[gregoriol]

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.

So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.

[Carrok]

I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.

[organsnyder]

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.

I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.

Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw alerts at me

I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).

[kelnos]

You're spending that much time on it because you're doing too much. Your use of the term "homelab" is telling. I have:

* A rented VPS that's been running for ~15 years without any major issues, only a couple hours a month of maintenance.

* A small NUC-like device connected to the TV for media. Requires near-zero maintenance.

* A self-built 5-drive NAS based around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a carrier board built for NAS/networking uses. Requires near-zero maintenance.

* A Raspberry Pi running some home automation stuff. This one requires a little more effort because the hardware it talks to is flaky, as is some of the software, so maybe 2-3 hours a month.

The basics (internet access itself) are just a commodity cable modem, a commodity router running a manufacturer-maintained OpenWRT derivative, a pair of consumer-grade APs reflashed with OpenWRT, and a few consumer-grade switches. There's no reason for me to roll my own here, and I don't want to be on the hook for it when it breaks. And if any of the stuff in the bulleted list breaks, it can sit for days or weeks if I don't feel like touching it, because it's not essential.

And yes, I've hard hardware failures and botched software upgrades. They take time to resolve. But it's not a big burden, and I don't spent much time on this stuff.

> I have a much more complex setup than necessary

Yup.

> Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.

You don't need this. Trying to get even remotely there will eat up your time, and that time is better spent doing something else. Unless you enjoy doing that, which is fine, but say that, and don't try to claim that self-hosting necessarily takes up a lot of time.

[organsnyder]

It's definitely mostly a hobby, but I also want to get something close to the dependability of a cloud offering.

I started small, with just a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant, then Proxmox on an old laptop... growing to what I have now. Each iteration has added complexity, but it's also added capability and resiliency.

[itchynosedev]

A hidden cost of self-hosting.

I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.

[organsnyder]

Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have one server where a failure would cause issues: it's connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage, and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That would only cause Jellyfin to stop working—the other services that have lower storage needs would continue working, since their storage is replicated across multiple nodes using Longhorn.

Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had a failed node because some services didn't come back up until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster (looks like there are various projects to automate this—I should look into those).

[horsawlarway]

This point is oversold.

Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)

Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.

Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.

Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.

---

Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.

[mbeex]

Much easier with AI. Went from Webhosting all-in package + NAS to Hetzner Storage Share and a separate Emailprovider (Runbox). After a short time I dumped the Nextcloud instance and moved on to a Hetzner VPS with five docker containers, Caddy, proper authentication and all. Plus a Storage Box. Blogging/Homepage as Cloudflare Pages, fed by Github, domains from CF and porkbun, Tailscale, etc., etc. ad nauseam, NAS still there.

Most of this I didn't for many years because it is not my core competence (in particular the security aspects). Properly fleshed-out explanations from any decent AI will catapult you to this point in no time. Maintenance? Almost zero.

p.s. Admittedly, it's not a true self-hosting solution, but the approach is similar and ultimately leads to that as well.

[bazmattaz]

Same for me. I’m not an engineer (but worked with them for 2 decades) and AI has been amazing for me self hosting.

For example I could never setup Traefik correctly because I just found it too complicated. Now I have Claude I finally got it setup just the way I want it - the ROI on my Claude subscription has been off the scale!

The obvious downside is that I might not really know what exactly I’m implementing and why. I do read all the explanations that Claude gives but it’s hard to retain this information. So there are pros and cons to relying on AI for this kind of stuff I suppose

[josmar]

Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just Work™ flawlessly every time.

If anyone reading this has struggled with servers accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend NixOS.

[0xCMP]

Agreed. NixOS + Tailscale is 99% there for me. Using Claude Code to deal with whatever other package I need built with nix while I'm working on $day_job things helps get me to a fully working system. Besides the fact that running containers via podman or docker (your choice) is super easy via a NixOS config.

Combine that with deploy-rs or similar and you have a very very stable way to deploy software with solid rollback support and easy to debug config issues (it's just files in the ./result symlink!)

[esseph]

There are a lot of people that have made a lot of money and careers because developers in particular don't want to know or don't care to know how to manage this stuff.

They need to get over it.

Pick up some Ansible and or Terraform/tofu and automate away. It can be easy or as involved as you want it to be.

[saadn92]

yes, I do agree with that sentiment, there are times when I'm spending way too much time restarting a service that went down, but it doesn't take as long as it used to, especially with AI assistance nowadays. If I'm spending too much time on it, then I'm also probably learning something along the way, so I don't mind spending that time.

[kelnos]

Self hosting doesn't take as much effort as the cloud providers want us to believe.

I've been renting a VPS for 15-20 years from a small provider. It runs a webserver, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a bunch of other things, and I spend maybe an hour or two per month maintaining it. Add a few non-recurring hours if I want to set up something new or need to change something big.

Self hosting is not hard. It's not scary. It's not a security nightmare. All of that is just FUD.