I recognize this will vary depending on how much you self-host, so I’m curious about the range of experiences from the few self-hosted things to the many self-hosted things.
Also how might you compare it to other maintenance of your other online systems (e.g. personal computer/phone/etc.)?
Huge amounts of daily maintenance because I lack self control and keep changing things that were previously working.
I have weekly backups of my VMs in Proxmox. Fuck it lol.
sometimes I remember I’m self hosting things
As long as you remember before you turn off the computer!
I don’t understand. “Turn… off?”
neofetch proudly displaying 5 months of uptime
my main PC hosts nothing, everything else is always on
+1 automate your backup rolling, setup your monitoring and alerting and then ignore everything until something actually goes wrong. I touch my lab a handful of times a year when it’s time for major updates, otherwise it basically runs itself.
Typically, very little. I have ~40 containers in my Docker stack and by in large it just works. I upgrade stuff here and there as needed. I am getting ready to do a hardware refresh but again with Docker that’s pretty painless.
Most of the time spent in my lab is trying out new things. I’ll find a new something that looks cool and go down the rabbit hole with it for a while. Then back to the status quo.
It’s bursty; I tend to do a lot of work on stuff when I do a hardware upgrade, but otherwise it’s set it and forget it for the most part. The only servers I pay any significant attention to in terms of frequent maintenance and security checks are the MTAs in the DMZ for my email. Nothing else is exposed to the internet for inbound traffic except a game server VM that’s segregated (credential-wise and network-wise) from everything else, so if it does get compromised it would be a very minimal danger to the rest of my network. Everything either has automated updates, or for servers I want more control over I manually update them when the mood strikes me or a big vulnerability that affects my software hits the news.
TL;DR If you averaged it over a year, I maybe spend 30-60 minutes a week on self hosting maintenance tasks for 4 physical servers and about 20 VM’s.
As others said, the initial setup may consume some time, but once it’s running, it just works. I dockerize almost everything and have automatic backups set up.
For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.
NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn’t work, restart it. If the OS doesn’t work, roll it back.
A lot less since I started using docker instead of running separate vms for everything. Less systems to update is bliss.
I spend a huge amount of time configuring and setting up stuff as it’s my biggest hobby. But I got good enough that when I set something up it can stay for months without any mainainence. Most I do for keeping it up is adding more storage if it turn out to be used more than planned.
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Mostly nothing, except for Home Assistant, which seems to shit the bed every few months. My other services are Docker containers or Proxmox LXCs that just work.
Maybe 1 hr every month or two to update things.
Thinks like my opnsense router are best updated when no one else is using the network.
The docker containers I like to update manually after checking the release logs. Doesn’t take long and I often find out about cool new features perusing the release notes.
Projects will sometimes have major updates that break things and I strongly prefer having everything super stable until I have time to sit down and update.
11 stacks, 30+ containers. Borg backups runs automatically to various repositories. Zfs auto snap snot also runs automatically to create rapid backups.
I use unraid as a nas and proxmox for dockers and VMs.
If you’re not publicly exposing things? I can go months without touching it. Then go through and update everything in an hour or so on the weekend.
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Generally, no. Most of the time the updates work without a hitch. The the exception of Nextcloud, which will always break during an upgrade.
If you set it up really well, you’ll probably only need to invest maybe an hour or so every week or two. But it also depends on what kind of maintenance you mean. I spend a lot of time downloading things and putting them in the right place so that my TV is properly entertaining. Is that maintenance? As for updating things, I’ve set up most of that to be automatic. The stuff that’s not automatic, like pulling new docker images, I do every couple weeks. Sometimes that involves running update scripts or changing configs. Usually it’s just a couple commands.
Yeah, to clarify I don’t mean organizing/arranging files as a part of maintenance, moreso handling different installs/configs/updating. Sometimes since more folks come around to ask for help it can appear as if it’s all much more involved to maintain than it may otherwise be (with a mix of the right setups and knowledge to deal with any hiccups).
As a complete noob trying to make A TrueNAS server, none and then suddenly lots when idk how to fix something that broke
If my ISP didn’t constantly break my network from their side, I’d have effectively no downtime and nearly zero maintenance. I don’t live on the bleeding edge and I don’t do anything particularly experimental and most of my containers are as minimal as possible
I built my own x86 router with OpnSense Proxmox hypervisor Cheapo WiFi AP Thinkcentre NAS (just 1 drive, debian with Samba) Containers: Tor relay, gonic, corrade, owot, apache, backups, dns, owncast
All of this just works if I leave it alone
