Wondering if I’m bad at using the search or if there is only a selfhosting community with a lot of subs?
Check the sidebar.
It’s about self-hostable alternatives to closed online software. It doesn’t say anywhere that the hardware has to be in your own home, just that it is about self-hostable software.
Similarly, !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is about self-hosting services, the hardware part is (even with the slrpnk folk) only a prefetence.
So feel free to discuss hosting your own services on a VPS here
Thanks, good to know alternatives to Lemmy.world!
Nothing against .world, but variety and alternatives are the gist of lemmy.
I assume a lot of people interested in selfhosting also enjoy the hardware side of things, making it more prominent than VPS.
Without a doubt a lot do, but I personally couldn’t care less. I have a server at home, but that’s just a necessary evil. If I could I’d just rent hardware for everything, but there’s technical and obviously financial limitations with that.
And hosting pretty much anything is practically identical regardless of the platform. Sure, there’s exceptions, like my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff, but things like fediverse instances and other browser-based stuff are exactly the same to maintain regardless of the underlying platform.
my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff
Not sure about Z-wave, but with Zigbee it’s possible to get coordinators with Ethernet ports (and this is generally recommended over USB ones due to the added flexibility), so your Home Assistant server doesn’t actually have to be near your Zigbee network, just the coordinator does.
Well, sure, I could leave just the z-wave endpoint at home and move the server to the cloud, but that would mean that none of my automations would work if the network happens to be down. And my ISP is pretty damn good to keep me on line, but that’s one thing of my home automation I’m not willing to compromise. Everything has to be local and not dependent on any kind of connectivity to outside.
Sure, the things rely on the infrastructure (networking very much included) I have in place in my house and it’s not perfect by any stretch and my HA server in itself would most likely be ‘safer’ in the cloud, but it still is my home automation and I want to keep it local to avoid connectivity issues, latency and other stuff beyond my control.
And sure, should my server PSU die tomorrow, it would bring the whole system down. As I mentioned, the setup is far from perfect, but it’s built the way I like it and, for me, this is the best approach. You may weigh pros/cons differently, and that’s perfectly fine. I have my reasons and you have yours, both equally valid.
But I’d still rather not mess with hardware, I just need at least one physical server and other stuff around to keep things running the way I like them.
As others have mentioned, VPSes (and rented dedicated servers) count as self-hosted. In many situations, a VPS can make more sense than a home server:
- Better internet connection - a lot of hosts have 40Gbps connections now, and it’s a data center grade connection with a lower contention ratio.
- Cheaper upfront - no initial purchase cost.
- Depending on electricity prices, it can be cheaper over the long run too, especially with a $20-40/year one (see LowEndTalk, GreenCloudVPS Budget KVM, RackNerd specials, etc). That’s the case for me in California - just the electricity for my home server costs more than some of my VPSes.
- Usually better hardware than you’d have at home - often AMD EPYC or modern Xeons (not a 10 year old E3 or E5), enterprise NVMe SSDs, etc.
Better internet connection - a lot of hosts have 40Gbps connections now, and it’s a data center grade connection with a lower contention ratio.
And also better infrastructure in general. VPS’s are running on a datacenter with (most likely) failsafes for everything. Multiple internet connections, pretty beefy setup for power reundancy with big battery banks and generators, multiple servers to take your stuff over in case a single unit fails, climate controls with multiple units and so on.
I could get 10Gbps connection (or theoretically even more) to my home, but if I want all the toys the big players are working with that would mean investing at least several tens of thousands euros to get anywhere and more likely hundred or two thousands to build anything even near to the same level. And that doesn’t include things like having mechanics to maintain generators, security stuff to guarantee physical safety and so on, so even if I had few millions to throw on a project like this it wouldn’t last too long.
So, instead of all that I have a VPS from Hetzner (I’ve been a happy customer with them for a long time) for less than a hamburger and fries per month. And that’s keeping my stuff running just fine. Obviously there’s caveats to look for, like backups in case Hetzner suddenly doesn’t exist anymore for whatever reason, but the alternative could as well be setting up a server farm in the Moon as that’s about as difficult to reach as getting similar reliability from them for ~100€/year.
Definitely, just was unsure if self hosting means doing the hosting yourself or hosting for yourself, if that makes sense, if its either or thats nice
Discussions about hosting on your hardware is more likely to be discussed as “homelab”.
Assuming you mean hosting stuff on a VPS or similar, I think the Lemmy selfhosting communities consider that also self hosting on some level.
If you more meant for commercial hosting, there’s no harm in asking, I’d wager a fair few people subscribed probably work in the industry.
If you meant the behind the scenes stuff of running a hosting provider, you might have a little less luck, but you never know
