For example, something that is too complex for your comfort level, a security concern, or maybe your hardware can’t keep up with the service’s needs?
I tried getting a music setup to work, but I couldn’t find a good solution for generated playlists with new song recommendations. The self-hosted music service just can’t add songs it doesn’t have yet, so it’s not really feasible. Plus I still have a very cheap YouTube Music subscription from the GPM days.
You can use Lidarr to subscribe to artists’ new album/singles. But you’d still need to have a workflow to add new artists every now and then to incorporate them into your library.
I want to be able to pick a song and say “give me a playlist of similar songs I don’t know yet”, and have that play immediately. That’s just not something a self-hosted setup can do. :/
Yeah I think the closest thing I’m aware of is Plex and album/track mood on smart playlist, and even then that’s kind of janky (ie: cannot shout into smart assistants to creat one on the fly). Music is so cheap now, even the free Amazon Music I get from Prime serves my needs, so I don’t even bother with it.
A social media platform where you can post or view images. I don’t wanna deal with CSAM.
In the early days it was cloud and mail, since Mailcow works really good, it’s just the cloud. Because nextcloud is too much hassle, all this php stuff… I have a managed nextcloud at hetzner and I am really happy this is something I have to worry about.
I check ocis from time to time, if it is usable the same way, I would selfhost my cloud again. NC on selfhost? Only if they do the same steps ocis already made. Because ocis is a simple single binary without php.
Bitwarden actually. I was really split on this but ultimately I trust Bitwarden, the company, to run a secure server than myself.
Who has time to track CVE’s and react to them in a timely manner? I don’t. If something happened, I probably don’t have the infrastructure or know-how to even realize I had been breached.
Email. Way too complicated and lots of maintenance. Not to mention it you mess it up, there are huge downsides.
I find it funny that a bunch of the simple basics are nowadays considered complicated. I’ve been doing my own mail and DNS for over two decades now, and don’t see a reason for stopping. It is pretty low maintenance, and generally less headache than having someone else do it.
Standing up email might not be that hard… but it’s much harder to ensure that your mail will actually be delivered successfully. Plus it’s not a service you can typically afford to go down. Any emails you miss during that downtime are gone forever, whereas even if my Vaultwarden credential vault goes down I can access passwords from a device that has things cached at least while I fix things.
Plus the big providers just treat small mail servers with a lot more skepticism than they did 20 years ago.
Plus it’s not a service you can typically afford to go down. Any emails you miss during that downtime are gone forever
The sending server will retry a few times, so you have at least a few days to bring it back. And if you prefer an additional fail-safe - adding a secondary MX somewhere else which will just store mails until the primary comes back is trivial.
Minecraft. When I started out it was fine but when I began to get regular visitors I got DDOSed for days on end and people poking me for ssh access. Never again.
Why were people asking for SSH access?
They weren’t asking, I was getting spammed with attempts. I changed the ports and locked down my server. In the end I switched to VPS’s.
You get spammed with ssh attempts no matter what. Just set up fail2ban with harsh firewall rules, key-only auth, and live happy!
Been using mine using docker behind an extra vpn container…works beutifully…
Sadly my server predated Docker or I would have done this. After I left the community I think they migrated to Docker.
A video hosting service. I cant be bothered collecting and storing all that media.
I was the same way for a while, but the last few years have just gotten worse and worse for streaming. I have a handful of streaming services I don’t have to pay to access (some through phone provider, prime video, parents accounts, etc), but anything not on there I’m just going to pirate. I use sonarr/radarr with Plex so it’s super easy to get and maintain media and it’s easy to access on all my devices, and my 4 tb hdd was $100, which I more than made up for after 4 months or so by not paying for hbo max and Netflix. No way in hell I’m going to pay for every streaming service for every show that looks good, or buy them individually.
I did this for a couple of years and it became such a major hassle I just closed my server and told everyone to go get their own subscriptions. 30 terra-bytes of data deleted!!
It’s not that hard honestly. I only have one TB though but it really isn’t that much of a hassle.
Ouch that’s brutal. You must have spent so much money on running all that and so much time collecting all that media.
Nothing really. I’m comfortable hosting mail, chat, my passwords and important documents. However:
Hosting personal/important data for other people is a bit intimidating because you kind of guarantee for safety and availability.
And services that are likely to be misused for illegal stuff and would be too bothersome. Otherwise i might host an anonymous spam eating email-forwarder, maybe a tor exit-node and a forum where adults can practise free speech. But that kind of stuff just attracts the wrong kind of idiots.
Anything that the family uses. Because when I cease to exist, my wife isn’t gonna take over self-hosting! So e-mail, chat, documents etc.
You know, I never thought about that
I hadn’t either until a few years ago. It’s something worth considering.
Dealing with the digital afterlife of a hacker - The Daily Dot
The main challenge was Michael’s tech footprint: His Gmail, Twitter, personal domains, rented servers, hosting business, home servers, and a huge collection of Apple tech.
“It was tough for Beth because she got home and she had a brand new phone and couldn’t even get on the Wi-Fi,” Kalat said. “Michael had done everything. Beth is very smart—she’s a scientist—but Michael had handled everything. A friend had to come over to reset the Wi-Fi password.”
Bitwarden has an option called emergency contact.
The emergency contact can request access to see all the saved passwords. If I don’t deny the request then the request is automatically approved after X days.
I feel like this would cover most of the issues in the article.
I told my wife when I die, she’s just going to have to throw it all away and start over.
We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I’m hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.
I gave my wife a laminated card with explicit instructions on how to access my keepass DB and encrypted backups. The rest can die when I do.
I have a router, switch and older access point preconfigured and ready to just plug in.
I have some basic documentation and a short list of folks to call, along with admin creds should anything need untangling.
But mostly it’s a rip and replace network. Ditch plex and get cable.
Google workspace is basically just gmail. You can pay someone to migrate it or abandon.
This guy has a good financial planner.
Mail. It’s almost impossible to find a server hoster that hasn’t yet been ip-range-banned from most mail gates, and I cannot host from my own house due to ISP terms and conditions.
Been having a wonderful experience with mailcow on a small vps…
I’ve managed to do it for my personal email and find it very rewarding. Sadly, I could never use it for my business. It’s just too risky and there may always be a few delivery problems here and there.
VPS hosting, BTW, not home.
I have setup a mail server for my employer, and doing it manually yourself is difficult. I didn’t want to do it for myself as well.
However I looked into mailcow, and tried that privately and it works great so far! However, i would dedicate a separate VPS for just that.
That, and the fact that Spam abatement is a terrible chore. Whackamole at its worst.
rspamd seems to do a fair job of it.
Tor exit node, public Lemmy instance.
Yes these. Essentially anything that an unidentified user could push data to that would land me in regulatory trouble. I would want to host these things, but I don’t want to become a distributor of anything that would get me a search warrant.
Lemmy instance for me as well. I have a specific community I miss from reddit that I want to replicate, I even have a domain sitting around that’d be good…I just don’t want to store data coming from complete strangers. I also have zero interest in any sort of admin/moderating. So I’ll just go without it and get over it lol
Weirdly for extremely similar reasons
@Tinnitus@lemmy.world I would say in retrospective, email, but it is too late now.
While I do have self hosted backups, I also have offsite, paid copies as well, not sure if that can be considered “self hosting” though.
Email was one I figured I would get an answer for. I know plenty of people do it, but I’m not sure if I’d trust myself to do it right.
The paid offsite backups just seem like a good idea. Some might have the ability to also self-host that, whether it be in a friend/family members home, but if that isn’t an option, paying for a service could save your ass some day.
Email was one I figured I would get an answer for. I know plenty of people do it, but I’m not sure if I’d trust myself to do it right.
It’s not even about doing it right. It’s a PITA to manage when big players can just decide to block your server and then you’ll be jumping trough hoops with Microsofts spam filtering program and whatnot just go get your messages trough. It’s got very little to do if you’ve managed things right on your end, random issues with delivery just pop out of the thin air and it’s your job to monitor it, swear by your mothers name to the big players that you’ll play nicely and hope that their robotic overlords are satisfied with your time and effort.
And if you host email for anyone else it gets exponentially worse. I’ve been doing it long enough that apparently my server has a reputation now so those cases aren’t as frequent as they used to, but they still pop up now and then and it takes time to figure it out with no other reward than the issue goes away, until it returns without any way to really know why.
I did email for about a year. Sucked shit so I cut my losses and closed the thing down.
@SocialDoki@lemmy.blahaj.zone what do you use now?
Honestly I’ve got like 7 different addresses spread across 3 different providers. Email isn’t important enough for me to worry too much about privacy and control. It’s mostly just a place to collect spam for me these days.
I don’t self-host Nextcloud. I have a cheap cloud instance running it and it’s essentially my off-site backup for important documents. I don’t put just anything up there but I live in New Orleans so I feel like I should assume my home server won’t necessarily be online when I most need insurance documents and shit like that.
Same, Hetzner Storage Share has been really good for me so far.
Password manager like Bitwarden. I’d rather they take care of it for me. The consequences would be too great if I messed it up.
Smart move, unless you really know what you’re doing and have redundancy. When I first made the switch from Lastpass to Bitwarden I had tried to host the vault myself instead of using the cloud version, which worked fine right up until the moment I had a server outage and lost access to all my passwords.
I’ve managed to keep my KeePass database for almost 20 years going back as far as when I was a dumb teenager. Back then it was as simple as having a couple extra copies on usb drives and Google Drive, but now I keep proper backups.
My take is, I’d rather control it myself, I am responsible enough to take care of my data, and I actually wouldn’t trust someone else to do it. That’s a huge reason I selfhost in the first place, a lack of trust in others’ services. Also, online services are a bigger target because of the number of customers, and maybe even the importance of some of their customers, whereas I’m not a target at all. No one is going to go after me specifically.
I think that’s what’s kept me at KeePass rather than moving to something like Bitwarden. Since it’s file-level encryption, anything that can serve files can also serve my KeePass database. When I upgrade servers or change to different services, restoring my database is as simple as throwing the file into that new service and going on with my life.
Yeah, my recommendation is basically this:
Do you need to share passwords?
No - use KeePass
Yes - use Bitwarden
Eh, the clients all cache your vault. It shouldn’t be a huge issue for it to be down even for a few days.
But I do upload encrypted backups of the server every 6 hours to cloud storage
Same.
Plus, my instance is proxies through Clouflare and only IPs from my country are allowed.
I still don’t get why people want to have cloud-based password managers. Keepass works in all major platforms, it’s just one file, which it is super easy to sync and/or merge. It can integrate with your browser/Os if you want, but otherwise the surface attack is basically zero.
Oh man, that’s actually really good advice! I recently switched to Vaultwarden, but you’re right: If my server goes down, I can’t even restart it, because the password for my account is in there! Damn! Close call!
Usually the password are also stored locally.
I can definitely access all my passwords offline with bitwarden
Well with bitwarden/vaultwarden you can have a copy of your entire vault on your phone or computer or both… so even if your server was totally dead, you’d have access to your passwords. Solid backups is a must, I follow the 3-2-1 rule on super critical systems (like vaultwarden) and test that you can actually recover. Something as simple as spinning up a VPS, testing a restore, testing access, see if that could work in a pinch until you get your server back online, then tear it down. Linode is very cheap for this kind of testing, it’d only cost you a few pennies to run a “dr” test of your critical systems. Of course you still want to secure it, I’d recommend wireguard or tailscale instead of opening access to your DR node to the internet, but as a temporary test it’s probably fine if your running patched up to date versions of docker, vaultwarden, and I’d always recommend putting a reverse proxy in front like nginx.
Bwoa, you can easily take json backups. It is pretty safe imo.
IRC server or ZNC bouncer.
