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> Self hosting is when you do everything yourself and that can be really cheap “Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.
by juandazapata 5y ago
> Self hosting is when you do everything yourself and that can be really cheap
“Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.
- foobar33333 5y agoOr your own money. I did the math and I was spending more money on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it. A raspberry pi is not sufficient for running things like nextcloud in any kind of performant way.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 5y ago> on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it. Most servers with enough GB of RAM and powerful processors can cost in the 50/100 USD range to rent per month. It's much cheaper to self host beyond a rock bottom VPS. Leaving a modern PC on the whole time will not cost that much in a month, and what you invest in hardware will pay for itself with the difference over time.
- stan_rogers 5y agoIf you need multiple GB of RAM, you're probably doing it wrong.
- detaro 5y agoenough RAM for what? Without diving into the bargain bin, I get a 64 GB VPS or dedicated server for ~$50, that's quite a lot. (And I don't need it, so I pay ~11€ for a 16 GB VPS, and even that's overkill for me)
- Saris 5y agoA box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power. A comparable VPS or Dedicated box is easily 10x the cost. I think people see those ridiculous rack-mount servers some people run at home that suck down 300+ watts and assume that's just normal! I went for even lower power usage, with an i3-7100u box that uses about 2W most of the day and cost $75 plus some extra RAM.
- ValentineC 5y ago> A box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power. I'm guessing you're looking at the preowned market? For those prices, people might consider themselves lucky to get an underpowered Celeron with BYO RAM and storage, brand new.
- Saris 5y agoYep! Not much point in buying new hardware for running basic services at home, especially since used business stuff is so cheap, it can cost 1/10th the amount for similar results of buying new.
- skydhash 5y agoI'm currently using a mac mini 2011 that I got from free from work (it did not support newer xcode and mojave). I'm the only user and have Lychee, Jellyfin, Syncthing on it.
- foobar33333 5y agoDepends what services you need. I used to be doing a lot with my server but then it became just static web hosting and nextcloud which I replaced with the cheapest google storage plan and gitlab pages. These days power usage might be workable with something like a mac mini server. I did a test and my ryzen 5 server with 3 HDDs was drawing 75w minimum and my area has quite expensive power so it just didn't make sense to keep running it. A VPS also comes with a lot of really useful advantages. You aren't tied down to the hardware. As your needs change, you can change the scale of the VPS. Right now I still have the homeserver sitting here waiting to be sold as well as some other previous machines which were not powerful enough. A VPS is also relatively unaffected by things like power and internet outages. It just keeps working. It's more convenient when you move house since you don't have downtime in the process. It has a dedicated fixed IP address and ipv6 with no fucking around with CGNAT or blocked ports. Just buying a fixed IP address would cost an extra $5/month. Once you consider every cost, a VPS can seem pretty good value in many cases.
- gsich 5y agoLearning is valuable time.
- WJW 5y agoIt can also just be enjoyable and therefore not wasted time. That said, the learned skills are only actually valuable if you can use what you learned later on in life. I've done my fair share of fiddling around with raspberry pis and kernel compiling when I was younger, but can't think of a single time in the last few years where I had to use that knowledge in my day job now that everything is containers+k8s+<some cloud hoster>. Maybe we can argue that it gave me a slight speedup when trying to grok the container execution model or something like that, but I could have gained that knowledge much more efficiently in other ways.
- dmitriid 5y agoThere are infinite things to learn. Why should I prioritize learning all the broken things that will allow we to self-host, and not, say, carpentry. Or knitting. Or the history and evolution of a non-y language. Or...
- Jolter 5y agoIn the civilized world, we have 8-hour work days, some of the days of a week, and then we can do whatever we want with the rest. By which I mean, most people do not see the remaining hours as “potential money making time” but as “this is when I do something I like to do”.
- wiz21c 5y ago> then we can do whatever we want with the rest hmmm... Let's count : 8 hours of work = 8 hours + 1.5 hours traveling to work + 1 hour for noon break. Then I sleep 7 hours. Then I need 1 hour to get ready in the morning. In the evening, it takes about 1.5 hour to cook (don't tell me it's my choice to spend time cooking instead of eating pre-made-full-of-sugar-and-fat food). Total = 20. So 4 hours left. But somehow, work is sometimes hard, so I need about an hour of rest. So in the end 3 hours left per week day. On the weekend, I'll spend 2 hours doing groceries, 2 hours keeping the house clean and doing repairs. Unless you are alone, you'll have time spent socializing, which is not exactly a choice neither, you need it for your mental health. And if you do some sports, again because it's fun but also because, at some point, it's for your health (i.e. being able to use your non-working time in a useful way). So well, it's not like there's much left. And I don't even count the kids... (but that was a choice :-) )
- Jolter 5y agoAgreed, many people simply don’t have the time to do hosting as a hobby. Me neither - I chose a family and a music hobby. But that’s not really relevant to the GP’s argument “your time is money”, though. My point is, only my working time is money. My spare time is mine to spend on whatever I like.
- hughrr 5y agoI couldn’t think of anything worse than debugging mail delivery all evening in that time.
- Jolter 5y agoMe neither, I do enough such stuff in my work hours. But I’m sure some people get a kick out of getting it to work and learning all about email internals.
- factorialboy 5y agoThis "only if your time is cheap" argument is fallacious. Especially since it was originally used in the Linux desktop context. If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense. I am far more productive with a Linux desktop and self-hosted / managed "solutions" than their commercial alternatives. For example: My media server setup far outperforms Netflix and Spotify in terms of ROI and /even/ convenience. Similarly my Linux desktop PC is better for work and play compared to any off the shelf MacOS or Windows experience. If you have the perseverance and initial time to invest, you end up over time saving so much time and money.
- systemvoltage 5y agoDe-cloudification is a thing now: https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-of-the-cloud-outweigh-the-benefits https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-o... We're coming a full circle. At work, we just installed a couple of massive 64-core Xeon machines. On prem. Like it is 2002.
- ryan29 5y ago> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense. I self host a ton of stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent writing code, but, ultimately, I think having good sysadmin and network admin abilities makes a difference in the quality of software development. Sometimes I see developers that barely seem to know how networks and DNS work. And the whole argument about time spent is getting weaker. My stuff has gotten to the point where it's a bunch of Docker containers that I could auto-update if I wanted. The hardest part is picking containers that are maintained, but all the official ones are nowadays.
- otterley 5y ago> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) Building the skill requires an investment of time, which has to be compared against more productive (read: profitable) alternatives. Remember that all endeavors have opportunity costs.
- 5y ago
- neals 5y agoI don't self host anything, but I have the skills and experience to do so. I think I would rather enjoy using those skills and more than using my skills in my current job. Though my current job over-values my time by a lot.
- ekianjo 5y ago> “Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time. That's a ridiculous take, because the skills you get through self-hosting are actually marketable afterwards.
- cpach 5y agoIt can be, but that depends entirely on what kind of career path one is interested in. Not everyone is interested in landing a SRE job.
- ekianjo 5y agoYou never know when or where the skills you picked up are going to be useful, no matter the career path or occupation.
- ThrowawayR2 5y agoAnd of course, everything gets changed in version n+1 in the churn-churn-churn world of web software so that the skills one picked up become dated fast unless constantly being refreshed. Not worth it for something that only might be useful if they're lucky.
- cpach 5y agoIndeed! But for every topic one chooses to study deeper, one also has to reject some other topics, simply due to the fact that every person has limited time on earth. Thus, one needs to choose wisely. There’s nothing wrong with spending time on learning the skills needed to do self-hosting. But I don’t believe everyone has the same preferences here. Just as not everyone will learn to brew beer, make furniture, sew clothes, make pottery, build a house, etc etc. As Chaucer would have it: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne”
- selfhoster11 5y agoSome properties of self-hosted infrastructure can't be had for love or money with commercial solutions. Or alternatively, are so costly that you can't justify the money for it when there's a mortgage to be paid.
- chmike 5y agoI automated as much as possible with ansible. I could upgrade my debian system in a few hours. With ansible I have a recovery plan ready in case of disaster. I could have used docker containers, but I'm a bit old school. It's not much work. I do check logs every day though. It was significant work to set up since I had to learn ansible.