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If you’re not paying for a service, you’re likely being monetized by watching ads or providing personal data to companies that don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.
This is a bit out of date. Nowadays, you pay for the service and are monetized by watching ads and providing personal data to companies that definitely don’t have your best interests at heart.
People said it back then too. The ad and tracking industry will always invade more and more of our privacy. When will there be enough tracking to make them stop and be happy? Never. Never is the only answer.
Username checks out .
And here’s the reason why layman should not: they’re much more likely to make that one wrong move and suffer irrecoverable data loss than some faceless corporation selling their data.
At the end of the day, those of us who are technical enough will take the risk and learn, but for vast majority of the people, it is and will continue to remain as a non starter for the foreseeable future.
Not to mention, few people have the time, skill, money, and energy to do it. They’re happy to outsource in exchange for money and/or data.
There are actually easy solutions out there. For example CasaOS, it’s a oneliner and you get a docker orchestration with an app-store and built-in file and smb management. I bet even non technicals could use this.
The “layman” should fall back to old ways. Think local photo management with maybe some backup software
So just because they don’t know technology like you do, they should be left behind the times instead of taking advantage of advancements? A bit elitist and gate keeping there, don’t you think?
Everyone have their own choices to make, and for most, they’ve already decided they’d rather benefit from advancements than care about what you care about.
I think they should do what they know. Asking them to try to learn new things when they don’t enjoy it is not fun
With that being said, if they have the drive to spend time on it let them
Oh, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. The “fun” of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that’s not usually how it works.
Self hosting isn’t super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.
I nowadays manage my private stuff with the ansible scripts I develop for work - so mostly my own stuff is a development environment for work, and therefore doesn’t need to be done on private time.
I’m tired of the argument that the solution to fight tracking/ads/subscription/gafam is self hosting.
It’s a solution for some nice people that have knowledge, time and money for.
But it’s not a solution for everyone.
We need more small nice open source association and company that provide services for people that don’t know the difference between a web search engine and a navigator or just a server and a client. I think that initiatives like “les chatons” in France are amazing for that!!! ( https://www.chatons.org/en )And just to be clear, I think that self-hosted services are a part of the solution. :)
Agreed. Most people online think having a personal website on their own domain is too much of a hassle, they won’t have the knowledge or time to setup a homelab server.
We need more of the nice people you mention — with the tech knowhow and surplus of time — to maintain community services as alternatives to corporate platforms. I see a few co-op services around where member-owners pay a fee to have access to cloud storage and social platforms; that is one way to ensure the basic upkeep of such a community. I’m not sure how Chatons is financed but they certainly have a wide range of libre and private offerings!
I’m hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We’d need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap–tons of used servers on eBay are out there–but monthly costs are not.
It’s a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.
If self-hosting is going to become commonplace, then it needs to be easier than setting up a network printer. People should be able to just buy a computer (maybe a laptop for integral screen and UPS) preloaded with something like Yunohost, but with a sleek GUI. It has to have good wizards that walk you through everything including setting up a domain and email.
Sounds like a market niche, you could start it up, call it something like “macrosoft”. … then start making scripts that do the work for the user, don’t release the scripts because people pay for them. Let this go on for many years and you find yourself shoving “AI” down your users throats and screenshotting their desktop without explicit permission…
Hopefully that path is mostly precluded if an open source project like Yunohost is used as a basis.
IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.
That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.
We need something better than email.
On top of that, most ISPs block port 25 on residential IP addresses to combat spam, making it impossible to go full ”DIY”
Well, there’s always, you know, mail.
Aah, the good ol‘ wooden variety
We need something better than email.
Say everyone agrees and the entire world swaps to some alternative. Email 3.0 or whatever.
Wouldn’t we just have the same issue? Any form of communication protocol (that can be self host able) will get abused by spam. Requiring a lot of extra work to manage.
Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.
Isn’t the current email system kind of a web of trust. Microsoft, Google etc… trust each other. But little me and my home server is not part of that web of trust making my email server get blocked.
Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.
Realistically I don’t see how it would ever not be managed by a corporation. Your average person doesn’t know how and doesn’t want to manage their own messaging system. They are just going to offload that responsibility to a corporation to do it for them. We are just going to have exactly the same system we have now. Just called some else besides email.
I wish there was a better solution but I am not seeing a way that doesn’t just end up the same as email.
I self-host mine using Mailcow, but I use an outbound SMTP relay for sending email so I don’t have to deal with IP reputation. L
I stopped reading after this line.
Raspberry Pi won’t do unfortunately, unless you run up to 4 lightweight containers.
Does the author know how much compute power a Raspberry Pi 5 has? If the software that just hosts personal data can’t run in Raspberry Pi 5, that should be a terrible software. For most people and their families, a RPi5 is enough to host anything that they would ever need.
How good is it? I have a raspi5 and wonder where it’s limit is
Well I run an ntp stratum 1 server handling 2800 requests a second on average (3.6mbit/s total average traffic), and a flight radar24 reporting station, plus some other rarely used services.
The fan only comes on during boot, I’ve never heard it used in normal operation. Load averages 0.3-0.5. Most of that is Fr24. Chrony takes <5% of a single core usually.
It’s pretty capable.
Wait what? Do I understand that correctly? You have a raspberry pi with a direct network connection to an atomic clock? That’s so awesome!
No. A GPS (with PPS) hat. That counts as a stratum 0 time source, making the NTP server stratum 1.
Ah, gotcha.
Is there like a list where you can enter your server so that other people use it as an ntp server? Or how did you advertise it to have 2800 requests flooding in?
I’m in the ntppool.org pool for the UK. It randomly assigns servers which could be any stratum really (but there is quality control on the time provided). I also have stratum 2 servers in .fi, and .fr (which are dedicated servers I also use for other things, rather than a raspberry pi).
I’ve ran multiple containers on a Pi 3 before “upgrading” to a Pi 4. Yes not even a Pi 5. Sure it’s not rapid and drags it’s heels at times but for the most part it’s great for hosting stuff for my household.
Home assistant, Plex, Syncthing, Wireguard, Ad Guard, nginx, nginx proxy manager, duckdns, mongodb and unifi network appliance. I was also running Jellyfin along side Plex but it keeps causing the Pi to lock up.
Perhaps this was written much earlier than v5.
It says posted 4 days ago, updated yesterday.
For most stuff the pi4 is also enough. Jellyfin (no transcoding) works fine on mine. It takes a bit to generate the chapter images and the timeline peek images when ingesting a new movie, but I’ve never had any issues with playback.
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Someday I hope we have a server technology that’s platform-agnostic and you can just add things like “Minecraft Server” or “Email Server” to a list and it’ll install, configure, and host everything in the list with a sensible default config. I imagine you could make the technology fairly easily, although keeping up with new services, versions, security updates, etc. would be quite the hassle. But that’s what collaboration is for!
Cosmos Server, Yunohost, CasaOS, Tipi, TrueNAS. There’s projects like this that have ‘app stores’ that are just an interface for you to enter parameters for a Docker compose file (or something similar) like the default username and password, etc. They aren’t flawless but flawless is an unrealistic standard for things with so many config options.
Neat!
…is as mod by Vaskii
Unraid does this via docker. It’s amazing. You can do this live and on the fly.
Sounds kinda like NixOS, although that’s not platform-agnostic.
Funnily enough I do use NixOS for my server! It’s not quite what I was describing but it does allow me to host easily.
Cloudron does that,not for free, though. But cheap
I do self-host some services but it bugs me that a lot of articles that talk about costs do not factor in a lot of additional costs. Drives for NAS need replacement. Running NUCs means quite an energy draw compared to most ARM based SBCs.
And it dismisses the time component of self hosting. It’s not going to be zero.
It really bugs me in general how often the term “home lab” is conflated with a “home server”, but in the context of what this article is trying to communicate, it’s only going to turn the more casually technical people it’s trying to appeal to off.
For many people, their home lab can also function as a server for self hosting things that aren’t meant to be permanent, but that’s not what a home lab is or is for. A home lab is a collection of hardware for experimenting and prototyping different processes and technologies. It’s not meant to be a permanent home for services and data. If the server in your house can’t be shut down and wiped at any given time without any disruption to or loss of data that’s important to you, then you don’t have a home lab.
Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.
Oh yeah like that’s part of it. If this article is supposed to be a call to action, somebody who starts looking into “homelabs” is going to get confused, they’ll get some sticker shock, and they won’t understand how they apply to what’s said in the article. They’ll see a mix of information from small home servers to hyperconverged infrastructure, banks of Cisco routers and switches, etc. my first home lab was a stack of old Cisco gear I used to study for my network engineering degree. If you stumbled upon an old post of mine talking about my setup and all you’re looking for is a Plex box you’ll be like “What the fuck is all this shit, I’m not trying to deal with all that”
“Self hosting”, and “home server” are just more accurate keywords to look into and actually see things more closely related to what you want.
Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.
I self host mail/smtp(opensmtpd)+imap(dovecot), znc (irc bouncer), ssh, vpn (ipsec/ikev2), www/http (httpd), git (git-daemon), and gotweb, on an extremely cheap ($2 a month, 512M ram 10G storage) vps all very easily on openbsd. With all these servers I’m using an immense 178M/512M of my available memory.
what VPS provider are you using?
buyvm/frantech
I have similar specs and cost with ionos
I self host a lot, but I host a lot on cheap VPS’s, mostly, in addition to the few services on local hardware.
However, these also don’t take into account the amount of time and money to maintain these networks and equipment. Residential electricity isn’t cheap; internet access isn’t cheap, especially if you have to get business class Internet to get upload speeds over 10 or 15 mbps or to avoid TOS breaches of running what they consider commercial services even if it’s just for you, mostly because of of cable company monopolies; cooling the hardware, especially if you live in a hotter climate, isn’t cheap; and maintaining the hardware and OS, upgrades, offsite backups for disaster recovery, and all of the other costs. For me, VPS’s work, but for others maintaining the OS and software is too much time to put in. And just figuring out what software to host and then how to set it up and properly secure it takes a ton of time.
Residential electricity isn’t cheap
This is a point many folks don’t take into account. My average per Kwh cost right now is $0.41 (yes, California, yay). So it costs me almost $400 per year just to have some older hardware running 24x7
I solved this by installing solar panels. They produce more electricity than I need (enough to cover charging an EV in when I get one in the future), and I should break even (in terms of cost) within 5-6 years of installation. Had them installed last year under NEM 2.0.
I know PG&E want to introduce a fixed monthly fee at some point, which throws off my break-even calculations a bit.
Some VPS providers have good deals and you can often find systems with 16GB RAM and NVMe drives for around $70-100/year during LowEndTalk Black Friday sales, so it’s definitely worth considering if your use cases can be better handled by a VPS. I have both - a home server for things like photos, music, and security camera footage, and VPSes for things that need to be reliable and up 100% of the time (websites, email, etc)
Omg, I pay 30€ for 1Gb/0.7Gb (ten more for symmetrical 10Gb, I don’t need it and can’t even use more than 1Gb/s but my inner nerd wants it) and 0.15€/KWh.
BTW the electricity cost is somewhat or totally negated when you heat your apartment/house depending on your heating system. For me in the winter I totally write it off.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging nginx Popular HTTP server
17 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.
The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.
Old ThinkPad with Win 10 Pro, Plex, Plexamp, and several 14TB drives so I can stream my home media library on the go.
