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> Self hosting is when you do everything yourself and that can be really cheap

“Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.


This "only if your time is cheap" argument is fallacious.

Especially since it was originally used in the Linux desktop context.

If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense.

I am far more productive with a Linux desktop and self-hosted / managed "solutions" than their commercial alternatives.

For example: My media server setup far outperforms Netflix and Spotify in terms of ROI and /even/ convenience.

Similarly my Linux desktop PC is better for work and play compared to any off the shelf MacOS or Windows experience.

If you have the perseverance and initial time to invest, you end up over time saving so much time and money.


> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense.

I self host a ton of stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent writing code, but, ultimately, I think having good sysadmin and network admin abilities makes a difference in the quality of software development.

Sometimes I see developers that barely seem to know how networks and DNS work.

And the whole argument about time spent is getting weaker. My stuff has gotten to the point where it's a bunch of Docker containers that I could auto-update if I wanted. The hardest part is picking containers that are maintained, but all the official ones are nowadays.


De-cloudification is a thing now: https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-o...

We're coming a full circle. At work, we just installed a couple of massive 64-core Xeon machines. On prem. Like it is 2002.


> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn)

Building the skill requires an investment of time, which has to be compared against more productive (read: profitable) alternatives. Remember that all endeavors have opportunity costs.


> My media server setup far outperforms Netflix and Spotify

Every time I've done the math, this only comes out ahead financially if you already have a huge library or if you are willing to torrent.

Is there something I'm missing?


In the civilized world, we have 8-hour work days, some of the days of a week, and then we can do whatever we want with the rest. By which I mean, most people do not see the remaining hours as “potential money making time” but as “this is when I do something I like to do”.


> then we can do whatever we want with the rest

hmmm... Let's count : 8 hours of work = 8 hours + 1.5 hours traveling to work + 1 hour for noon break. Then I sleep 7 hours. Then I need 1 hour to get ready in the morning. In the evening, it takes about 1.5 hour to cook (don't tell me it's my choice to spend time cooking instead of eating pre-made-full-of-sugar-and-fat food). Total = 20. So 4 hours left. But somehow, work is sometimes hard, so I need about an hour of rest. So in the end 3 hours left per week day. On the weekend, I'll spend 2 hours doing groceries, 2 hours keeping the house clean and doing repairs. Unless you are alone, you'll have time spent socializing, which is not exactly a choice neither, you need it for your mental health. And if you do some sports, again because it's fun but also because, at some point, it's for your health (i.e. being able to use your non-working time in a useful way). So well, it's not like there's much left. And I don't even count the kids... (but that was a choice :-) )


Agreed, many people simply don’t have the time to do hosting as a hobby. Me neither - I chose a family and a music hobby. But that’s not really relevant to the GP’s argument “your time is money”, though. My point is, only my working time is money. My spare time is mine to spend on whatever I like.


Well there are degrees here, aren’t there? I might hack away on some software in my free time but there are some aspects of that I like more than others where I’d rather spend my time. Besides that, nothing about this article led me to believe it’s just about personal hobby projects.


I couldn’t think of anything worse than debugging mail delivery all evening in that time.


Me neither, I do enough such stuff in my work hours. But I’m sure some people get a kick out of getting it to work and learning all about email internals.


Or your own money. I did the math and I was spending more money on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it.

A raspberry pi is not sufficient for running things like nextcloud in any kind of performant way.


A box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power. A comparable VPS or Dedicated box is easily 10x the cost.

I think people see those ridiculous rack-mount servers some people run at home that suck down 300+ watts and assume that's just normal!

I went for even lower power usage, with an i3-7100u box that uses about 2W most of the day and cost $75 plus some extra RAM.


Depends what services you need. I used to be doing a lot with my server but then it became just static web hosting and nextcloud which I replaced with the cheapest google storage plan and gitlab pages.

These days power usage might be workable with something like a mac mini server. I did a test and my ryzen 5 server with 3 HDDs was drawing 75w minimum and my area has quite expensive power so it just didn't make sense to keep running it.

A VPS also comes with a lot of really useful advantages. You aren't tied down to the hardware. As your needs change, you can change the scale of the VPS. Right now I still have the homeserver sitting here waiting to be sold as well as some other previous machines which were not powerful enough.

A VPS is also relatively unaffected by things like power and internet outages. It just keeps working. It's more convenient when you move house since you don't have downtime in the process. It has a dedicated fixed IP address and ipv6 with no fucking around with CGNAT or blocked ports.

Just buying a fixed IP address would cost an extra $5/month.

Once you consider every cost, a VPS can seem pretty good value in many cases.


> A box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power.

I'm guessing you're looking at the preowned market?

For those prices, people might consider themselves lucky to get an underpowered Celeron with BYO RAM and storage, brand new.


Yep! Not much point in buying new hardware for running basic services at home, especially since used business stuff is so cheap, it can cost 1/10th the amount for similar results of buying new.


I'm currently using a mac mini 2011 that I got from free from work (it did not support newer xcode and mojave). I'm the only user and have Lychee, Jellyfin, Syncthing on it.


> on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it.

Most servers with enough GB of RAM and powerful processors can cost in the 50/100 USD range to rent per month. It's much cheaper to self host beyond a rock bottom VPS. Leaving a modern PC on the whole time will not cost that much in a month, and what you invest in hardware will pay for itself with the difference over time.


enough RAM for what? Without diving into the bargain bin, I get a 64 GB VPS or dedicated server for ~$50, that's quite a lot. (And I don't need it, so I pay ~11€ for a 16 GB VPS, and even that's overkill for me)


Where are you getting 64GB of ram on a dedicated server for $50/month? Even OVH and hetzner charge almost double that.


Hetzner EX42 and AX41 both start at 40.46 € (local price, so incl. 19% VAT), how is that almost $100?


If you need multiple GB of RAM, you're probably doing it wrong.


doing what wrong? There are applications that require several GB of RAM.


Do you mean gitlab? :)


Nifi, Kafka, etc...


> “Cheap”, only if you don’t value your own time.

That's a ridiculous take, because the skills you get through self-hosting are actually marketable afterwards.


It can be, but that depends entirely on what kind of career path one is interested in. Not everyone is interested in landing a SRE job.


You never know when or where the skills you picked up are going to be useful, no matter the career path or occupation.


Indeed! But for every topic one chooses to study deeper, one also has to reject some other topics, simply due to the fact that every person has limited time on earth. Thus, one needs to choose wisely. There’s nothing wrong with spending time on learning the skills needed to do self-hosting. But I don’t believe everyone has the same preferences here. Just as not everyone will learn to brew beer, make furniture, sew clothes, make pottery, build a house, etc etc.

As Chaucer would have it: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne”


And of course, everything gets changed in version n+1 in the churn-churn-churn world of web software so that the skills one picked up become dated fast unless constantly being refreshed. Not worth it for something that only might be useful if they're lucky.


I automated as much as possible with ansible. I could upgrade my debian system in a few hours. With ansible I have a recovery plan ready in case of disaster. I could have used docker containers, but I'm a bit old school. It's not much work. I do check logs every day though. It was significant work to set up since I had to learn ansible.


I don't self host anything, but I have the skills and experience to do so. I think I would rather enjoy using those skills and more than using my skills in my current job. Though my current job over-values my time by a lot.


Some properties of self-hosted infrastructure can't be had for love or money with commercial solutions. Or alternatively, are so costly that you can't justify the money for it when there's a mortgage to be paid.


Learning is valuable time.


It can also just be enjoyable and therefore not wasted time.

That said, the learned skills are only actually valuable if you can use what you learned later on in life. I've done my fair share of fiddling around with raspberry pis and kernel compiling when I was younger, but can't think of a single time in the last few years where I had to use that knowledge in my day job now that everything is containers+k8s+<some cloud hoster>. Maybe we can argue that it gave me a slight speedup when trying to grok the container execution model or something like that, but I could have gained that knowledge much more efficiently in other ways.


There are infinite things to learn. Why should I prioritize learning all the broken things that will allow we to self-host, and not, say, carpentry. Or knitting. Or the history and evolution of a non-y language. Or...


Because you enjoy that?


The original comment said nothing about enjoyment, or about enjoying spending time and learning this particular set of skills.


It is. Excerpt from [1]

> An inability to feel pain and temperature often leads to repeated severe injuries. Unintentional self-injury is common in people with CIPA, typically by biting the tongue, lips, or fingers, which may lead to spontaneous amputation of the affected area. In addition, people with CIPA heal slowly from skin and bone injuries. Repeated trauma can lead to chronic bone infections (osteomyelitis) or a condition called Charcot joints, in which the bones and tissue surrounding joints are destroyed.

1: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/congenital-insens...


Just the occasional mech bill after some parts replacement.


Can you expand on this? How would this work?


The idea is that the government prints money to cover expenses. If you could somehow force everyone to hold all their wealth in cash, this would act as a wealth tax.

This doesn't work, however, because with very high planned inflation no one wants to use your currency, and without taxation there's no reason they have to.


They use your currency because they get paid in it. Government spending doesn't disappear into a black hole never to be seen again. [FALSE]>>> Also it's illegal to use other currencies as tender in (probably?) all countries in the world (Zimbabwe uses/used(?) the US dollar but I'm not aware of any other instances).


> Also it's illegal to use other currencies as tender

That's generally not true - it's not the case in the US (https://mises.org/wire/use-us-dollars-mandatory-united-state...) or the EU (https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/euro-area/eu...).

It is impractical in most places of course, but only because there isn't much demand for it, so it's hard to get bank accounts, contracts or purchases denominated in foreign currencies. Companies and individuals are free to do so, but they don't because using the predominant local currency is useful and convenient for everybody (usually).

The places where using foreign tender is illegal or tightly controlled are generally places where they have huge problems with inflation of their primary currency, like Venezuela.

Venezuela is an illustrative example of the original point here: in practice, if you make your official currency very inconvenient/impractical/expensive, people _absolutely_ will switch to an alternative. Even though paying for things in dollars in Venezuela is illegal and awkward, everybody goes through convoluted mechanisms to do so anyway because the official alternative is worse.


Thanks for the correction. I always assumed legal tender meant the other are illegal.

OT side note: if anyone from HN team is reading this it would be great if the upvote from the parent poster to a comment would be signified visually in some way (like green usernames for 2 week old accounts).


I’m not sure this true in most countries which don’t have strict capital controls. In most (all?) European (and I assume other developed countries) you’re free to use any currency you want as long as both parties agree on. iirc in the UK the pound is only legal tender when settling debts and merchants are not even legally required to accept payment in pounds and can demand any other currency they want.


People of Venezuela would like to have a word with you


Venezuela did a lot of things to restrict the use of the US dollar including forcibly converting all USD accounts at their banks to their own currency at an unfavourable ratio.


They are doing it illegally. My point still stands.


Generally it’s only illegal in countries which have unstable currencies and strict capital controls.


Government sets an annual budget and then creates the money to pay for it out of thin air every year.


I installed awscli and somehow emacs ended up installed in my system.


At Indeed, we developed something similar that is also open source https://github.com/indeedeng/k8dash


k8dash got a shout out in the article for some code they re-used from it.


Your website is blocked by my corporate VPN with the following message

``` Web Page Blocked

Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been blocked in accordance with company policy. Please contact your system administrator if you believe this is in error.

URL: justsavee.com/ Category: malware ```


wow, no idea about that. the site is just a simple redirect to the appstore or google play, depending on the device you open it from.


Megadosing B12 gave me dizziness and trouble sleeping (I had hypervitaminosis)


Another data point here. Happened to me ~7 years ago. FWIW, I haven't had any issues with Ghandi.net.


> Ghandi.net

I think you meant Gandi.net?

I definitely agree with the sentiment, Gandi has not done this to me in the past -- I've looked up short domains weeks before purchase -- and in general provide an outstanding service.


Are you paying your employee since day #1 on the job? If not, he's probably also a co-founder.


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