HACKER Q&A
📣 asim

Could you build a personal server from the ground up?


So HN loves posts about self hosting and home servers, this much is clear. That and the holy grail of self hosted email services. I keep coming back to this, I continue to contemplate it and as much as I'm seeing DIY solutions in the market it's not clear to me any of these are an ideal solution. The conclusion I'm coming to is we need support for the protocols but maybe not the current software suite of tools e.g Umbrel [1] packs tons of open source stuff onto a box but it all feels a bit fragmented like there's no unified experience there. The thing about adopting cloud services or an ecosystem like Apple or Google is that it's a very unified experience. It's very singular and that drives a great end user experience. I'm just wondering if the personal server needs that same initiative from the ground up starting with protocols. We need SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, XMPP, etc but that doesn't necessarily mean we need to install some existing open source software that's all bespoke. Maybe it's possible to implement something leveraging libraries to create a singular server?

Mostly thinking out loud but looking for the people who might have the most interest in something like this.

I started mocking something up here https://github.com/asim/aslam

[1] https://umbrel.com/

  👤 zeroCalories Accepted Answer ✓
Don't know if UX is as big of a problem as you think. My understanding is that the problem with self hosting is reliability and spam prevention.

For reliability, self hosting a server that will always be available is hard. Not getting an important email because your server went offline is a massive bummer.

Similarly, while filtering spam on your end might be doable, self hosted email servers are often filtered by major email providers for looking like spam.

👤 rmdes
You should try Cloudron.io Email is fully solved provided you choose a VPS IP that isn't completely burned by previous abuses. Cloudron makes all of this so easy it's becoming ridiculous to self host and manage users, domain, email, countless apps from a one click install.