The web services I self-host (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The web services I self-host (2022)

thinking.ajdecon.org

10 pointsmooreds21 comments

I wonder if the people who use other people's blog posts to justify not self hosting email have actually tried doing it.

I've only been doing it for just over 9 years but I don't think I'm ready to quit yet. Really it's fine for the most part.

I do the same. I don't discuss with the people who claim otherwise, they just had a different experience and I have a different one.

I've been self-hosting a ton of things for decades. It's been fine and I'm certainly not going to stop. For a small amount of time spent doing maintenance stuff, I get to have complete assurance that my service providers isn't doing something terrible to me because I am that service provider.

As a bonus, I have a much greater amount of uptime than any third-party provider I've seen and when there is a rare instance of downtime, I can just fix it and get it back up quickly instead of sitting around twiddling my thumbs for an hour or more waiting for someone else to fix their systems.

Unfortunately OC is randomly shutting down their Free Tier instances. I didn't believe it and I thought it's just a rumor until it happened to me. Then I googled it and it turned out it's been happening to many people for quite some time.

> my self-hosted services are hosted on Oracle Cloud

That's... one definition of self hosting

Using Tailscale for it's VPN, too... that's a rather generous definition of self-hosting.

Weird take. What does the choice of remote ingress have to do with hosting things yourself?

Hosting doesn't mean exposing to the public internet. It means running the stuff.

It's perfectly fine to self-host a bunch of services that are only accessible from within your LAN. Using a VPN to expand that access doesn't change that, regardless of the VPN solution used.

Outsourcing a part of your network to a third party service doesn’t really fit the definition of self hosting to me. If you used headscale or wireguard it would.

The author never claimed to self-host the VPN/Ingress.

VPN/Ingress could definitely be defined as a web service. Either way thats just picking on semantics. It strikes me as odd that an article about self-hosting would have so little of it in it.

The point here is that they control the server and the data, not that it's running on a machine physically in the same building.

I think it's a fair definition. If you are running it from home, should you also create your own ISP to be able to call yourself "self-hosted"? Your own power generator? :)

Those aren't apt analogies. "Self-hosted" means "on your own hardware". It isn't talking about your internet feed or power generation.

> "Self-hosted" means "on your own hardware".

Does it? This is not the definition I've come accustomed to.

Until recently, I've never heard it used to mean anything else. If you're running your stuff in the cloud, wouldn't that be "cloud-hosted"?

If "self-hosted" now includes cloud-hosted, then what should we call things that are actually self-hosted? The distinction matters. We should have a term.

Can't agree more. And the article mentions that they use free tier. It is not their server for sure.

I usually understand that as "you manage it".

Whenever I read about anything self-hosted, it's always about not being reliant on a single third party to provide the services you need. If you control the software and the data, you can easily move everything from one cloud provide to another or to your own hardware. Whether or not you own the hardware has no bearing on this.

Yeah that's a fair point. There is a line to be drawn somewhere, and most people don't run their own email server. Administering one on a rented server somewhere can be considered self-hosting your email (ahem, did I say server? I meant Cloud! Apologies)

Maybe what bothered me about the section I quoted, is that they're explicitly using the free tier and allegedly didn't give the hosting company (Oracle) any billing information. So they cannot possibly be paying for their use. It's sorta not really theirs but, instead, a charity from Oracle (there's three words I never thought I'd put together)

This is the second time on HN I've seen a piece that incorrectly refers to hosting stuff in the cloud as "self-hosting". Is there a language change afoot here?

But I understand where it comes from. We need some other term to talk about running your own services on machines you don't own or control. Something like "cloud-hosted".

Self-managed. It can cover both cloud and on-prem instances.

What that usually means is self-maintained, and I would rather outsource that to cloud/service vendors.

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