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