

Cloudflare Tunnel is another increasingly popular solution (proxying all your traffic via cloudflare, with the CF Tunnel client taking care of establishing the backend<->cloudflare connection)

Of course you can do a similar thing yourself by getting a cheap VPS somewhere (~$2/month with no-name hosters from lowendbox.com) and connecting your server to it via wireguard

Articles like this never really cover the downsides of self-hosted setups, and the real time, effort, and costs that'll go into it.

Statements like this are so disingenuous:

"Monitor Your Services: Set up monitoring to keep track of your server's health and performance: Use tools like Prometheus and Grafana for detailed monitoring Set up alerts to notify you of any issues"

That reads like it'll take 5 minutes, but requires learning PromQL, spinning up multiple services, which you then also have to maintain and support, and come with all their own issues.

"Full control over files, no storage limits except hardware"

This is technically true, but for the average user, compared to the vast and free data in Google Drive is just not really valid. Then get into the issues of maintaining drive arrays for redundancy, back-ups, IO performance, etc.

Everything that says "enhanced security" but you're asking someone with no experience in self-hosting to get security right. That's a really big ask.

I don't want to keep going on dissing the article, which is a good attempt at summarizing where the industry/hobby is now. I love self-hosting things at home, I've learnt a lot, and it lets me geek out. But, I'd contend that almost every sentence in that article is flawed somehow.

I liked the depth of the article.

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