For most personal projects, hosting on the cloud may be overkill, but tempting with its supposed ease of use and benefits of scale. Self-hosting is often overlooked as a solution with the benefit of simplicity and cost.
Interesting discussion and demonstration of self hosting the kinds of apps most personal projects will end being.
Is it over-engineered for you? Absolutely. For enterprise level applications that must ensure 100% up-time and have complex requirements? No
Exactly. That’s the whole point of view of the video; for hobbyists and their personal projects, it is likely overkill.
Well, the title is click bait then.
Title: “Linux is the worst!”
Content: if your favorite software is Microsoft Excel.
It’s a shame that he didn’t do a writeup on this. It’s nice to have a video to demo the workflow, but it’s really annoying to go back to the video to get details to try it yourself.
I would really like to mess around with self-hosting someday, but I live in a residential area and those sort of shenanigans are explicitly banned by my ISP. Is there anything someone in that position can do?
Your ISP bans self hosting? I’ve never heard of that before.
My local ISP is the same, no static ip without a business plan.
So I use cloudflare tunnels now and they can pound sand
Edit: tail scale funnels could also be a good option
Why do you need a static ip? For a business case I get it. But for most stuff… Dns is there for a reason.
Because when my IP address changes all my websites stop point to the services. Unless I go and change the A record in my DNS every time that happens, which is frustrating and annoying. Cloud flare tunnels fixed that for me so that no matter what happens my domains are fixed to the local host services in my machine with no port forwarding and no DNS maintenance
Because when my IP address changes all my websites stop point to the services
Stuff like no-ip and dyndns exist for that specific usecase.
Exactly this. I’ve been using afraid dns for over a decade. Easy to setup and is basically instant.
I selfhost for 2+ years and it is both a job and really cool. We‘re not at real consumer self hosting yet imo but we‘re close.
My setup is around 50 docker containers on two servers. Important (offline) and security conscious stuff at home and fediverse services on a vps.
I‘m currently working on object storage which is a lot of work but its fun and maybe will come in handy too.
You can check my setup on github. Feel free to hit me up if you want to do it too or wanna discuss stuff. You can also see my matrix in my bio.
Have a good one.
Nice.
A VPS is also very expensive though. And shared hosting usually only allows HTML and PHP. So what’s the affordable alternative?
expensive
Highly disagree, but I realize expensiveness is subjective.
What is your definition of not cloud? Does anyone else’s VM count? So linode or digitalocean for example would be acceptable, or no?
I guess “alternative” is also subjective.
I’ve been looking for a place to host web apps in whatever language (Rust, Nim, or whatever) and framework I want, where I can use my own domains and multiple apps, and have sudo access. And I don’t want to pay $70/month for it. I gave up on that hunt (it might have been unrealistic), although I’ll be researching some of the alternatives offered in these comments.
My ovh vps costs me 60€/y. Granted it’s low end specs. What would you need exactly?
Oracle VMs have a perpetual free tier. Even AWS’s non-free tier starts around $3/mo, similar for buyvm/DigitalOcean/linode/etc. There are MANY options that are way cheaper than $70… unless I misunderstood your requirements.
I use nearlyfreespeech.net. They bill for usage, and since my site gets almost no hits and doesn’t take much storage, it’s ridiculously cheap. Much cheaper than even he $2.50.mo VPS listed in another comment. I just checked, and I spend an average of $.30/mo.
Thanks for this; I signed up because of your comment
Plenty of places with $5 per month VPS
With sudo access? Can you suggest some? I did tons of research and rarely found anything less than $70/month.
Yup, many are mentioned in the comments alongside mine. Linode is my option of choice.
VPS’ are pretty cheap. Checkout https://buyvm.net starts at like 2.50$/mo
Great question. Here’s where I’ve landed:
- For a surprising number of things, my previous desktop, running Linux, confined to my local network, is perfectly fine.
- For a number of other things, a Raspberry Pi, with a dedicated disk image (ISO), confined to my local network, is fine.
- Surprisingly often, a not-at-all-dynamic dynamic DNS solution gets the job done. I follow the first half of the DynDNS guide, and then hard code my preferred IP, and skip the rest. It’s inconvenient when my IP changes, but that happens a lot less often than most folks imagine. Most DNS providers have provided this to me for free after I bought my domain name from through them.
- For my public personal portfolio, GitHub pages works fine.
- For additional silly static sites, AWS S3 and AWS CDN get the job done for about $3 per month.
- When I need to do public facing database stuff, I get a virtual private server, not from Amazon or Microsoft, who both way overcharge for small apps.
Personally I self-host on a raspberry pi. It took me a few weeks to setup, but it has been running without problems for almost 2 years now at practically no cost (beyond purchase and electricity).
