HACKER Q&A
📣 gvkhna

Do You Self Host?


Just out curiosity I’m wondering if HN has a decent size self hosted audience. Do you self host?

I self host many services on an Unraid, and may eventually move to TrueNAS Scale. It’s not something I spend too much time on, but I rarely hear about Unraid or Truenas on HN. Maybe it doesn’t make it to Front Page because it’s not very popular. Upvote if you Self host and tell me a bit about your setup.

The only reason I self host is control, I gave up switching SaaS tools every couple of years to the latest and greatest. I appreciate that a lot of FOSS still works great after 30 years, it’s boring, dependable, and slow to change. Mostly set and forget. Unraid not having a k8 cluster is starting to show its age, but TrueNAS Scale seems a bit too immature right now. Perhaps in 2-3 years it will be boring and stable. Share your thoughts!

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Do You Self Host?

I self host all the things with one exception now. I moved a portion of my domains to a mail provider so that family members would run into less issues with deliverability and so they would not bump into my global anti-spam regex rules.

👤 Ocha
Yeap. Mail, apps, DBs
👤 sema4hacker
My ATT Fiber IP address never changes, so I've been running an IIS web server on it for about a year.
👤 tamimio
If you have a stable fast internet connection, I don’t see why not to self-host, it’s pretty easy these days unlike a decade ago, and also cost effective.
👤 eternityforest
I don't self host anything except my NVR for CCTV, and a personal site on a cheap VPS using DokuWiki.

I suppose you could kind of consider SyncThing self-hosting. I make pretty heavy use of that to keep my music collection on both my phone and my laptop, and to keep small important files mirrored on all my devices.

I do want a NAS, but I have no immediate plans to get one, nor any idea of what tech I would use. Most likely a commercial WD or Synology to make things easier, or a device in the same kind of class as a Pi Zero W 2.

Hopefully there will be tech like SyncThing-lite again soon, that can make a NAS usable P2P without any manual admin.

Anything more than zero maintenance is too much, because I can't predict when something will have issues, and it might be while I'm away. The cloud alternatives have full time.

I don't tend to switch SASS a lot, because the big services don't really change much, except chat platforms, but I don't have much choice there. I don't know many people who use anything that even could be self-hosted.

👤 mergy
Yes. Count me in. Always have. Don't recommend it for others but works for me.
👤 t312227
yes.

everything i need - including email - on colocated / rented bare-metal.

👤 schmookeeg
Yep. I like the idea of spinning up a VM for any random crazy idea without having a tollbooth in my way. I have a Dell 740xd racked in Santa Clara.

Email, owncloud, about 2 or 3 dozen websites of personal or quasi-project status, and a few dozen other tinkerings.

Amusingly most of my clients have me doing AWS work these days, so my on-prem experience brings me nothing professionally anymore.

I do enjoy writing apps that "baseload" on my colo box and can burst into the cloud as needed. I feel like that's where everyone is headed when the cloud fees get thought about a little harder.

👤 fragmede
I made an opener for my garage door that's on the web so I enter a password and hit the submit button and my garage door opens. I self host that because I have to.
👤 valrix
Yep, I got a free Raspberry Pi 3 B+ from my employer who was just gonna toss it (it was the internal processing board for a PDI Fuel Commander device) and use it to host my personal website and other random tools and projects. Currently the biggest stress test is using it to scan the web for gas station tank gauges that are open and unprotected.