[nottorp]

Even as a techie, why would you put in the work to set up your own thing?

Though, I moved away from Dropbox long ago when they introduced device limits. One phone, one laptop and one triple booting desktop -> over the device limit already.

[JohnFen]

> Even as a techie, why would you put in the work to set up your own thing?

As a techie, I do this so that I can maintain control and trust, and so that when something goes wrong, I can fix it instead of just refreshing the status page of the service and hoping.

I in no way think that anyone else should do like me, but when people are having trouble with a service, I will mention options that involve not needing that service.

[AdamJacobMuller]

Putting in the work to setup your own thing is great. You learn a lot, if your doing it at an advanced level you start to understand some of the designs/tradeoffs that the commercial products made.

Keeping that running and reliable and operating it for years or decades sounds like an absolute nightmare and I'd suggest avoiding that at all costs.

[JohnFen]

> Keeping that running and reliable and operating it for years or decades sounds like an absolute nightmare

But it's not. I run many such services for myself, and keeping them running and reliable hasn't been a large burden.

[ihateyouall123]

I run a lot of my own things on my network. It is a nightmare, but I still do it. If I had more money, I would absolutely outsource this process.

[JohnFen]

Interesting. I wonder why our experiences are so radically different?

[AdamJacobMuller]

Because the things you consider work and what you consider a large burden is different for everyone.

As an example.

I exclusively run hosted apps for email and chat at this point (Outlook/Gsuite/teams/slack/etc).

I use Plex for most of my personal media consumption.

When outlook/gsuite/teams/slack/etc stop working, I realize there's nothing I can do, lots of engineers are fixing it and I move on to some other task.

When Plex stops working, it doesn't come back online until I do something.

Maybe it's just restarting it's container, maybe some update broke something and I need to downgrade, maybe the spinning bit of slowly rusting metal in my basement failed and I'm going to spend the next week fighting with mdadm because the raid rebuild goes poorly. It happens. If you're self-hosting, even if you want to claim to be perfect at deploying/running software and even if you think you can constantly upgrade things without any issue or even if you think you can leave things running on old software forever, something will eventually break. Probably software at times, definitely hardware will break.

Do you see fixing and troubleshooting these kinds of issues as a burden, or a large one? That's the question.

At this point in my life I do. If not for the cost, I'd run absolutely everything on the cloud.

The amount of free time I spend with computers is not infinite and I'd prefer to spend it doing fun new things rather than troubleshooting for the 30th time why some random ISP I was trying to send mail to is blocking my home mail server. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt out of frustration.

[nottorp]

Well... if you run owncloud (or any other alternative in fashion) you need off site backups and a plan for disaster recovery to match what an external service can offer. Backup machine or funds to get one at short notice.

If you use a 3rd party service they'll handle that too.

It's not the initial setup that's the problem.

[JohnFen]

> you need off site backups

Yes, but that's not technically difficult or time-consuming.

> a plan for disaster recovery to match what an external service can offer.

I'm not sure what you really mean by this. Isn't that what the backups are for?

[marcosdumay]

To be fair, nowadays setting up syncthing is trivial for a techie and keeping it running isn't harder than keeping dropbox running on your computer.

At the time dropbox launched, there wasn't anything this convenient.