I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
I’ll parrot the top reply from Reddit on that one: to me, self hosting starts as a learning journey. There’s no right or wrong way, if anything I intentionally do whacky weird things to test the limits of my knowledge. The mistakes and troubles are when you learn. You don’t really understand the significance of good backups until you had to restore from them.
Even in production, it differs wildly. I have customers whom I set up a bare metal Ubuntu in some datacenter for cheap, they’ve been running on that setup for 10 years. Small mom and pop shop, they will never need a whole cluster of machines. Then at my day job we’re looking at things like Kubernetes and very heavyweight stacks because we handle a lot of traffic.
Some people self-host a PiHole on a Raspberry Pi and that’s all they need. Some people have entire NAS setups with smart TVs accessing their Plex/Jellyfin servers for the whole extended family. I host my own emails, which is a pain in the ass to get working reliably and clean your IP reputation.
I guess the only thing you should know is, you need some time to commit to maintaining your stuff if you don’t want it to break or get breached (if exposed to the Internet), and a willingness to learn because self hosting isn’t a turnkey experience. It can be a turnkey installation but when your SD card/drives fails you’re still on your own to troubleshoot and fix it. You don’t set a NextCloud server to replace Google Drive with the expectation that you shove the server in a closet forever. Owning your infrastructure and data comes at a small but very important upkeep time investment.
- 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.
To piggy back on your “You don’t need k8s or high availability”,
If you want to optimize your setup in a way that’s actually beneficial on the small, self hosted scale, then what you should aim for is reproducibility. Docker compose, Ansible, NixOS, whatever your pleasure. The ability to quickly take your entire environment from one box and move it to another, either because you’re switching cloud providers or got a nicer hardware box from a garage sale.
When Linode was acquired by Akamai and subsequently renamed, I moved all my cloud containers to Vultr by rsyncing the folder structure to the new VM over SSH, then running the compose file on the new server. The entire migration short of changing DNS records took like 5 minutes of hands-on time.
Ansible is so simple yet so elegant.
Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in
/etc/containers/systemd/, daemon-reload and presto, you’ve got a service that other containers or services can depend on.I wish I knew not to trust closed source self-hosted applications, such as Plex. Would have saved a lot of time and money.
Can you elaborate?
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)
2.What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
Caddy. Once you try Caddy there’s no turning back to Nginx or Apache.
Apparently traefik might be better if you run docker compose and such, as it does auto-discovery, which reduces the amount of manual configuration required.
