Thinking about self-hosting; why do/don't you run your own hardware?
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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?
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@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.
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@marcusquinn Thanks for good links
I am looking at Hetzner, maybe a new home for me. -
@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 ! -
@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.
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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.
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@necrevistonnezr Do you mind sharing the hardware/specs you're running?
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@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.
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I appreciate everyone's input, thanks!
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.
)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.
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.
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@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.).
