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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Don’t build castles in other peoples kingdoms

That is why I devote my energy to enriching my home file server with custom software that I can access anywhere via domain name mapped to a IPv6 address. It is my kingdom and its not going away. I can demo on there full stack applications that would be challenging to demo otherwise. If I had a blog on there I could say what I want. I could host a personal email address on there. I am exploring how to limit access by physical device identity so that it remains private even on the public internet.

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I'm not trying to be rude but are you serious or being sarcastic? Because on here it could go either way. There are definitely people who would build everything themselves just because they can. And there are people who would mock someone for doing so.

If you're being serious, how much time does it take and how much custom software do you actually have?

I wrote a Node application that serves as a real time dashboard of my docker containers, web servers, port availability, provides a command terminal in the browser, and a system logger. I should also write a symlink manager and a process manager for it. The web servers are executed from this application and allow any kind of traffic redirection via streamed pipes. Then in the docker containers I can run things like pihole, jellyfin, and various other things that I can choose to expose outside the lan via traffic redirection rules on the web servers. Running multiple web servers on the same box allows access via port numbers and different management rules per server.

Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.

Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern

Or you die, if you are interested in long-term availability of your work. It's nice to have it hosted somewhere where others will look after it.

> Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live.

How about this approach? https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/

And frankly, if you're not a business, there's no reason to chase a 100% uptime.

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