Hey, I was thinking about getting a VPS and hosting my own single user Lemmy instance. I am trying to think of other things to host. I already have some old hardware running unRAID with Plex, the *arrs, Kavita and home assistant. This is pushing my hardware to the limit but I still want to mess around with some self hosted things. Is there anything you would rather host on a rented server as opposed to a server sitting at your home?
Right or wrong, the line I draw is “will I need to use this if I’m away from my home network?” If the answer’s “yes,” then I go with a VPS. I’m sure lots of people are angrily pounding their keyboard telling me to use Tailscale, but I have no interest in hacking/tweaking my home network’s infrastructure.
I’m not angrily typing this but I’m curious why not Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunneling? You get built-in authentication and don’t need to worry about dynamic ips. It’s pretty game changing for me as far as self-hosting goes. It also doesn’t require you to change your network infra as long as the host has some sort of connection to the Internet.
This didn’t come to mind when I wrote my comment, but there’s also a “workflow friction” element. Most VPS providers have 1-click installs for the majority of the apps that I want/need to run, and I’m more of a developer than a sys admin. So I don’t really get anything out of figuring out how to do it, it just becomes another headache-inducing barrier to implement the stuff I need.
Fair enough! Curious if you’ve tried out Portainer with Docker templates which feels pretty close to 1-click installs.
The closest I’ve gotten to playing with Docker is Distrobox while trying out Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE MicroOS, where most of the Docker functions are abstracted away. If I need something on my LAN where Docker is the best/only option, then yeah, I’d definitely dig into it.
My approach to tech in general is a combination of just-in-time learning & you-ain’t-gonna-need-it, so… [shrugs]
I’ve been dicking around with Portrainer (and Yacht) in the last week, and in my short experience many of the templates are not really 1-click ready. Especially things that need persistent storage for settings or other things are often a mess with the preoconfigured volume paths. Also most things are not available as a template…
Think it really depends on who you ask. 1-click can mean different things to other people but for me personally, nothing is truly 1-click. I’ve always had to configure something and I like the flexibility Docker gives while also allowing you to understand how things are wired up without going too deep.
A VPS will always have a better uptime, bandwidth and latency than your home network, because of it’s enterprise grade carrier. And the electric costs to run everything at home are never mentioned, but they are real when you run many services.
I host everything on a VPS for these reasons.