I’m trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it’s better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?
Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.
I wouldn’t recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.
But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.
Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.
And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.
“Self-hosted” means you are in control of the platform. That doesn’t mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.
Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don’t technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you’re still in the driver’s seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.
As long as you’re the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it’s still self-hosting.
actually have a server at home
I haven’t got any piece of hardware that was sold with the firstname “Server”.
But there’s this self-built PC in my room that’s running 24/7 without having to reboot in several years…
Well technically a “server” is a machine dedicated to “serving” something, like a service or website or whatever. A regular desktop can be a server, it’s just not built as well as a “real” server.
Do you have any recommended resources for getting started? I do have a secondary PC…
recommended resources for getting started?
I don’t know where to start today, honestly.
I started with books a long time ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Data-Structures-Niklaus-Wirth/dp/0130220051
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Andrew-S-Tanenbaum/dp/0132126958
https://www.amazon.de/Programming-Language-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0131103628
The simple way is to Google ‘yunohost’ and install that on your spare machine, then just play around with what that offers.
If you want, you could also dive deeper by installing Linux (e.g.Ubuntu), then installing Docker, then spin up Portainer as your first container.
Years? Lol you should update that software.
Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.
But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.
As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.
Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.
I’d say there are levels to selfhosting. Hosting your stuff on the cloud is selfhosting, but hosting it on your own hardware is a more “pure” way of doing it imo. Not that it’s better, both have their advantages, but it’s certainly a more committed to the idelal
I don’t know what hosting on the VPS should be called but it is definitely not self hosting. Since you are hosting your services on someone else’s servers. Didn’t it used to be called colo or something like that.
I thought colo was your hardware in someone else’s data center.
For me though a VPS is still self hosting because you own your applications data and have control over it.
You’re less beholden to the whims of a company to change the software or cut you off. With appropriate backups you should be able to move to a new cloud provider fairly easily.
I’d like to pose the fact that VPSes and Hosted solutions are different as a rebuttle to what you’re saying. It’s pretty unreasonable to gate keep self hosting behind having the hardware running on a device you control.
Of course it’s self hosting. The term “self hosting” just means being in control of the service or host yourself, as opposed to that being controlled by a third party.
It doesn’t mean the hardware has to be in your house. It just so happens that that is the majority preference, because people value privacy, and are often hosting private data.
Yep, big ol’ case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.
Most of what I host is piracy related 👀
Some stuff is just better hosted in a proper data center. Like mail, DNS or a search engine. Some stuff, like sensitive data, is better hosted on your own hardware in your home.
I have a salvaged HP 3500 Pro with an HTPC case and 8.5 TB storage. Started mainly for Jellyfin and now have half a dozen docker containers on it. Great test bed for getting used to linux before I slowly creep towards having it as my main OS on my PC.
I’m starting to realize that jellyfin is a gateway drug to self-hosting. And I’m here for it.
That’s how it started with me. Now I have the arr stack and a bunch of other stuff running. It’s definitely been a fun learning experience. It’s a lot nicer just giving the wife a jellyseerr icon on her phone instead of her giving me a long list of stuff she wants and I have to find them.
Most people who “self host” things are still doing it on a server somewhere outside their home. Could be a VPS, a cloud instance, colocated bare metal, …
Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.
To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.
Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.
I mean, as long as you patch regularly and keep backups, you should be good enough. That’s most of what responding to a zero day is, anyway, patching.
I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.
In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.
Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.
Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.
I pay Dreamhost for a beef pc VPS, that’s what “selfhosted” means to me. I host all kinds of shit on it.
What kinda beef are we talking here?
500 GB SSD / 16 GB RAM / 8 vCPUs you won’t go hungry
For me it does. I’m sure some other people use a VPS or something and self host using a cloud provider of some kind.
Running on a synology, but it’s not cheap. I like having direct access to my stuff if I can. Next step is cloud backup of my local , i think borg or something is very popular.
I’m going to say that self hosting becomes a fun hobby once you get your core services running. Core in this case means the services that are bringing you into selfhosting.
I ran one for a few months until I woke up one morning and it wasn’t working. As I was the only person using it, I didn’t bother to troubleshoot and just signed up for an account at lemmy.world.
If you want to run your own I recommend you check out the ansible install route. It’s really simple and straightforward once you wrap your head around ansible.
at least i do have 2 servers. one main and one backup
