[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Should I use my old computer instead of cloud?
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Ask HN: Should I use my old computer instead of cloud?
I've got an old (but still not bad for dev needs) quad code with
16gb ram. This is quite a lot for running various small
containerized services. However I'm wondering if this is considered
a bad practice. Cloud machines for something like this would be
>$100 a month. What security measures and other considerations
would I need to keep in mind if I go this route? For example I
have a Emailer service that sends updates to users (needs to
connect to my remote hosted DB)
Author : me_me_mu_mu
Score : 19 points
Date : 2022-06-06 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| Yes.
|
| NextCloud is your data on your hardware.
|
| Encrypt it, back it up to the cloud (someone else's computer) as
| offsite storage, but don't give read/write access to your
| calendar, contacts and emails.
| toniks wrote:
| Anything that not PHP?
| superb-owl wrote:
| If you've got external users, I'd go cloud.
|
| Hardware dies unpredictably. The cloud providers have figured out
| how to be highly resilient to it.
|
| If you use your own hardware, there's a XX% chance you're going
| to have a really bad day sometime in the next year.
| manfre wrote:
| Why would you rent a cloud instance that is as overprovisioned as
| your home computer? Price compare based upon what you'll actually
| use, not what you have available. You'd be surprised how much you
| can run on a few small VPSes or a container hosting service like
| fly.io
| dotty- wrote:
| I'm sure I'm missing something, but I feel like the main reasons
| to choose cloud over self-host are availability and bandwidth.
| The data center is probably more reliable for uptime than your
| home. If neither of those are your problem, then I suppose you
| should consider segregating the network that machine is running
| on from the rest of your devices in your home. So your server
| can't connect to your TV in the living room or something, for
| example.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Even back in the 1990s I had so many friends who were obsessed
| with the idea of running a web site from a server at home.
|
| For most people their internet service is not that fast... If
| people like that got their wish they would wind up praying that
| their web site never gets on Hacker News, or they will after
| the first time it does.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| In an age where gigabit upload speeds are no longer
| impossible to attain I wouldn't worry too much about uplink
| performance. Sure, this is a regional thing, but if you set
| your website up right you can serve more than you'd expect
| with just 100 or even 50mbps up. An HTML page with resources
| doesn't need to be more than half a megabyte in size and
| 50mbps up still nets you full performance for 12 convurrent
| users per second, something many websites will never even
| need.
| wdfx wrote:
| It's not just about raw bandwidth though. Yes my domestic
| line has 20+Mbps upload but the latency and routing
| distance from some other domestic endpoint on the other
| side of the world is going to be terrible. I could go to
| great lengths to make sure that what I serve is the minimum
| amount of bytes but you'll be waiting multiple seconds for
| the connection to be established. Hosting the same data in
| a cloud or data centre would do the audience a much better
| service overall.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If it's just for personal use sure.
|
| But the bottleneck will quickly become bandwidth for anything
| with users other than you.
| znpy wrote:
| > However I'm wondering if this is considered a bad practice
|
| It depends who you ask.
|
| I do the same at home and it works like a charm, but I have no
| users beside myself and my SO.
|
| If you have paying users and SLAs you'd better get that
| $100/month cloud machine or have a disaster recovery plan ready
| (and tested).
|
| > What security measures and other considerations would I need to
| keep in mind if I go this route?
|
| the usuals... disable password authentication, configure the
| firewall, do not share /var/run/docker.sock with containers,
| don't shut down SELinux, run periodic backups and test recovery
| procedures periodically etc.. Normal sysadmin stuff.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You can self host if you make sure to monitor for signs of
| hardware failure and ensure that replacement hardware + good
| backup strategies are always ready if you rely on it for hosting
| services for customers/other people.
|
| If it's just for you and you have the hour or so per week to
| dedicate to updates and maintenance, then I don't see why not. I
| run two servers in my room and they've worked fine with minimal
| maintenance so far, except for a few old hard drives that needed
| replacing and a fan that I couldn't get replaced because of a
| screw I stripped years ago.
|
| There are quite decent cloud machines out there if you just look
| beyond the big guys like AWS and GCloud.
| https://contabo.com/en/vps/ has decent servers for cheap, as does
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
|
| If your emailer service makes direct contact with destination
| SMTP servers, then running from home is probably not an option.
| If you use an external SMTP server to deliver mail to the
| destination servers then this won't be a problem.
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(page generated 2022-06-06 23:02 UTC)