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?
Yep, big ol' case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.
Most of what I host is piracy related 👀
how much of the 20tb is used?
Free space is wasted space
~19.5 tb of hardcore midget porn
~500 gigs of whale sounds to help me sleep
Whoops that was backwards, my bad
~19.5 tb of hardcore whale porn
~500 gigs of midget sounds to help me sleep
Whale sounds! Oh man, I'm gonna add that to ELF space radio and rain recordings!
There's about 3.5 TB to go out of an actual 18 in the server.
I have another 2TB to install but it's not in yet.
I'm also transcoding a lot of my media library to x265 to save space.
I don't download for the sake of downloading, usually, and i delete stuff if I don't see value in keeping it.
What is a good transcoder? I haven't ran my media through one. Is the space saving significant? Did you lose video quality?
In order:
FFMPEG, yes, no.
I refer you to this comment for more info.
I have seen a saving of 60-80% per file on lower resolutions like 720 or 1080, which makes the server time well worth it.
A folder of 26 files totaling 61GB went down to 10.5, for example.
"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.
Selfhosting is the act of hosting applications on "hardware you control". That could be rented or owned, its the same to us. You could go out and buy a server to host your applications but there a few issues that you might run into that could prevent you from simply standing up a server rack in your spare room. From shitty ISPs to lack of hardware knowledge there are plenty of reasons to just rent a VPS. Either way youre one of us :)
But you don't control the hardware if you run it on a VPS?
You control the hardware you are provisioned and the software you run on it, which is enough for me. Unless you're looking for a job in the server adminstration/maintenance field the physical hardware access component of it matters less IMO
You definitely don't control the hardware. Someone else at some remote server farm or something does.
Some of them offer what they call bare metal provisioning and I wonder if some even offer ILOM type access. That’s pretty much control of the hardware for me. Just that you can’t plug in a disk or a memory stick.
Me, yes. But it's still selfhosting if you do it on a VPS. And probably easier, too. I mainly do it at home, because I can have multiple large harddisks this way. And storage is kind of expensive in the cloud.
Depending on where you are, a hard drive that runs 24/7 can cost you quite a bit of money (6$/month or even more for just the hard drive). If you consider the upfront cost of a hard drive, the benefit of hosting at home gets even smaller. Nvme is where you really save money hosting at home. Personally I do both, because cloud is cheap and you can have crazy bandwiths.
I know. You pretty much need to know what you're doing. And do the maths. Know the reliability (MTBF/MTTF) and price. Don't forget to multiply it by two (as I forgot) because you want backups. And factor in cost of operation. And corresponding hardware you need to run to operate those hdds. My hdd spins down after 5 minutes. I live in Europe and really get to pay for electricity as a consumer. A data center pays way less. My main data, mail, calendar and contacts, OS, databases and everything that needs to be there 24/7 fits on a 1TB solid state disk that doesn't need much energy while idle. So the hdd is mostly spun down.
Nonetheless, I have a 10TB hdd in the basement. I think it was a bit less than 300€ back when I bought it a few years ago. But I can be mistaken. I pay about 0.34€/kWh for (green) electricity. But the server only uses less than 20W on average. That makes it about 4€ per month in electricity for me. And I think my homeserver cost me about 1000€ and I've had it since 2017. So that would be another ~15€ per month if I say I buy hardware for ~1100€ every 6 years. Let's say I pay about 20€/month for the whole thing. I'm not going to factor in the internet connection, because I need that anyways. (And I probably forgot to factor in I upgraded the SSD 2 times and bought additional RAM when it got super cheap. And I don't know the reliability of my hdds…)
I also have a cheap VPS and they'd want 76,27€/month … 915.24€ per year if I was to buy 10TB of storage from them. (But I think there are cheaper providers out there.) That would have me protected against hard disk failures. It'll probably get cheaper with time, I can scale that effortlessly and the harddisks are spun up 24/7. The harddisks are faster ones and their internet connection is also way faster. And I can't make mistakes like with my own hardware. Maybe having a hdd fail early or buy hardware that needs excessive power. And that'd ruin my calculation… In my case… I'm going with my ~20€/month. And I hope I did the maths correctly. Best bang for the buck is probably: Dont have the data 24/7 available and just buy an external 10TB hard drive if your concern is just pirating movies. Plug it in via USB into whatever device you're using. And make sure to have backups ;) And if you don't need vast amounts of space, and want to host a proper service for other people: just pay for a VPS somewhere.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home?
My lemmy instance is hosted in my basement
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.
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.
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Hey, I love this thread, and I am intrigued by the term "futureproof"ing. can someone direct me to a thread where local networks are self-hosted and the human element of organizing the network is discussed? Thank you. If I don’t come back, it’s because I’m new to Lemmyworld and got lost.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation Plex Brand of media server package SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
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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
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.
No that's a homelab. Selfhosted applies to the software that you install and administrate yourself so you have full control over it. If it was about running hardware at home we'd see more posts about hardware.
I would say that a homelab is more about learning, developing, breaking things.
Running esoteric protocols, strange radio/GPS setups, setting up and tearing down CI/CD pipelines, autoscalers, over-complicated networks and storage arrays.
Whereas (self)hosting is about maintaining functionality and uptime.
You could self-host with hardware at home, or on cloud infra. Ultimately it's running services yourself instead of paying someone else to do it.I guess self-hosting is a small step away from earning money (or does earn money). Reliable uptime, regular maintenance etc.
Homelabbing is just a money sink for fun, learning and experience. Perhaps your homelab turns into self-hosting. Or perhaps part of your self-hosting infra is dedicated to a lab environment.
Homelab is as much about software as it is about hardware. Trying new filesystems, new OSs, new deployment pipelines, whatever
