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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I still run a server for hosting my Jellyfin and n8n, but I've honestly been moving a lot of my stuff to cloud hosting stuff. I found that trying to maintain uptime for all my services started to become a pretty huge time sink and I realized that I really didn't gain anything by hosting my blog on my own server with Nginx instead of just using a free Cloudflare Pages with Quartz.

I think it's ultimately a sign of aging; I don't really have the attention span or energy to LARP as a sysadmin anymore, especially since I never really enjoyed that aspect of computers anyway. I think my monthly cost of storage would get untenable if I tried to move all my raw media rips to the cloud (about 45TB [1]), so I don't think I'll be able to migrate my Jellyfin for the foreseeable future, but I would like to some day.

[1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.

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I'm curious which aspect(s) became a time sink for you? I self-host a bunch of stuff myself. I can't say I never spend time on it, but it's measured in hours per year. Once stuff is set up, it just runs.

Also curious about the time sinks! Fingers crossed no issues with my services so far. The initial setup was tedious: configuring multiple services with their own configuration intricacies, and having proper backups. I am looking for something that would help reduce the setup toil, maybe something like nix?

Part of it is the fact that I'm using USB storage for my RAID, which is a little finicky. Another part is that I'm using this server as my router as well, which means that when things break I kind of have to fix them immediately, and since my network cards are thunderbolt I have to rely on the finicky Linux thunderbolt support.

For reasons not clear to me, if a system update requires compiling a large thing (e.g. Immich + TritonLLVM), 95% of the time it will break the internal LAN's network interface. I think updating is important (especially for a router), this means that a few times a week I have to babysit the system update to be there to reboot the server manually.

I installed Jellyfin on my home server a few months ago but it’s already broken by upgrading to 10.11, and unusable until I restore 10.10 from backup or start over: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/15027. There seem to be lots of other database migration bugs for this release and other ones.

Yeah, I've been afraid to upgrade because I've been following these updates. I'm going to wait until the dust settles a bit before upgrading because, as stated, I don't really enjoy larping as a sysadmin anymore.

I use Docker on Linux for this kind of thing (Jellyfin, Nextcloud and a few others) and updates are completely trouble free. I would never deploy complex "black box" apps like Jellyfin bare metal. That being said, I do run my email stack bare metal as I want fine control. Everything is hosted at home on my own hardware and I would never consider moving my computing to the "cloud."

In FreeBSD you typically install them in a jail.

Update: I just tried upgrading again (from 10.11.1 to 10.11.2) and it seems to have fixed things!

> [1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.

Or about $5k one-off at pCloud, which is still a big investment. (No affiliation, just a customer.)

Actually had I known about this two years ago, I would have considered pCloud; as it stands I bought 24x16TB used hard drives, about 288TB after RAID. That was like a $2600 investment that I don't really want to get rid of now unless I can find something considerably cheaper per-month.

I personally still don't understand how actual online services (like storage) can work with one-off licenses.

The answer is: they don't. It operates similar to a ponzi where they need a certain amount of new "investors" each year to sustain their scheme.

Obviously, collapse is inevitable on a long enough timeline for any company, but this scheme in particular is very vulnerable to a couple slow years in terms of sales.

Good actuarials can pull this off. They just charge enough that they can invest some of your upfront payment and use the interest to pay the staff to support you. We know how often hard drives fail, so you just ensure that you have enough interest to replace them when that happens.

If you are the only one paying upfront this is impossible as your harddrives might fail early, but if there are 1000 people willing to pay upfront we can easially handle that.

Note that I would not be surprised if this was just a Ponzi. That we know how to do this doesn't mean we are.

Invest it?

They get to depreciate the equipment, deduct electricity and labor, and get bulk rates on equipment.

And show mark to market accounting, cash flow and revenue for investment funding

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