I self-host a lot of stuff. Nearly everything that I use. FOSS and self-hosting is a massive part of my computing experience.
I love reading about people enjoying / exploring self-hosting stuff.
I struggle when people advocate "just self-host it", without giving due consideration to the costs, risks, security considerations, and so on.
I know that I've posted this a few times now, but this discussion seems to pop up quite a lot. So:
https://neilzone.co.uk/2022/07/self-host-it-is-not-the-answer/
@neil "It appears that “self-hosting” might mean different things to different people."
Definitely. We are able to do #selfhosting because we are local ISP for 25 years. We run our own datacenter from at least 8 years, and I was planning how to do the waste heat recycling for 10 years. We have access to second-hand hardware, because it would be hard to afford only the new hardware.
So #selfhosting is still collective activity of some kind, you need small business, or cooperative, or something, because you have expenses.
I suppose aggregating VPS-es for multiple instances on same physical hardware may have some advantages eg. with containers sharing the same ZFS filesystem (you can turn on eg. de-duplication of files)
So the #selfhosting usually anway about seeking some kind of cooperation. I would not be able to "selfhost" without cooperating with experienced admin...
@laurel not really, we are company limited, created by group of originally self-employed admins, we already transformed several times, and it is not easy and now I see, what is the difference compared to cooperative. Anyway, it behaved like cooperatively owned most of the time... and... this is never really easy 🙂
The most successful project was providing community based wireless ISP services when local telecom monopoly (privatized state telecom) was unwilling to provider broadband DSL services for reasonable prices. This era is long gone and now we compete against 5G mobile, XDSL infrastructure and also fiber and other fixed wireless services.
The idea behind datacenter is, that if you anyway lease backbone fibers for neighborhood fiber network, you get kind of free bandwidth for datacenter and if datacenter is small enough, it can be located in rental apartment building and the waste heat can be reused for heating water (basically: pay rent in hot water)
It more or less works - in the sense, that you can cover your fixed costs this way. But the question if, it can be considered "viable". Of course, we seek new customers, who would appreciate our approach: eg. VPS users, which would appreciate, that most of the waste heat for most of the year is recycled. Or Mastodon instance housing (I still hope, that sufficiently large Mastodon instance would start acting as CDN, but this is relevant for peering on national scale and national language instances).
Most customers are interested only in cutting costs or in technical parameters...
Neil Brown
Chao-c'
laurel