Highly recommend. I moved my web hosting from my home server to a CPX11 server for better uptime (my tinkering around in the homelab was always bringing things down) and couldn’t be happier. It’s dirt cheap (cheaper than shared web hosting, even), performant (performance is better than shared web hosting) and reliable. With a 20TB bandwidth limit at the lowest tier, I can reverse proxy for most of my homelab, too.
Most of this article is not purely about that question, but I dislike clickbait, so I’ll actually answer the question from the title: Two reasons.
First of all, I like to be independent - or at least, as much as I can. Same reason we have backup power, why I know how to bake bread, preserve food, and generally LARP as a grandmother desperate to feed her 12 grandchildren until they are no longer capable of self propelled movement. It makes me reasonably independent of whatever evil scheme your local $MEGA_CORP is up to these days (hint: it’s probably a subscription).
It’s basically the Linux and Firefox argument - competition is good, and freedom is too.
If that’s too abstract for you, and what this article is really about, is the fact that it teaches you a lot and that is a truth I hold to be self-evident: Learning things is good & useful.
Turns out, forcing yourself to either do something you don’t do every day, or to get better at something you do occasionally, or to simply learn something that sounds fun makes you better at it. Wild concept, I know.
Contents
Introduction
My Services
Why I self host
Reasoning about complex systems
Things that broke in the last 6 months
Things I learned (or recalled) in the last 6 months
You can self host VS Code
UPS batteries die silently and quicker than you think
Redundant DNS is good DNS
Raspberry PIs run ARN, Proxmox does not
zfs + Proxmox eat memmory and will OOM kill your VMS
The mystery of random crashes (Is it hardware? It’s always hardware.)
SNMP(v3) is still cool
Don’t trust your VPS vendor
Gotta go fast
CIFS is still not fast
Blob storage, blob fish, and file systems: It’s all “meh”
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