I’m trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it’s better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?
Me, yes. But it’s still selfhosting if you do it on a VPS. And probably easier, too. I mainly do it at home, because I can have multiple large harddisks this way. And storage is kind of expensive in the cloud.
Depending on where you are, a hard drive that runs 24/7 can cost you quite a bit of money (6$/month or even more for just the hard drive). If you consider the upfront cost of a hard drive, the benefit of hosting at home gets even smaller. Nvme is where you really save money hosting at home. Personally I do both, because cloud is cheap and you can have crazy bandwiths.
I know. You pretty much need to know what you’re doing. And do the maths. Know the reliability (MTBF/MTTF) and price. Don’t forget to multiply it by two (as I forgot) because you want backups. And factor in cost of operation. And corresponding hardware you need to run to operate those hdds. My hdd spins down after 5 minutes. I live in Europe and really get to pay for electricity as a consumer. A data center pays way less. My main data, mail, calendar and contacts, OS, databases and everything that needs to be there 24/7 fits on a 1TB solid state disk that doesn’t need much energy while idle. So the hdd is mostly spun down.
Nonetheless, I have a 10TB hdd in the basement. I think it was a bit less than 300€ back when I bought it a few years ago. But I can be mistaken. I pay about 0.34€/kWh for (green) electricity. But the server only uses less than 20W on average. That makes it about 4€ per month in electricity for me. And I think my homeserver cost me about 1000€ and I’ve had it since 2017. So that would be another ~15€ per month if I say I buy hardware for ~1100€ every 6 years. Let’s say I pay about 20€/month for the whole thing. I’m not going to factor in the internet connection, because I need that anyways. (And I probably forgot to factor in I upgraded the SSD 2 times and bought additional RAM when it got super cheap. And I don’t know the reliability of my hdds…)
I also have a cheap VPS and they’d want 76,27€/month … 915.24€ per year if I was to buy 10TB of storage from them. (But I think there are cheaper providers out there.) That would have me protected against hard disk failures. It’ll probably get cheaper with time, I can scale that effortlessly and the harddisks are spun up 24/7. The harddisks are faster ones and their internet connection is also way faster. And I can’t make mistakes like with my own hardware. Maybe having a hdd fail early or buy hardware that needs excessive power. And that’d ruin my calculation… In my case… I’m going with my ~20€/month. And I hope I did the maths correctly. Best bang for the buck is probably: Dont have the data 24/7 available and just buy an external 10TB hard drive if your concern is just pirating movies. Plug it in via USB into whatever device you’re using. And make sure to have backups ;) And if you don’t need vast amounts of space, and want to host a proper service for other people: just pay for a VPS somewhere.
You forgot something in your calculations, you don’t need a complete VPS for the *arrs. App hosting/seedboxes are enough for that and you can have them for very, very cheap.
Ahem, I don’t need a seedbox at all. I use my VPS to host Jitsi-Meet, PeerTube and a few experiments. The *arrs are for the people over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
That you probably need a VPS for, yes.
actually have a server at home
I haven’t got any piece of hardware that was sold with the firstname “Server”.
But there’s this self-built PC in my room that’s running 24/7 without having to reboot in several years…
Well technically a “server” is a machine dedicated to “serving” something, like a service or website or whatever. A regular desktop can be a server, it’s just not built as well as a “real” server.
Do you have any recommended resources for getting started? I do have a secondary PC…
recommended resources for getting started?
I don’t know where to start today, honestly.
I started with books a long time ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Data-Structures-Niklaus-Wirth/dp/0130220051
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Andrew-S-Tanenbaum/dp/0132126958
https://www.amazon.de/Programming-Language-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0131103628
The simple way is to Google ‘yunohost’ and install that on your spare machine, then just play around with what that offers.
If you want, you could also dive deeper by installing Linux (e.g.Ubuntu), then installing Docker, then spin up Portainer as your first container.
Years? Lol you should update that software.
Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.
But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.
As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.
Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.
I’d say there are levels to selfhosting. Hosting your stuff on the cloud is selfhosting, but hosting it on your own hardware is a more “pure” way of doing it imo. Not that it’s better, both have their advantages, but it’s certainly a more committed to the idelal
I don’t know what hosting on the VPS should be called but it is definitely not self hosting. Since you are hosting your services on someone else’s servers. Didn’t it used to be called colo or something like that.
I disagree. Selfhosting is not specific to hardware location for me. My own git server is definitely selfhosted, VPN, and so on.
I agree that having your own hardware at home is a more pure way of doing it, but I’d just call that a Homelab. I personally just combine both.
Yup, it’s more like self administration or something like that
Of course it’s self hosting. The term “self hosting” just means being in control of the service or host yourself, as opposed to that being controlled by a third party.
It doesn’t mean the hardware has to be in your house. It just so happens that that is the majority preference, because people value privacy, and are often hosting private data.
“Self-hosted” means you are in control of the platform. That doesn’t mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.
Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don’t technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you’re still in the driver’s seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.
As long as you’re the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it’s still self-hosting.
Yep, big ol’ case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.
Most of what I host is piracy related 👀
Most people who “self host” things are still doing it on a server somewhere outside their home. Could be a VPS, a cloud instance, colocated bare metal, …
Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.
To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.
Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.
I mean, as long as you patch regularly and keep backups, you should be good enough. That’s most of what responding to a zero day is, anyway, patching.
Some stuff is just better hosted in a proper data center. Like mail, DNS or a search engine. Some stuff, like sensitive data, is better hosted on your own hardware in your home.
I have a salvaged HP 3500 Pro with an HTPC case and 8.5 TB storage. Started mainly for Jellyfin and now have half a dozen docker containers on it. Great test bed for getting used to linux before I slowly creep towards having it as my main OS on my PC.
I’m starting to realize that jellyfin is a gateway drug to self-hosting. And I’m here for it.
That’s how it started with me. Now I have the arr stack and a bunch of other stuff running. It’s definitely been a fun learning experience. It’s a lot nicer just giving the wife a jellyseerr icon on her phone instead of her giving me a long list of stuff she wants and I have to find them.
No that’s a homelab. Selfhosted applies to the software that you install and administrate yourself so you have full control over it. If it was about running hardware at home we’d see more posts about hardware.
It’s not strictly defined like that. Some people do, others don’t.
Do you think that the majority host from a 3rd party services or hosts from a home server?
My website/blog is in the cloud but anything that needs local storage or internet access (everything else) is virtualized in a container on proxmox.
It’s easier and quicker to start with a VPS and most people do that. On the low end it is usually also cheaper (unless you already have or can get second hand hardware almost for free).
However, if you are starting to get higher storage and compute needs, currently especially also GPU compute, hosting from home can be very interesting as it is much cheaper in the longer term and the hardware side is interesting to learn as well.
I pay Dreamhost for a beef pc VPS, that’s what “selfhosted” means to me. I host all kinds of shit on it.
What kinda beef are we talking here?
500 GB SSD / 16 GB RAM / 8 vCPUs you won’t go hungry
I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.
In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.
Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.
Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.
For me it does. I’m sure some other people use a VPS or something and self host using a cloud provider of some kind.
at least i do have 2 servers. one main and one backup
