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From reddit selfhosted: What do you wish you knew from the start

I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
nickhammes ,
  1. I’ve learned a number of tools I’d never used before, and refreshed my skills from when I used to be a sysadmin back in college. I can also do things other people don’t loudly recommend, but fit my style (Proxmox + Puppet for VMs), which is nice. If you have the right skills, it’s arbitrarily flexible.
  2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day. Pricier hardware could have saved me money in the long run. Bigger drives could also mean fewer, and thus less power consumption.
  3. Google, selfhosting communities like this one, and tutorial-oriented YouTubers like NetworkChuck. Get ideas from people, learn enough to make it happen, then tweak it so you understand it. Repeat, and you’ll eventually know a lot.
tburkhol ,
  1. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

traches ,

That’s not really what a UPS is designed for, they’re meant to last minutes. Long enough for a clean shutdown or to start a generator.

You’d want something like a whole house battery backup instead.

zutto ,
@zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi avatar

I wish I knew not to trust closed source self-hosted applications, such as Plex. Would have saved a lot of time and money.

warlaan ,

Can you elaborate?

zutto , (edited )
@zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi avatar

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)

0x0 ,

Are you still on Hetzner? How’s their customer support in general?

zutto ,
@zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi avatar

Still with Hetzner yeah. Haven’t had to deal with Hetzner customer support in the recent years at all, but they have been great in the past.

rhys ,
@rhys@rhys.wtf avatar

@zutto @warlaan Searching about, this was Plex banning the use of Plex on Hetzner's IP block, right? Not a decision made by Hetzner?

zutto ,
@zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi avatar

Yes, correct.

I apologize if someone misunderstood my reply, Plex was the bad actor here.

kitnaht , (edited )
    • Learning. If you ever found yourself tired of learning new things, your life is basically done.
    • Cost. You already have an internet connection at home. It’s practically a necessity these days. The connection is likely fast enough for most things. Renting even the most piddly of VPS is wildly expensive. Just throw a spare machine at it and go wild.
    • Freedom. Your own data is constantly being collected, regurgitated, and sold back to you. More people need to care about this incessant invasion of our lives.
    • Backups. 3 copies, on different forms of storage, in multiple PHYSICALLY distinct locations. Just when you have that teeny little imp in the back of your mind say “hmm, I should probably back up soon” – stop everything you’re doing and run a backup.
    • Test your recovery! Backups are only good if you can recover from them. Many have lost data because they failed to ever fail-test their backups.
    • Google. Legitimately the best skill you can ever attain is simply being able to search effectively and be able to learn jargon quickly. Once you have the lingo down, searches become clearer, quicker, more precise.
ChapulinColorado ,

For #1 I would say not to focus on learning the same kind of thing that you started at some point recently. It took me a few months to get my local setup going since I would do it after work (also similar skills) and get tired of poking around.

At some point I gave up and started doing other things that brought me joy (video games, paint night with YouTube tutorials, movies/TV). When I finally decided to get back to it, it was enjoyable again. If I have to re-do it from scratch it could be done in probably a few hours or at most some nights after work and would be enjoyable since the annoying “got ya” lessons are somewhere on memory or some searches away that could be filtered much quicker.

DmMacniel ,
@DmMacniel@feddit.org avatar

My reason for self hosting is being in control of my shit, and not the cloud provider.

I run jellyfin, soulseek, freshRSS, audiobookshelf and nextcloud. All of that on a pi 4 with an SSD attached and then accessible via wireguard. Also that sad is accessible as nfs share.

As I had already known Linux very well before I’ve started my own cloud, I didn’t really had to learn much.

The biggest resource I could recommend is that GitHub repository where a huge amount of awesomely selfhosted solutions are linked.

TheButtonJustSpins ,

Awesome Self-Hosted

DmMacniel ,
@DmMacniel@feddit.org avatar

Yes that one, thanks.

LastoftheDinosaurs ,
@LastoftheDinosaurs@reddthat.com avatar

Regarding your third point, you might find it helpful to search for beginners’ guides whenever starting a new project. One thing that people don’t seem to tell new users about is the struggles they faced when getting started themselves. Countless thousands of hours could be spent on this before someone decides to get started, while others pick it up in a much shorter timeframe. It just depends on you and what you are looking to get out of it.

It’s much more difficult than many people realize. If you need a space to test things out, I’d recommend installing VirtualBox with a couple of VMs to host whatever services you decide on. You can take a snapshot of the VM at any point in time, so when things go bad, you can simply restore whichever snapshot you like.

LastoftheDinosaurs ,
@LastoftheDinosaurs@reddthat.com avatar

For your first point: Work experience, to save money, and just because it’s cool.

There are other benefits that I’ll mention depending on whether I think the person I’m talking to might value them or not, but these are my reasons.

GravitySpoiled ,

I would’ve wished

  • don’t rush things into production.
  • dont offer a service to a friend without really knowing and having the experience to keep it up when needed.
  • dont make it your life. The services are there to help you, not to be your life.
  • use docker. Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience. When the services move to podman officially it’s time to move. Just because jellyfin offers official documentation for it, doesn’t mean it’ll work with podman (my experience)
  • just test all services with the base docker install. If something isn’t working, there may be a bug or two. Report if it is a bug. Hunt a bug down if you can. maybe it’s just something that isn’t documented (well enough) for a beginner.
  • start on your own machine before getting a server. A pi is enough for lightweight stuff but probably not for a fast and smooth experience with e.g. nextcloud.
  • backup.
  • search for help. If not available in a forum. ask for help. Dont waste many many hours if something isnt working. But research it first and read the documentation.
xantoxis , (edited )

Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience

My experience varies wildly from yours, so please don’t take this bit as gospel.

Have yet to find a container that doesn’t work perfectly well in podman. The options may not be the same. Most issues I’ve found with running containers boil down to things that would be equally a problem in docker. A sample:

  • “rootless” containers are hard to configure. It can almost always be fixed with “–privileged” or some combination of permission flags. This would be equally true for docker; the only meaningful difference is podman tries to push everything into rootless. You don’t have to.
  • network filesystems cause headaches, especially smbfs + sqlite app. I’ve had to use NFS or ext4 inside a network-mounted image for some apps. This problem is identical for docker.
  • container networking–for specific cases–needs to managed carefully. These cases are identical for docker.

And that’s it. I generally run things once from the podman command line, then use podlet to create a quadlet out of that configuration, something you can’t do with docker. If you are having any trouble with running containers under podman, try the --privileged shortcut, see that it works, and then double back if you think you really need rootless.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NAT Network Address Translation
NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex Brand of media server package
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
k8s Kubernetes container management package
nginx Popular HTTP server

20 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 30th Jul 2024, 23:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

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.

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