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by AdamJacobMuller 1143 days ago
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.
1 comments
JohnFen 1143 days ago
> 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.

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ihateyouall123 1143 days ago
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.
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JohnFen 1143 days ago
Interesting. I wonder why our experiences are so radically different?
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AdamJacobMuller 1142 days ago
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.

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nottorp 1143 days ago
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.

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JohnFen 1143 days ago
> 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?

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nottorp 1143 days ago
> > you need off site backups

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

Yes, you just pay for some server space on a cloud service... oh wait...

The point is all this trivial to do stuff just adds up, and sometimes it does make sense to use a 3rd party.

Your pain threshold may just be larger than mine.

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