I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.

    General guidance is useful, but there’s a lot of ‘You need ZFS!’ and ‘You should use K8s!’ and ‘Use X software!’

    My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it’s shockingly low-complexity.

    And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it’s shockingly low-complexity. And it’s just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things “easier” because, again, it’s low-complexity.

    I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I’ve tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there’s basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you’d have to get working first since it’s just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro’s package manager on, well, ANY distro.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Benefits:

    • Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for piracy storing all my legally obtained files.

    • Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.

    • Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.

    • Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.

    As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.

    SMB sucks, try NFS.

    Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.

    Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.

  • zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fiEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I wish I knew not to trust closed source self-hosted applications, such as Plex. Would have saved a lot of time and money.

      • zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fiEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Plex is a great example here. I’ve been Hetzner customer for many many years, and bought a lifetime license to Plex. Only to receive few months later a notification from Plex that I am no longer allowed to self-host Plex for myself(and only myself) at Hetzner and that they will block all access to my self-hosted Plex instance. I tried to ask for leniency or a refund, but that was wasted effort as well.

        In short, I was caught on a crossfire when for-profit company tried to please hollywood by attempting to reduce piracy, so they could get new VC funding.

        …

        I am now a happy Jellyfin user and warmly recommend all Plex users to try it, the Jellyfin community is awesome!

        (Use your favourite search engine to look up “Hetzner Plex ban” for more details)

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago
    • you do not need kubernetes
    • you do not need anything to be „high availability”, that just adds a ton of complexity for no benefit. Nobody will die or go broke if your homelab is down for a few days.
    • tailscale is awesome
    • docker-compose is awesome
    • irreplaceable data gets one offsite backup, one local backup, and ideally one normally offline backup (in case you get ransomwared)
    • yubikeys are cool and surprisingly easy to use
    • don’t offer your services to other people until you are sure you can support it, your backups are squared away, and you are happy with how things are set up.
    • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
      01·
      4 months ago

      That’s what everyone thinks for a while, and then they go back to Nginx.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        I’m currently in the process of separating the certificate renewal service from the reverse proxy completely.

        But if you’re just starting out Nginx Proxy Manager makes it so easy.

        • ahal@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Out of curiosity, what’s the benefit of splitting those?

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            0·
            4 months ago

            It lets you change reverse proxy or run a website with TLS completely independently of the certbot. The certbot deals with obtaining certs and leaves them in a dir, and the proxies or webservers just take them from that dir. If the proxy container breaks the certbot still does its thing etc.

            It also makes it easier to do stuff like run different proxies in paralel for different things, chain proxies (for instance if you need to use a VPS because you can’t forward ports) and so on.

            But it’s all for advanced setups, for basic stuff I’d still go with NPM.

            • ahal@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              4 months ago

              Cool makes sense, thanks for the reply! And yeah, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.