pyratelog

personal blog
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20220110-self-host_or_self-almost.md (2909B)


      1 Self-hosting is the idea that instead of using services provided by companies, you own and operate everything yourself.
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      3 Reasons to do this can vary from technical curiosity to the desire for data protection.
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      5 Some argue in order to be a true self-hoster you should own the physical hardware and run it at home.  Others say that even using cloud providers such as Digital Ocean or Hetzner can be considered self-hosting if you are using a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and no Software as a Service (SaaS).
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      7 Understandably some people take the "self" part seriously.  There are others who can't afford the upfront costs or even the running costs.
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      9 Do you self-host?  Do you have your own physical servers  serving your sites and data, or do you use a VPS to host; is the latter really self-hosting?
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     11 In my opinion, you can refer to running your website or blog on a VPS as self-hosting.  If you have created the VPS, chosen the OS, are the only user with root access, and installed, configured and are managing everything yourself then are you not self-hosting?
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     13 Maybe I say that because it is what I do.  I don't host anything public on my own infrastructure.  This blog and my various other online sites are running in the cloud.  I have hosted websites from my home in the past.  Having moved around a lot as part of my previous job it wasn't sustainable so I migrated to running everything public to cloud services.
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     15 Some people do run their own servers, and it is something I am interested in doing again now I have settled more.  If you want to own the infrastructure you have to consider not only the purchasing and running costs, but the physical space required.  I met somebody years ago who had a rack in their garage which they were slowly filling with blades.  The hardware geek in me got quite giddy.
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     17 Running the few sites I have wouldn't actually have to require much infrastructure.  I could probably get a way with a few Raspberry Pis for the static HTML and maybe a tower server or two for anything requiring more resources.
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     19 One reason I like using a cloud provider is the control over the network, specifically the floating IPs you can purchase.  This is not something I could have if I hosted the hardware myself, my current ISP doesn't provide a static IP as an option.  I have had an ISP in the past which would give you a static IP for a price, this was useful for things like my VPN.
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     21 If you self-host on your own hardware I would love to hear about what you use, how you find maintaining everything (especially IPs potentially change at random), and even why you decided to go that route.
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     23 If you host in the cloud it would be interesting to hear how complex you built the infrastructure, and do you have multiple cloud providers or stick with just one?
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     25 You can find ways to contact me on my [homepage](https://pyratebeard.net) if you would like to tell me your self-hosting journey.