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?
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.
That, and the fact that Spam abatement is a terrible chore. Whackamole at its worst.
rspamd seems to do a fair job of it.
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.
Been having a wonderful experience with mailcow on a small vps…
IRC server or ZNC bouncer.
Mail server, but mostly because deliverability in this day and age is a nightmare. If you’re some one off running your own mail server in 2023 be prepared to deal with many headaches around IP reputation.
I think someone else already mentioned it, but just to reiterate… Anything for other people who aren’t my wife and future kids.
Password manager, file backups, photo backup, whatever.
If something happens to me, or I pass away, wifey has instructions on shutting everything down (probably should write instructions on how to save all the important stuff).
But I don’t want to deal with other peoples stuff. I like tinkering with my server and different docker containers, etc. So I don’t want someone complaining they can’t access their photos because I wanted to try something new. Also, just don’t wanna be responsible for storing their photos and important documents.
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.
Aegis. Never use a local-only 2FA app on your phone.
Any recommendations for 2FA?
Paid bitwarden
Authy, having paid bitwarden and 2FA in one app is a disaster waiting to be happen in case of a security breach.
Can Authy really be trusted?
Out of all hosted options available that I lasted tested 2-3 years back, Authy is the only one that reliably syncs and backups seeds across devices. I would switch in an instant if something like Bitwarden comes up but for 2FA only.
Why not just use Aegis with a remote backup?
What’s the problem with it being local-only? Just backup the secrets, and you’re good? Or is backing it up the “online” element?
Like a password manager, I can’t trust myself for the seeds to get misplaced.
First, that’s what recovery codes are.
Second, that’s what backups are for.
Frankly, given what we’ve seen with LastPass this past year alone, there is absolutely no one I would trust to host any of my credentials.
My TOTP seeds go in a Keepass database that has a very long passphrase. That database is then sync’d across devices with syncthing and included in encrypted backups.
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.
Backups. Cloud services like Backblaze B2 are so cheap for the durability they offer, it just doesn’t make sense for me to roll my own offsite solution with a Raspberry Pi at my parents’ house or something. Restic encrypts everything before it leaves my machine.
Password manager- it’s too important and it’s the thing that has to work for me to recover when I break something else. I’m happy to support Bitwarden with a few bucks a year.
Email- again, it’s mission critical and I have a habit of tinkering with things and breaking them. And it’s just no fun. The less I need to think about email, the happier I am.
Re backups, to be clear it sounds like you’re specific referring to offsite backups.
I run my own local backup server using syncthing for replication and restic for snapshotting, but I also send offsites to cloud storage (in my case gdrive).
That’s what “1” in the “3-2-1” backup strategy stands for, a true offsite backup (preferably continent where you do not reside) For “2” I would still deploy a local offsite at someone’s house for quick disaster recovery.
Downloading your 10TB data from B2 (or even requesting a tarball HDD from them) is costlier than recovering from an offsite backup facility within an hour’s reach.
Why is backblaze so cheap?
Because the assumption is there’s very little throughput. Storage isn’t really that expensive, but bandwidth is and Backblaze is only cheap if you aren’t trying to get at your data regularly. That’s fine for backups because hopefully you never need them.
EDIT: I should say that for an individual user, getting data out of Backblaze isn’t that expensive, but it’s more expensive than cold storage. I think they charge $.01 per GB transfered, so a 10GB movie would cost you about ten cents to stream. It would cost you $100 to recover a 10TB backup from Backblaze (though for a fee than can mail you some of that on a hard drive, I think).
I self-host all those things.
I just have two portable drives, and I bring one home from work at a time to run an rsync backup job.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
- My own search engine (a meta search engine like searx-ng would be fine though)
- a tor exit node, because don’t want to deal with the legal hassle (i run snowflake on multiple machines though)
- a SMTP relay (recieving email is easy. Sending email is a pain in the ass)
Sending email is super easy as well. Making sure everyone can receive it is such a pain though.
Tor exit node, public Lemmy instance.
Weirdly for extremely similar reasons
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
Hosting an email server is pretty sure a magnet for half the Chinese IP range… So I would refrain from hosting that myself.
I figured email would be a common theme. I’m just starting to dip my toes into all of this, so an email server is not on my to-do list (and may never be).
I have an email server but it is not my main email account. I’m purely only using it to learn and to have email notifications sent out from a few services. I do not trust myself or my setup enough to have my main email account hosted on it
Google and other large scale providers have intentionally made it very difficult to self host your own email. It’s generally not considered a wise move these days and is very difficult to maintain.
Why do you say so? I’m not an expert in the fields, but isn’t a mail server pretty much the same as 20 years ago plus DKIM and SPF?
With DKIM and SPF, I’ve had zero problems in the last 15 years of selfhosting, most recently with Mailcow Docker on a residential IP. I don’t even have a reverse PTR to my mailserver hostname, just a PTR provided by the ISP that can be resolved.
I’ve added a few fresh, un-reputed domains to the server and had no issues.
I think many people’s problems with running email servers are self-inflicted. I remember even before there were things like blacklists, etc with large providers, many people had problems keeping mailservers running. It’s just not an easy task for a variety of reasons completely unassociated with the mega’s blacklisting you. I’ve been running mailservers at various scales for 20+ years so maybe it’s just second nature to me now.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us. @MaggiWuerze@feddit.de , @body_by_make
ip-reputation is also important. Mailgun, an email service for mass mailing, is doing an „ip-warmup“ if you choose a dedicated ip. So, if you are self-hosting with dynamic-ip, i think you would have a very very low ip-reputation.
True, but this has nothing to do with Google and other, is a well done method to avoid spam.
so what else is a factor for reputation? Or is it like if you dont pay to get your mail-domain whitelisted we lower your reputation score?
No idea! I don’t run my own mail server. But if you read a bit up here, there’s a guy who runs his own mail server(s) since years. But the selfhosted world seems to be full (well…not so full) of people that self host their mail server.
Problem is, that most larger providers sort your mails to spam if the domain is not well known to them, which is not easy to achieve
Mmm…are you sure about that? I happen to buy some random domain and I’ve never had any problem sending email even right after the domain created.
There’s been a lot of write ups on this, such as this one: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
But there are even people that still self host email server (have a look in the selfhosted subreddit for example). IP reputation is a thing, for sure, but I don’t feel that it’s been brought up by the big corp wickedly, it’s a good way to prevent spam to arrive to the server. There are thousands of email providers in the world that are not Google, Amazon, Microsoft or some other big corp. This means that is possible. Is it difficult? For me for sure!!! But I think that the rising difficulty has been a result of this fields over the years. Just my 2 cents.
Me too, I’ll never self host my email server. Too much time that I don’t have to set it up correctly, manage the antispam and other thing that I don’t even know . And if it goes down and I don’t have time to look into it (which would be the case 95% of the time 🙈), I’ll be without email for I don’t know how long.
I’ve been self-hosting a personal email server for about half a year now, and it was definitely challenging! But it also tought me quite a bit about how the system works, so I think it was worth it. There are solutions for everything, but you definitely need some time and patience.
Gladly, fail2ban exists. :) Note that it’s not just smtp anyway. Anything on port 22 (ssh) or 80/443 (http/https) get constantly tested as well. I’ve actually set up fail2ban rules to ban anyone who is querying
/on my webserver, it catches of lot of those pests.This method supposedly works great too.
Om going to try that as well
CrowdSec has completely replaced fail2ban for me. It’s a bit harder to setup but it’s way more flexible with bans/statistics/etc. Also uses less ram.
It’s also fun to watch the ban counter go up for things that I would never think about configuring on fail2ban, such as nginx CVEs.
Edit: fixed url. Oops!
Thanks for mentioning it, I didn’t know about it. Protecting against CVEs sounds indeed awesome. I took a more brutal approach to fix the constant pentesting : I ban everyone who triggers a 404. :D Of course, this only work because it’s a private server, only meant to be accessed by me and people with deep links. I’ve whitelisted IPs commonly used by my relatives, and I’ve made a log parser that warns me when those IPs trigger a 404, which let me know if there are legit ones, and is also a great way to find problems in my applications. But of course, this wouldn’t fly on a public server. :)
Note for others reading this, the correct link is CrowdSec
I did host my email, but the problem wasn’t the spam but the bigger email providers. Best case was my mail was marked as spam. Worst case was that I was blocked until I jumped through hoops. Email hosting is unfortunately broken.
what’s that? a federated service isn’t immune from a corporate take over? colour me shocked.
not complicated or hard, just don’t care enough: music, spotify is fine, especially on the family plan.
A public Matrix server. Its just a never ending black-hole of ever increasing storage requirements and the software is too buggy to not become a maintenance hassle.
I do run a Synapse server for bridging purposes, so I am not just talking in theory.
XMPP is safer and lighter anyway
And so damn easy to self-host in general. Ejabberd is batteries included down to offering stun/turn for audio/video calls, Erlang is just unrivaled when it comes to hot reloading so updates are effectively zero-downtime (unsurprising considering all the business critical environments it’s deployed).
At first (and especially because I went with Matrix originally) I wouldn’t think of self hosting all my instant messaging, but in retrospect, ejabberd is one of the easiest services I’ve got to maintain. I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot, especially to all the matrix refugees to whom it was a surprise/disappointment.
