[HN Gopher] Self-Host All the Things?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Self-Host All the Things?
        
       Author : ecliptik
       Score  : 201 points
       Date   : 2023-03-05 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tedium.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
        
       | Axsuul wrote:
       | Loving the "just right" labels. How does n8n compare to
       | Activepieces?
       | 
       | Also those who are looking to dive deeper into self-hosting
       | should join us at /r/selfhosted on Reddit.
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | I have tried a lot of different alternatives to Zapier and in my
       | opinion, they are not even close in terms of productivity.
       | 
       | I can get things running with little fuzz and it keeps working
       | for the most part.
       | 
       | Now that just means it works for my needs and the connections I
       | need to make.
       | 
       | I have stopped using Zapier because they are far too expensive
       | for my budget.
       | 
       | Now I make do with a few Perl scripts for what I really need and
       | ifttt
        
       | MuffinFlavored wrote:
       | > Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick
       | 
       | Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp
       | because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes
       | of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're
       | going to end up in "spam" otherwise?
       | 
       | I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to,
       | say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high
       | rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though.
       | 
       | This article could've talked about DataDog vs Jaeger/ELK stack I
       | think for tracing/logs.
        
         | gwbrooks wrote:
         | You can get high deliverability -- the keys, whether you're
         | using your own servers or someone else's come down to a clean
         | list that won't generate complaints and staying within the TOS
         | of your mailserver host or third-party SMTP service.
         | 
         | Host your mail-creation/list-management/analytics stack
         | yourself (I like Mautic and MailWizz but there are other
         | options) and use a third party for SMTP services. Amazon SES
         | charges $1 per 10,000 emails; other services are slightly more
         | expensive but it's all still very affordable.
        
           | locustous wrote:
           | I've had really poor deliverability from SES. Our emails went
           | straight to spam on many providers. Just trying to do email
           | verification on new signups.
        
           | tedivm wrote:
           | I'm not sure why you're getting the downvotes but this is the
           | way for people who want some level of self hosting. I finally
           | gave up hosting my own mail server about two years ago- I had
           | been self hosting email since 2005, but it reached the point
           | where delivery to the big companies was extremely difficult.
           | If someone wants to host their own software but actually have
           | their emails delivered they really do need a third party SMTP
           | service that specialized in deliverability or has a big
           | company behind it.
        
             | nottathrowaway3 wrote:
             | You're sending your emails over the internet anyway. You're
             | paying for the reputation of the 3p smtp service and it's a
             | pretty liquid/perfect market.
        
         | dijit wrote:
         | > I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail
         | to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at
         | a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though.
         | 
         | You can do this, I have done this, but honestly it's annoyingly
         | painful and you're always one bad ad campaign away from being
         | nuked to death by people marking your emails as spam.
         | 
         | There's a lot of rules to follow and even when you follow them
         | you need to ensure that you start emailing a low volume for
         | each new sending IP until the reputation grows over time.
        
           | djbusby wrote:
           | How does one even know that message are being tagged as spam?
        
             | dijit wrote:
             | Depending on the provider you can receive a "bounce"
             | response. Yahoo and Hotmail do this, Google was a little
             | more opaque if memory serves.
        
           | Nextgrid wrote:
           | To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam
           | frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it
           | suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn't
           | be sending whatever you're sending to those people.
        
             | mrmattyboy wrote:
             | One thing to say to this.. I work at a company and have
             | personally setup quite a few mail servers for mass email
             | sending and warming up IPs.. not fun..
             | 
             | (these are all legitimate interest emails)
             | 
             | I was in a meeting with a couple of people from the team
             | and a QA engineer mentioned that everytime he's done with
             | an email in gmail, he spams it off... _wut_..
             | 
             | Whilst yes, we have been blacklisted a handful of times
             | and, based on spam reports (feedback loops), people do mark
             | emails as spam for completely nonsensical reasons... e.g.
             | users signing up, (getting and using the activation email),
             | using the service and then spamming the activation email.
             | 
             | Edit: I definitely think there's a bell curve for sending
             | your own emails:
             | 
             | * If you have a very small platform (at least in my
             | experience), reputation doesn't mean _that_ much, emails
             | are generally accepted by providers (assuming IPs that you
             | used haven 't been previously used for spammy activity), so
             | self-hosting might make some sense (though a third-party
             | probably wouldn't be too expensive if you did want to).
             | 
             | * If you start sending 100s-1000s of emails/day, I guess
             | some third party solution would make sense, since running
             | dedicated IPs/domains and servers just for sending emails
             | might not be beneficial.
             | 
             | * As you go to sending 100K+ emails a day, personally, I
             | think setting up servers starts making more sense
        
             | dijit wrote:
             | Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your
             | receipt" mails also get marked as spam.
             | 
             | Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for
             | nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam"
             | buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages;
             | so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you
             | will be false flagged eventually.
             | 
             | We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super
             | easy to unsubscribe, emailed once a month at most; and we
             | had people still marking our communications as spam. I'm
             | not sure what else we could have done to weed out the
             | people who just smack the spam button honestly.
             | 
             | That said, there was a lot of variance, emoji in the
             | headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark
             | spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us
             | blackholed for 2.5 months.
             | 
             | I think a major issue is that people don't want to even
             | check how to unsubscribe and they see the "mark as spam"
             | button as a "just make this go away" button.
        
               | ChainOfFools wrote:
               | People who mark things as junk mail or spam typically
               | have no idea that this action can have an upstream impact
               | on spam filtering algorithms.
               | 
               | They typically have no idea how any of this stuff works
               | and just assume that the purpose of marking something is
               | spam is to prevent them from seeing any more of it,
               | personally, in the future. It doesn't occur to them that
               | their preference thus exerts a small influence over the
               | experience of potentially millions of other people.
               | 
               | In the decades past, when preferences weren't so tightly
               | linked to each other among otherwise unaffiliated users,
               | the simple definition of spam as " stuff I'm not
               | interested in seeing in my inbox" was completely
               | sufficient to inform a user's decisions about using the
               | spam button. But today that definition is something
               | closer to "stuff I'm not interested in seeing and that I
               | am fairly certain few if any other people are interested
               | in seeing, either."
        
               | the_af wrote:
               | I disagree with your modern definition. Spam to me is
               | unsolicited commercial emails. All email "ads" are spam.
               | Newsletters I didn't subscribe to are spam. Anything
               | trying to sell me something I didn't subscribe to is
               | spam.
               | 
               | You bet I'm going to mark it as spam and _I hope_ it
               | creates trouble for the sender.
               | 
               | PS: I assume we all agree scams, "Russian singles", chain
               | letters, "little Jessica is 4 and dying of cancer", etc,
               | are all spam. That's a shared common ground.
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | The annoyance I felt that I was a "good" postmaster and I
               | was punished as a part of being from a tribe of bad
               | postmasters.
               | 
               | Google et al. can't tell the difference when you hit
               | spam.
               | 
               | We never bought or sold any email lists, we went out of
               | our way to _ensure_ you wanted to be on the list- we made
               | it single link with no extra checkbox or button to
               | unsubscribe, we emailed only occasionally and above all
               | we did our absolute best to make the content humorous and
               | engaging.
               | 
               | You can make the case that there should be "no automated
               | mail trying to sell things" and honestly, thats fine, but
               | why the hell are people marking the receipts for things
               | they bought as spam?
        
               | the_af wrote:
               | > _but why the hell are people marking the receipts for
               | things they bought as spam?_
               | 
               | I never thought people did that. That's definitely not
               | spam. It is a one-time interaction confirming an
               | operation you just did. Also not spam: when you buy
               | something and the tracking sends you updates via mail.
        
               | Dma54rhs wrote:
               | It happens often, we sell fairly expensive items and
               | regular confirmation and tracking number emails still get
               | reported.
               | 
               | I am certain rising ipv4 prices are dictated by spammers
               | but only availability.
               | 
               | No one likes spam but when you have to send legitimate
               | emails you quickly learn the other side of the problem as
               | well.
        
               | zamnos wrote:
               | Personally, the effort to sell me something doesn't need
               | to be there for me to consider it noise, and where
               | marking something as spam (or phishing) are the only ways
               | to tell the system something is noise, I'll mark stuff as
               | spam even if it's not an advertisement.
        
               | hurril wrote:
               | Oh we do. We just don't want to have your shitty
               | newsletter.
        
               | rationalist wrote:
               | How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong
               | address, and thus a random person receiving your emails?
               | 
               | If it's just a one-off receipt, I'll delete it. If that
               | business I never had any business with starts spamming
               | me, then I mark it as spam. Second receipt, pisses me
               | off, a third receipt from the same company gets marked as
               | spam etc. If you want to send more than one email, ask
               | for permission.
               | 
               | Unfortunately I have a few technology-challenged
               | acquaintances still using my common-ish firslast@ gmail,
               | but once I get them switched over, everything that inbox
               | receives will automatically be marked as spam.
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | > How do you prevent people from entering in the wrong
               | address, and thus a random person receiving your emails?
               | 
               | Double opt-in.
               | 
               | You cant just enter an email address to subscribe, I used
               | to send you an email with a link to click to complete the
               | process.
               | 
               | For transactional email this would be handled by getting
               | people to either create an account or use Paypal for
               | guest checkout. (this was 2012)
        
               | nkrisc wrote:
               | > I think a major issue is that people don't want to even
               | check how to unsubscribe and they see the "mark as spam"
               | button as a "just make this go away" button.
               | 
               | You can thank unscrupulous actors for this. I get so much
               | spam I'm not going to try to figure out what is actually
               | spam or not, nor am I going to risk clicking
               | "unsubscribe" links in emails I assume are malicious spam
               | anyway. If it looks automated and I don't know what it is
               | or can't remember why I'm getting it, it's spam.
               | 
               | Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly sign
               | up to receive a marketing email so if I do receive yours
               | it's either spam or you tricked me into signing up for
               | it, so it's also spam as far as I'm concerned.
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | Here's the thing. If companies never collected and used
               | email addresses in exchange for providing free webinars,
               | reports, developer seminars, books, reports, etc. they'd
               | do far less of those things because digital marketing
               | would be much more just shouting out into the void with
               | often difficult to measure results. And they'd generally
               | be way out-marketed (and out-sold because marketing
               | brings in leads).
               | 
               | You may be fine with all that but remember that selling
               | pays for engineering salaries.
        
               | nkrisc wrote:
               | You're right. And it's lead us to a place where I mark
               | most email I get as spam.
        
               | kshacker wrote:
               | I do this. And what would help (hey google) is if gmail
               | would remember I requested an unsubscribe and then offer
               | to mark as spam 72 after my request to unsubscribe. As of
               | now, I need to remember who all I tried to unsubscribe
               | and when I get their email 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months
               | later, I don't want to remember my unsubscribe list.
        
               | pimlottc wrote:
               | I created an "unsubscribed" label for this. I haven't
               | bothered to automate the rest of the steps you describe
               | but I'm sure it could be done.
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | > Especially marketing emails. I would never knowingly
               | sign up to receive a marketing email
               | 
               | thats fair, some people do it for the promise of getting
               | some deals, something we actually delivered on often as
               | when we wanted to clear the warehouse we sent
               | discount/clearance emails to the signed up users rather
               | than putting it on the site.
               | 
               | We used to also trial "own produced" products at
               | discounted rates for people as a sort of beta test.
        
               | AviationAtom wrote:
               | Call me crazy, but for a problem folks seem to imply has
               | had everything, including the the kitchen sink thrown at
               | it... why do I have yet to see a single email that has
               | the unsubscribe button at the very top, front and center,
               | the absolute first thing I see?
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | It is. It literally is.
               | 
               | Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices
               | a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own
               | unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to
               | the address of the sender's email.
               | 
               | I'm sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont
               | reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails
               | with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there.
               | 
               | The unsubscribe link lives near the bottom of the email
               | along with the link to support, in clear text in a font
               | and colour that matches the content.
        
               | Izkata wrote:
               | I remember seeing that in Gmail years ago, but haven't
               | seen it in a long time. I thought they removed the
               | feature.
        
               | DangitBobby wrote:
               | Funny, I know to hit the spam button at the top and the
               | unsubscribe bottom buried in a link at the email footer.
               | Am I blind? Have I somehow clicked "spam" and
               | "unsubscribe" hundreds of times without seeing an obvious
               | "unsubscribe" button at the top? Very dubious.
               | 
               | Nope! Just checked Gmail WebView. There is a toolbar at
               | the top with a very prominent"spam" button, and two kebab
               | menus with "filter messages like this", "report spam",
               | "report phishing", but no unsubscribe button.
        
             | monsieurbanana wrote:
             | Could be, or it could be that those systems are so
             | aggressively tuned that newcomers have no chance to not be
             | labeled spam while established players are whitelisted.
             | 
             | (I truly don't know, but I don't think it's as simple as
             | you're saying)
        
               | nottathrowaway3 wrote:
               | Email delivery is not purely a protection racket.
               | 
               | People use Gmail because they legitimately want to filter
               | out the unsolicited spam, marketing, etc. To an anonymous
               | attacker, there is no cost to send these emails.
               | Middlemen like MailChimp and Sendgrid play the role of
               | converting email from a free, publicly exploitable
               | channel into a paid, KYC one.
               | 
               | Email fbfw is the de facto standard communication channel
               | for almost everything, but by design a single computer
               | can send an unlimited number of emails to other
               | addresses. This maybe was a good enough design
               | originally, but now the role of email has grown so much
               | that, today, it should be a paid KYC channel.
               | 
               | What is the alternative to spam filtering? Everyone
               | maintains their own allowlist of good senders?
        
             | safety1st wrote:
             | Is that the "Just So" story that people who don't work with
             | email at scale believe?
             | 
             | Email deliverability is a full time job. There are so many
             | "potential spam" markers that are interpreted differently
             | (and opaquely) by different ESPs. Getting your email
             | delivered to a lot of people is essentially non
             | deterministic.
             | 
             | Including a link to a Google Doc in your message body is
             | enough to get you blacklisted by some email providers if
             | you don't have a prior history with them. Yes, there will
             | usually be some process to get off the blacklists and doing
             | it will mostly stick even if you continue to email Google
             | Docs to people. But the key word there is mostly. As I
             | said, deliverability (at least at scale) is a full time
             | job.
        
             | gscott wrote:
             | It's been my experience that people can't tell the
             | difference between the delete button and the spam button.
        
             | samstave wrote:
             | See my other comment below on how IP blocks for IPv4 went
             | through the roof on price and availabilty...
             | 
             | The global spam market is what caused the hockey-stick rise
             | in IPv4 "shortage"
        
             | IncRnd wrote:
             | Except, that's not a fair take.
             | 
             | It only takes a moment for a single person to get your ip
             | or domain balacklisted, not a concerted campaign. There are
             | many blacklists that accept direct submissions from any
             | unauthenticated person for any target domain/ip.
             | 
             | What's difficult is not to get onto a blacklist but to get
             | off of a blacklist.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | + unsurprisingly, lots of hosting providers disable
           | SMTP/block port 25/ban you if any email sending is being
           | detected coming from your instances, legitimate or not, as
           | the problem with hosting IPs that are sending spam is so
           | annoying (and even illegal in some places).
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | luckylion wrote:
         | That's also why the phishing campaigns now use Amazon SES (and
         | amazon happily lets them, as long as they pay, it seems): their
         | email will get delivered.
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | The biggest aspect that _used_ to be used in spam detection
         | (from an OSI, not a content reading perspective) was source IP
         | blocks.
         | 
         | Many people dont realize that spam was the original source for
         | social networking...
         | 
         | I cant type up all the history I know quickly, but Friendster
         | (who 'invented the social graph', HI5, Tagged, MySpace, were
         | all started as an overlay to email harvesting mechanisms to -->
         | spam....
         | 
         | They needed to create high value email-lists of valid emails.
         | 
         | Asking for such, was stupid as most people rejected it.
         | 
         | Then, they figured out that adding a service (chat and share
         | with your friends, give us your email and their email so we can
         | connect you by sending them invites etc) was the best social-
         | engineering (the 'hacker' meaning) mechanism was to have people
         | validate their personal email, offer a novel e-'service' to
         | 'connect' with your friends within some context - and have you
         | pre-validate the email list based on your invites and
         | contacts... then parlay MLM structure to create better more
         | validated email lists.
         | 
         | Then you sell the lists on the BM to spammers looking to avoid
         | a high bounce rate based on real emails.
         | 
         | Then they started nefariously stealing your contacts with auto-
         | opt-in agreements and such....
         | 
         | Then as the battle btwn spam and socially-interesting services
         | ramped up the spam companies (such as Postini (which was bought
         | by google) became the spam filters (selling their services to
         | BigCorps) began to realize that filtering on the sending IPs
         | was a good measure for determining spam (along with rate-
         | limiting, and other aspects) - such that spammers were getting
         | blocked based on delivery IP blocks.
         | 
         | This set-off a market incentive for spammers to buy up swaths
         | of IPv4 blocks so they could swap out IPs...
         | 
         | Then there were many ranges, sources, tracrts etc used to
         | determine senders and ID them as spammers etc....
         | 
         | So - the spammers invented VPN/Tunneling delivery routes such
         | they could send to a number of various global relays so that
         | they could send from a central source of machines, but be
         | delivered to the endpoints from a variety of global IP blocks.
         | 
         | There was a market for IPv4 blocks all over the world and
         | spammers were spending big bucks on all aspects, from paying
         | for the IP blocks, relationships with ISP/VPN/etc tech....
         | 
         | All while attempting to provide what was a thin layer of
         | utility service to the user to keep what was effectively
         | continued access to the growing address books of their users
         | and keep them engaged on the platform such that they could keep
         | knowing if existing or new contacts were valid.
         | 
         | There were even back-room deals between spammers/tech/isp etc
         | to allow access.
         | 
         | So, the "social networks" we know know of were birthed
         | literally upon spam.
         | 
         | -
         | 
         | Have you ever wondered why as soon as tiktock came out, all of
         | a sudden a fuck-ton of spam was hitting your gmail inbox
         | (previously postini) <-- Because tictock was eating the revenue
         | lunch.
         | 
         | Zuck literally stated that the entire revenue model for FB was
         | "senator, we sell ads"
         | 
         | When in an interview with Google, they asked "what kind of
         | company do you think google is "Well, most people think youre a
         | search engine, but youre actually an advertisement correlation
         | engine"
         | 
         | In an interview with Twitter (dont forget about the infamous
         | ATT room 641A?) - what do you think twitter is: "Twitter is a
         | global sentiment monitering engine" (this was ~2006?8? I cant
         | recall)
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | Source: I know these founders and many of the original devops
         | members from the above companies, and other more scary outcomes
         | from the above statements.
         | 
         | And here we are today with the advanced learning all built upon
         | "consumption" ad algos
        
         | galdor wrote:
         | You go with Mailchimp (or equivalent) for newsletters because
         | they give you the subscription form, handle email verification,
         | unsubscriptions, GDPR mentions everywhere, provide useful stats
         | and notifications, segmentation and targeting... Getting email
         | delivered is indeed really hard, especially if you send
         | thousands of emails, but building all these other features is
         | insanely time consuming. The cost of Mailchimp is negligible in
         | comparison.
         | 
         | Same reason why companies use Sendgrid for marketing campaigns.
        
         | j45 wrote:
         | A dedicated IP address can be warmed up to deliver email well
         | enough but it can take some time.
         | 
         | A mail server software like mdaemon can quickly handle the
         | heavy lifting of improving deliverability. It's a small price
         | for the deliverability. I'm just a former user of it.
         | 
         | It's ok to use an external email provider for outgoing email
         | delivery.
         | 
         | ESPs (email service providers) are handy because they can
         | separate outgoing transactional emails from marketing ones to
         | ensure deliverability.
        
       | oaththrowaway wrote:
       | I self host most everything through unRAID. I spent a good amount
       | of money getting a good server setup. The only thing I rely on
       | the cloud for is email.
       | 
       | I've gone through several iterations of hardware and hard drive
       | capacity over about 7-8 years now. Hard to imagine I'll ever go
       | back.
       | 
       | It's not even about the monthly subscriptions, I've spent more on
       | hardware I'm sure, plus my monthly VPN and Usenet fees. It's
       | really an exhaustion of SaaS becoming essentially keyloggers of
       | our entire lives. I guess self hosting is the closest we have of
       | opting out, but even then it's not enough.
        
         | AnthonyMouse wrote:
         | What are you spending a significant amount of money on
         | hardware? A used PC is ~$50, assuming you don't already have
         | one. Spinning rust is ~$10/TB:
         | 
         | https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH728080ALE604-3-5-In...
         | 
         | https://www.ebay.com/itm/125797516426
         | 
         | It can be done for less than $100, done well for less than
         | $300.
        
           | oaththrowaway wrote:
           | Part of it is that I'm running a gaming VM on it and passing
           | through a GPU to that. Plus I have another GPU for
           | transcoding my media to HEVC. Lots of RAM for all the
           | containers as well.
           | 
           | I also wrote my own container that I use for all my
           | development so I like to keep it snappy for that.
           | 
           | I have about 20TB of platter storage (WD Reds) + parity, and
           | 2TB of SSD cache (an additional 2TB SSD passed into the
           | gaming vm)
           | 
           | It slowly adds up. I started with a Raspberry Pi and a USB
           | hard drive as storage.
        
       | stonewall wrote:
       | I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP,
       | XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from
       | eBay and a cable internet connection.
       | 
       | It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother
       | with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running,
       | there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a
       | month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it.
       | 
       | I use a stack of Proxmox VMs, FreeIPA for authn/authz, and Rocky
       | Linux for all servers and workstations. My phone runs GrapheneOS
       | with a Wireguard VPN back to the house. I don't expose anything
       | to the public internet unless absolutely necessary.
       | 
       | I recently anonymized and Ansibilized my entire setup so that
       | others might get some use out of it:
       | 
       | https://github.com/sacredheartsc/selfhosted
        
         | triyambakam wrote:
         | Very inspiring and thank you for sharing. I run GrapheneOS too
         | but I haven't set anything up like a Wireguard VPN. What is the
         | rough idea of how that works?
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | Try installing algovpn it's pretty much a turnkey wireguard
           | installation, lots of tutorials on YouTube.
           | 
           | I would advise against setting up wireguard manually.
        
           | stonewall wrote:
           | I plug my cable modem into a server running the OPNsense
           | firewall [0], which has a wireguard plugin.
           | 
           | I set up a wireguard VPN in OPNsense.
           | 
           | Then I downloaded the wireguard app in F-Droid, and pasted my
           | credentials from the wireguard Android app into the wireguard
           | configs on the firewall.
           | 
           | I set the VPN in grapheneOS as "always on," so from my
           | phone's perspective, it always has access to my internal
           | network, even when on LTE. All my phones internet traffic
           | ends up going through my home internet connection as a
           | result.
           | 
           | [0] https://opnsense.org/
        
         | novok wrote:
         | How much power does it take? I've realized with some services
         | it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.
        
           | digitallyfree wrote:
           | * * *
        
           | stonewall wrote:
           | I almost certainly don't save any money considering
           | electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an
           | r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the
           | rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total?
           | 
           | If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient
           | gear.
           | 
           | That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much.
           | I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my
           | roof.
        
             | chinaman425 wrote:
             | [dead]
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | For homelab or self hosting, Power per watt is my favourite
           | measure now.
           | 
           | Depending on your need (many apps just idle most of the time)
           | a usff pc can make an excellent proxmox server.
           | 
           | Check out a Lenovo m920q, Dell Optiplex 7060, HP EliteDesk or
           | ProDesk 800 series. They are easy enough to bump to 64G of
           | ram and stack up as you need. The 8700T cpu is a desktop
           | grade in a small shell and watt footprint and also has vpro
           | and hyperthreading.
           | 
           | It's not a rack server but it's easy enough to add a Mac
           | Studio/Mini soon enough for crunching.
           | 
           | I have spent too much time with full rack server gear and
           | using it a can seem like a matter of preference before need.
           | It's heavy, hungry, noisy, and my better half didn't like
           | when I brought the leftover data centre stuff home.
           | 
           | The USFF boxes are near silent and sip electricity.
        
       | vitro wrote:
       | Slightly related:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34940181
       | 
       | https://github.com/Haxxnet/Compose-Examples
        
       | triyambakam wrote:
       | > which honestly kind of upset me a lot
       | 
       | I've seen this language more and more frequently: minimized (kind
       | of) + maximized (a lot) qualifiers. No real insight, just
       | interesting.
        
         | eointierney wrote:
         | As a modifier it's kind of a mollifier
         | 
         | Edit: just looked it up and wikipedia has a difinition I didn't
         | know :)
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollifier
         | 
         | However in the colloquial usage 'round these parts mollifier
         | means to soften or make gentle
         | 
         | https://www.etymonline.com/word/mollify#etymonline_v_17411
        
         | scubbo wrote:
         | In my idiom, at least, "kind of" is not solely deminisher, but
         | can also be an approximater - to say something "kind of upset
         | me" _could_ mean "it upset me, but not a great deal", or it
         | could mean "it had an effect on me which is complicated and
         | difficult to concisely describe, but which can be approximately
         | described as 'upset'". In that reading, this isn't a
         | contradiction at all - "which honestly had an extremely large
         | effect on me which was similar to, but not entirely the same
         | as, being upset".
        
         | rhaway84773 wrote:
         | I don't think the "kind of" here is serving to minimize the
         | "upset ness". I think it's describing the fact that the person
         | wasn't really "upset", but some other emotion which they can't
         | express, which was kind of like being upset, but not exactly
         | the same.
        
         | jeppester wrote:
         | This is definitely a thing, and I worry that I'm guilty of it
         | myself.
         | 
         | I don't know if I should thank you for this insight or if you
         | just cursed me.
        
         | powersnail wrote:
         | To my non-native speaker ear, "a lot" indicates the strength
         | the emotion ("very upset"), while "kind of" is a defensive
         | wording indicating lack of objectivity or surety ("not saying
         | it's objectively annoying, but it does upset me"). It shows up
         | a lot, in my experience, when people are talking about
         | something anecdotal or subjective.
        
         | bitsinthesky wrote:
         | Nice catch. I've been using this construction and I've been
         | oblivious to its hypocrisy until now :) I might start seeing
         | how far I can stretch it to make it obvious how silly it is.
         | "Which honestly did not at all upset me a ridiculous amount."
         | Sounds unhinged.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | creativenolo wrote:
         | This. I've seen a lot using this on its own more and more
         | frequently too.
        
       | unixhero wrote:
       | Self host with vps
       | 
       | Use cloudron.io for provisioning
       | 
       | Profit
        
         | margorczynski wrote:
         | It looks like a proprietary, closed-source solution so not sure
         | if that's such a great idea in the long run.
        
           | unixhero wrote:
           | Used it for 5 years in production, it is a good idea
        
             | oarsinsync wrote:
             | I used google reader for 6 years.
        
               | unixhero wrote:
               | Where did it get you though?
        
           | tweetle_beetle wrote:
           | Maybe not in the long run, but more reliable than community
           | created scripts which may or may not be: up to date, migrate
           | data correctly, etc. They all suffer from it, but it's
           | especially the non-Docker ones like Yunohost that seem to be
           | worse in my experience.
           | 
           | Anyway even if Cloudron goes under, you still have your own
           | data on your own machine if youve set it up like that.
        
       | jeppester wrote:
       | This is a thing I'm very interested in currently. It seems like
       | the last 10 years tech innovation (especially cloud) should have
       | also made it much easier to run - and maintain - things on-
       | premise.
       | 
       | Containers, easy to setup SSL, immutable OS's, reverse proxies.
       | 
       | Those things coupled with cheap and power efficient
       | workstations/nucs seem like a very good match, at least in
       | theory.
       | 
       | Then we have the GDPR laws which - also in theory - should be
       | much more tangible when you know exactly where your data is - and
       | backups can still easily be stored in the cloud as long as they
       | are encrypted.
       | 
       | The biggest issue I see is the lack of ECC memory in the machines
       | I mentioned.
       | 
       | And then that this idea goes against the business model of the
       | cloud providers, who have a great deal of control over where we
       | are heading and what we are talking about.
       | 
       | Still I cannot help but think there's a lot of opportunity in
       | that area which seems rather untapped so far.
        
       | linsomniac wrote:
       | Self-hosting is a big operations problem, with few tools to
       | automate it.
       | 
       | Long ago, I had an associate tell me that he was having some
       | success with setting up Wordpress sites for local political
       | organizations. I said to him: "Oh, that's really neat! What are
       | you doing to ensure that the sites stay up to date with security
       | patches?" His response was completely unrelated to my question,
       | which I figured was my answer and was why there are so many
       | hacked sites out there.
       | 
       | Anything I deploy needs to have an upgrade plan. Ideally,
       | something that provides a package (either on distro or a repo the
       | package provides), so "apt update" will resolve it. Docker can be
       | a good way as well, Sentry does a pretty good job at this.
        
         | x0x0 wrote:
         | The entire discussion on the link obscures the fact that saas
         | companies are providing a real service. Even if you don't want
         | the product to be updated, staying abreast of security patches,
         | external api changes, OS changes, client changes, browser
         | changes, etc is real work. Self hosting requires the person
         | hosting to do all the ktlo work.
        
       | cuuupid wrote:
       | Cal.com's issues have less to do with the stack and more that it
       | just isn't setup for self hosting , if you try to get it up and
       | running you'll notice you get quite a few errors where it tries
       | to hit proprietary code and it crashes strangely every few hours.
       | Also uses up an incredulous amount of resources for such a simple
       | service.
        
       | satvikpendem wrote:
       | I posted about this before but I would recommend Coolify for self
       | hosting applications, it's an open source Heroku alternative that
       | has one-click installation of services like Plausible, NextCloud
       | etc. It works with Herokuish buildpacks as well as Docker +
       | Docker Compose (with Kubernetes support coming soon).
       | 
       | I personally use a $5 Hetzner server in Northern Virginia which
       | works great, cheaper and faster than the equivalent in
       | DigitalOcean.
       | 
       | https://coolify.io
        
       | freitzkriesler2 wrote:
       | Self hosting is great , except it's incredibly frustrating to get
       | a good pipe to your home that has decent upload speeds. Even
       | "business class " is downright awful. Thankfully this is slowly
       | changing but not fast enough!
       | 
       | Looking to run my own next cloud instance soon.
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | It doesn't suit everything, but 10mbps can already be plenty
         | for self hosting. Apparently youtube's 1080p stream is ~6
         | mbps1. Count on some overhead, but I would say that 10 mbps
         | upload should be enough for most types of content so long as
         | it's just you and your friends using it. If it's a text blog
         | (with css, site logo, etc. of course), 10mbps will easily
         | survive the HN homepage at #1 position.
         | 
         | Perhaps a photography blog, where you don't want to drag the
         | jpg quality down to "looks fine without zooming" levels, might
         | be more of a struggle. Or if your goal is to share flashable
         | images for a raspberry pi or so (that can easily be gigabytes),
         | yeah then this is not going to be a good experience even
         | without concurrent users.
         | 
         | Definitely you'll be fine to host things like:
         | 
         | - email
         | 
         | - a website (blog, CV, hobby, link shortening... can be
         | anything) if you don't overload it with huge CSS/JS bundles
         | 
         | - chat server, such as Matrix or an IRC bouncer
         | 
         | - live editing notepad like etherpad, cryptpad, codimd
         | 
         | - software development stuff, like a unit test server or a git
         | server (maybe not if you're the Linux kernel with gigabytes of
         | history), perhaps a build server depending on the size of the
         | binaries (CLI vs GUI)
         | 
         | - game servers: most real-time games (e.g. shooters) will run
         | fine at low bandwidth if your latency is stable (let alone
         | turn-based games), presuming it's just you and some friends
         | playing, maybe not if you want to provide commercial game
         | hosting services
         | 
         | - backup server if are fine driving home for doing restores,
         | especially if you mostly backup when you're at home anyway
         | 
         | - "client" services like web scraping, e.g. I fetch some game's
         | leaderboards regularly (with permission) and provide statistics
         | for them, and monitor a river for giving me notifications in
         | certain cases, which take negligible amounts of bandwidth
         | 
         | - home automation that needs to talk to third-party services or
         | you want to use outside of the house
         | 
         | Probably there are more uses to be thought of. I can only say
         | to not let your dreams be dreams :D
         | 
         | 1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24198739/what-bitrate-
         | is...
        
         | kornhole wrote:
         | If you have high bandwidth requirements, you can self-host on a
         | VPS from the many possible providers. I personally have a
         | hybrid setup with my high storage and resource intensive apps
         | such as Nextcloud hosted on a server at home but host services
         | that need high bandwidth, no NAT restrictions, and different
         | security on a VPS. Yes I pay a small subscription to the VPS
         | provider, but it is relatively small.
        
         | kefirlife wrote:
         | One option to consider if you really want to host something is
         | to get some space at your local transit provider collocation
         | space. You have access to considerably larger amounts of
         | bandwidth without all the complications of getting the path to
         | your home to be sufficiently high bandwidth, and with
         | sufficient capacity for your purposes. If you want something
         | relatively highly available then power redundancy is important,
         | and in my opinion leaning on existing infrastructure for this
         | purpose is an additional benefit of this approach.
         | 
         | Setting that up will be a lot more in depth and complicated
         | than leveraging a cloud service provider, so you need to
         | consider the cost benefit analysis for yourself. However, if
         | you want to self host and want the bandwidth, I think it is a
         | route worth considering.
        
           | bruce343434 wrote:
           | Not to mention the expense!
        
         | dijit wrote:
         | I guess that depends on where you live, I have almost the same
         | upload vs download speed on my ISP Bahnhof in Sweden.
         | 
         | Proof: https://www.speedtest.net/result/14437484691.png
         | 
         | I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me though.
        
           | lucb1e wrote:
           | > I am always worried about someone deciding to DDoS me
           | though.
           | 
           | I've hosted a Tor exit node and other questionable stuff as a
           | teenager, going from 1mbps upload to 50 mbps today. The site
           | has been on the HN homepage, sometimes get featured on news
           | sites like zdnet (that article gave me clicks for years on
           | end), plus I run a file sharing service where anyone can post
           | literally anything but the links are valid for one day. It
           | has definitely hosted links to phishing and malware in the
           | past (and I combat that when I see it, like replacing the
           | short link with an info page "this was a phishing page" +
           | infos).
           | 
           | In ~15 years, I never noticed anyone trying to take down the
           | site. But your sentiment keeps being echoed in places like
           | r/selfhosted and moves people to put their services behind
           | some traffic inspection service, reducing the decentralized
           | to a few places where all traffic passes through (often with
           | decryption keys made available to them). It's still good to
           | self host even if you do that, but I do feel a bit conflicted
           | about that and wouldn't do it myself.
        
           | Nextgrid wrote:
           | To be fair, they can do that just fine regardless of whether
           | you're running externally-available services. Most
           | untargeted, low-effort DDoS relies on filling up all your
           | bandwidth with spam traffic, not exploiting some layer-7
           | vulnerability in an application you host.
        
             | charcircuit wrote:
             | Who does untargetted layer 3/4 DDoS? Why would an attacker
             | waste money booting a website that gets 0 visitors?
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | DDoS risk seems to be related to the type of services you're
           | hosting. If you host openly available game services or adult
           | media, those seem to attract DDoS, and you need a good
           | relationship with your upstream. If you're just hosting
           | personal things, you're not likely to get DDoSed except for
           | people just hitting random IPs, which could get you anyway.
           | 
           | If it happens, not too much you can do, other than move to
           | real hosting, and let them know upfront, or they'll drop you
           | quick. Note that the first line of DDoS defense at your real
           | hosting is going to be null routing your IP: dropping traffic
           | to that IP, preferably on their upstreams' routers. That's
           | normal and ok, although frustrating for you; doing better has
           | costs.
        
         | WXLCKNO wrote:
         | I recently got 1.5 gigabit internet (1.5 down, 940 up) and it's
         | been amazing.
         | 
         | The fact that my desktop pc only has a gigabit card is perfect
         | because I'm naturally throttled against using the entire.
         | Obviously I can do this in my router (dream machine which is
         | also gigabit only though) but it leaves a lot of room for
         | everything else that's hosted at home even during peak
         | utilization on my pc.
        
       | fabianhjr wrote:
       | Its better to design, implement, and use local-first software:
       | https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | I'm developing such an app. I'm excited to get to the network
         | connectivity part so I can see how much I've saved by making
         | the client smart.
         | 
         | I think I'm going to be able to get away with just running the
         | server for 36 minutes a day (three minutes every hour). The
         | client will know to sync data during those time windows. 1hr of
         | latency is fine for a lot of things if the client is smart
         | about what it caches.
        
           | triyambakam wrote:
           | What is the app?
        
         | triyambakam wrote:
         | Very cool, and interesting that Martin Kleppmann of DDIA is an
         | author. I am glad to come across this - I was brainstorming
         | such a manifesto, now I can use this as a resource.
         | 
         | One local first that I recently switched to is migrating from
         | ynab.com to my own Libre Calc spreadsheets. It took a few days
         | to figure out all the formulas, but now I have even more
         | control over how I track my budget.
        
       | justin_oaks wrote:
       | I thought this article would go into more than a handful of apps.
       | 
       | What apps do you think work well for self-hosting, even if it
       | limited to us tech folk?
       | 
       | I've self-hosted Grafana and InfluxDB for monitoring and metrics
       | and found them OK to self host. The authentication and TLS setups
       | were the most annoying.
       | 
       | I've self hosted a few kinds of wiki software, but I eventually
       | settled on a combination of a single Tiddlywiki file and
       | uploading to S3. It works well for most of my own knowledge
       | storage. I even went so far as to write my own plugin to save the
       | Tiddlywiki file to S3, so I can press a button in Tiddlywiki to
       | upload it.
       | 
       | I have a self-hosted docker registry, which is just the reference
       | repository provided by Docker. It has required almost no
       | maintenance since I set it up.
       | 
       | [Edit: for clarity]
        
         | nickstinemates wrote:
         | A lot of tools get mentioned and resources are available in
         | reddits /r/homelab
        
         | spmurrayzzz wrote:
         | > What apps do you think work well for self-hosting, even if it
         | limited to us tech folk?
         | 
         | At least once per month I check out https://github.com/awesome-
         | selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted to see what folks have been
         | adding.
         | 
         | One of my favorites from that list is Focalboard. I used to use
         | a combination of Todoist, Trello, and Notion, but found that
         | moving to FB helped me collapse that all into one tool. The
         | open source and self-hosted aspects were a big bonus, of
         | course.
        
         | nitnelave wrote:
         | I got fed up installing OpenLDAP for user management, so I made
         | LLDAP, targeting the Goldilocks zone of the article: simple to
         | setup/manage, but powerful enough for most self-hosting needs.
        
           | justin_oaks wrote:
           | Awesome! Next time I'm looking to set up some user management
           | stuff, I'll have to try it out. I especially appreciate the
           | sample configurations you give for each service you are
           | trying to integrate with.
        
           | navigate8310 wrote:
           | Can something like this be used to host phone books for IP
           | PBX?
        
             | nitnelave wrote:
             | Not quite yet, but I'm working on a feature that will
             | enable that: https://github.com/nitnelave/lldap/issues/67
        
         | boguscoder wrote:
         | +1 to influxDB (I use older Chronograf instead of Graphana) for
         | home automation/ sensor monitoring, even on Rpi Zero hosting
         | was very easy to start and zero maintenance from there
        
       | spiderfarmer wrote:
       | https://mailcoach.app/ is another awesome self hosted Mailchimp
       | alternative, especially when you're developing Laravel
       | applications.
        
       | steponlego wrote:
       | As for Google Analytics - who hasn't been blocking that shit for
       | at least a decade? Heck my uMatrix pretty much auto-blocks all
       | telemetry.
        
       | dmje wrote:
       | I've been impressed with Yunohost [0]. I only have it setup on an
       | internal box for now but it works well, and super easy to use.
       | Good for people like me who aren't interested in admin.
       | 
       | [0] https://yunohost.org/en
        
       | margorczynski wrote:
       | As for hosting your own apps I found Hetzner VPS or something
       | similar to be very good. Just pack them up into a docker-compose
       | with your CI/CR pushing an image into a repository and you can
       | host a lot of low-medium traffic solutions on a single box with
       | the cost being a fraction of "the Cloud" (especially PaaS). On
       | the box there is a single Nginx acting as a reverse proxy to the
       | exposed compose ports offloading SSL.
       | 
       | In such a solution you just need to ask yourself should Postgres,
       | Grafana etc. be shared between the apps or put into each one of
       | the compose configs as a service and handled separately. Both
       | have their upsides and downsides.
        
         | contradictioned wrote:
         | I have something similar, but with traefik instead of nginx.
         | Traefik integrates very nicely with docker using labels, such
         | that the labels configure e.g. domain, path, http-auth etc for
         | the web service running in a container.
        
           | Witoso wrote:
           | Same here but with caddy-docker-proxy which I found a bit
           | easier than traefik.
        
           | johnchristopher wrote:
           | Came to say I did the same :).
        
         | Svarto wrote:
         | Do you know of (or used) any guide to get started? I'm
         | reasonably proficient but struggle to put all the moving pieces
         | together
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-05 23:00 UTC)