Thinking about self-hosting; why do/don't you run your own hardware?

[infogulch]

I'm currently running Cloudron on a Linode VPS as a kind of trial, but as I'm considering expanding the use cases I'm increasingly leaning towards setting up a home lab to run most of my (server) software on my own hardware. I have a couple generic reasons:

• I'm (agonizingly) slowly moving away from hosted cloud services like google (thanks Cloudron!) and while a general VPS is an improvement, you can follow the independence thread farther.
• I'd like to have more control over various private things like notes, recordings, emails, bitwarden_rs vault, etc than what you get at a generic VPS. (aka I'm a paranoid ninny)

I also have some cost reasons:

• I'd prefer the a flat capital cost to an ongoing operational cost. Since I'm not running this as a business (yet...), this reduces the risk of budget changes forcing me to scale down since it will only cost electricity and internet access to sustain.
• I have a large library of media that would be prohibitively expensive to host with a generic provider (and I expect this to grow substantially).
• I want to do this for the long-term and the overall cost of self host is much lower at 5+ year time scales.
• I can scrounge for cheap hardware on the second-hand market.

For example STH/Serve The Home has a series of articles/videos which describes using small, power efficient, 1-liter 'business' PCs often used as terminals in large office installations as nodes in one's home lab since they can land pretty cheap when a whole office rotates them out; titled Project TinyMiniMicro named after the product lines these PCs are sold under by Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

Another option is just regular old server hardware that is being rotated out of data centers.

With multi-instance cloudron management feature on the horizon for 7.0, a cluster-style set up from cheap second hand PCs looks pretty attractive to me.

What do you think of my reasons? Did I miss one? Or do you think it's just a bad idea?

[robi]

@infogulch I do this already for a few clients and myself (as do a few devs on this forum), running fanless/quiet PCs at home with a host of self-hosted services.

With all of the changes happening in the world today, as well as hacks & outages, the next few years will be a good time to run things privately.

[atridad]

@infogulch Its not a bad idea. I do this purely for more privacy. It also helps reduce latency when I use my own apps

IMO it is not incredibly hard to put together a relatively power efficient build. If you want suggestions on parts let me know. Although depending on how the silicon shortage is hitting your particular region it might be best to go pre-built or order used older server hardware off of eBay.

[timconsidine]

@infogulch I am not one of those who think e-Armageddon is around the corner but I too am actively moving away from BigTech solutions, such as Google & GSuite, MS Office 365. And much as I like the awesome range of services of AWS, they end up expensive.

And many are becoming political, which I worry speaks badly for the future of opensource libre-principled solutions. It's important to support that sector as much possible, by usage/adoption and by donations/sponsorship.

Side-note : I am increasingly dismayed and angry at how supposedly IT "professionals" swallow BigTech offerings hook, line and sinker, to the extent that many can't even use the terminal and can't/don't embrace Linux. Mostly a bunch of 2nd-hand car salesmen who thrive on exploiting SME and corporate customers who also have near zero-knowledge of their critical working tools. Madness. I speak as a former lawyer/banker/consultant. not a real IT professional, realising that getting hands-on with systems is possible and wise.

So thank you all@Cloudron, you make managing your own software environment so much easier.

Returning to your point about self-hosting in the home/office instead of the cloud, you're entirely right that it is possible and IMHO strategically wise.

The problem comes when you have distributed users of the apps across the country/world. And in my case I work/live in 2 countries. I worry about the quality & reliability of internet provision to my endpoints if they are serving up apps for multiple off-premise users.

And also worry about being in the wrong country if something goes wrong and I can't physically access the relevant box for maintenance, and not able to return for couple of months. My UK internet failed when the FTTC connection broke and I couldn't get to the office to do the endpoint physical tests required by the ISP, resulting in an internet connection down for 6 months.

And Covid will impact ease of travel for some time to come. Even afterwards, a return airfare to fix a box or line is an expensive operation.

So while the goal of self-host on own hardware in own location is 90% strategically correct, I think self-hosting in the cloud remains strategically important.

The problem is that there seems to be an unofficial cartel amongst likes of Linode/Digital Ocean and others. Amazing how their price plans are so aligned. The world desperately needs a VPS hoster who is community driven.

I'm thinking of hiring 1/2 or 1/4 rack in a datacentre and putting my own appliances in there. As you pointed out, older bare-metal devices which have been retired from font-line use are available at reasonable cost. And the amortised cost over 3-5 years is viable compared to a bunch of Linodes/similar is viable.

Apologies if this developed into a rant, but hopefully got back on track at the end.

[jdaviescoates]

Yeah it's primarily the (lack of) reliability and speed of my home Internet that stops me exploring this further.

[marcusquinn]

Might deserve a thread dedicated to this "hyper convergence" thingy but recent exploring (and discussion with @robi )I happened across this StarWind software for home/private clustering on the OS level. Interested if anyone else has tried this or similar?

• https://www.starwindsoftware.com/

[marcusquinn]

@timconsidine I found the same with all the high-marketing hosts, and then happiness (as far as anyone can be happy with someone else's computer) with Hetzner.

Plus, there's thousands more covering various niche need and jurisdictions here: https://hostadvice.com/

And, many obsessives have trawled https://www.lowendtalk.com at some point too.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn Thanks for good links
I am looking at Hetzner, maybe a new home for me.

[timconsidine]

@marcusquinn Interesting. Not tried it.
Rather defeated by the jargon, so need to find some more brain space to understand it. I'd willingly pay for an upgrade of that !

[mehdi]

@infogulch said in Thinking about self-hosting; why do/don't you run your own hardware?:

I have a large library of media that would be prohibitively expensive to host with a generic provider (and I expect this to grow substantially).

I am in the same situation here, about 3.5To of media, and I use a cloud server. It's really not that expensive, at about 20€/month.

Why cloud instead of home server? Mainly because the barrier to entry is much lower, and when I took this server I lived in a tiny Parisian apartment with crappy Internet. Now that I could have a server at home, I'm thinking of migrating to a home server (mainly because the 4To of space on my cloud server are starting to feel a bit limited ^^), but I have not jumped the gun yet.

[necrevistonnezr]

I run Cloudron at home on a fanless NUC-like device and couldn't be happier - mostly for privately used apps though so I don't need that much bandwith / low latency, etc.

[humptydumpty]

@necrevistonnezr Do you mind sharing the hardware/specs you're running?

[robi]

@jdaviescoates said in Thinking about self-hosting; why do/don't you run your own hardware?:

Yeah it's primarily the (lack of) reliability and speed of my home Internet that stops me exploring this further.

This is a perfect use case for doing it, where you learn that intermittent power or packets don't have to stop the infrastructure from being self managing and automated.

Once that's done, you can add redundant uplinks and have that be a boost to packet availability.

A valuable lesson lost by handing that over to a VPS hoster.

[infogulch]

I appreciate everyone's input, thanks!

@timconsidine said:

The problem comes when you have distributed users of the apps across the country/world.

True, you have to consider latency if you expect users to regularly access it from geographically distant locales. If it's just for yourself, I suppose you could use the coming multi-cloudron feature to just move (backup/remove/restore) the app to the nearest installation when you relocate. Might be worth it if it only takes 20m to migrate.

And also worry about being in the wrong country if something goes wrong and I can't physically access the relevant box for maintenance, and not able to return for couple of months.

That's a good point. It seems there's no working around the need for local maintenance presence to handle hardware failures in a self-host scenario, and a cloud host makes that problem just go away. (Of course it doesn't solve the need for maintenance itself, just the part where you have to do it. )

@mehdi said:

I am in the same situation here, about 3.5To of media, and I use a cloud server.

I've run Plex on my Windows PC at home for years now, but it's been stuck at ~3TB total for a long time and I've had to delete / rotate out at least that much again over its lifetime which is always a bummer. I'm trying to move away from cloud services like Windows 10 (heh) and running a PC 24/7 is not exactly power efficient or maintenance free, but I like the host from home part.

@jdaviescoates said:

Yeah it's primarily the (lack of) reliability and speed of my home Internet that stops me exploring this further.

I'm lucky enough to have access to Google Fiber in the US which is pretty ideal for something like this. But if your ISP is that bad, it might actually be an overall improvement to host at home: you'd get ideal latency and bandwidth... as long as you primarily use it from home.

@marcusquinn Hertzner looks like a good value option for maintaining a cloud presence, I'll keep that in mind. One nice thing about cloud is that you can guarantee ownership of your IP over a long period which makes staying off email blacklists easier.

[necrevistonnezr]

@humptydumpty said in Thinking about self-hosting; why do/don't you run your own hardware?:

@necrevistonnezr Do you mind sharing the hardware/specs you're running?

ASRock Beebox N3000 (https://www.asrock.com/nettop/Intel/Beebox Series/index.asp#Specification), with Intel Celeron N3000 CPU (Dual Core, up to 2.08 GHz), 8 GB RAM, 512 GB M2 SSD and a 2 TB 2.5" HDD - it's quite old already but still sufficient for all my needs (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, a Wordpress Site, FreshRSS, etc.).