For a growing number of reasons, as with most people here, I am more desirous of self-hosted solutions to replace proprietary ones, yet, as with many others, I am not in a position to fully self-host with a server at home. Any comments on kinda-self-host, where you rent a server from a third party and do all the same shenanigans on it? Specifically, I’m thinking of data storage and streaming.
Please share any information resources if you can.
Not a server, but a storage box from Hetzner I use for my most important off-site backup. At home I have a small Dell Optiplex that runs Jellyfin and is exposed outwards via Tailscale. It does consume a lot of electricity, was cheap, great performance. I don’t know what is holding you back from self-hosting, but it does not need a lot of effort.
Taking this at different levels…
Offsite storage (assuming you have something at home): Hetzner storage boxes (2 different countries to choose from)
VPS for actually doing something, also Hetzner, but, I also use MythicBeasts for a UK specific host and they also host Raspberry Pi servers (not checked the price), so maybe that’s something to consider to dip your toe into the waters
I don’t like it, the whole point to me is to not pay anyone to store thing on a computer that I don’t own. If you have a dedicated IP I would always prefer a homelab
I’ve been a customer of SoYouStart, now the OVH Eco series for many years. For $30/mo, I get 32GB of RAM and 480GB of disk space. Plenty of space for me to run my too many different services.
I’ve found them cost effective
I have a sys3 that’s 64GBb and 4TB of disk for about £26, the ovh eco stuff is pretty good for the price
Used both Hetzner (storage) and Netcup (VPS), no issues with either.
There’s a large group of folks here that swear by renting a VPS. A common argument is that when you fully self host and expose anything to the internet (incoming connections), you’ve always got some security risk you might not know exists.
A VPS offloads a lot of the low level security concerns to someone else (it’s the whole cloud sales pitch) and if someone breaks in, there’s little for them to steal (assuming you’re not putting anything personal and sensitive on the VPS).
The nice thing is that you can start with a small and cheap VPS and set things up and decide if you even want to self host, or to what extent. Then you have data to make a decision as to whether you need to upgrade to a better VPS, or port your setup to a local server (which you can now buy with a good idea of what sort of specs it should have).
On the flip side, you could also self host on whatever computer you have laying around (leave the laptop open) and play with some services there. If you decide you want to open it to the internet, you could just as easily port your local playground to a VPS and keep going.
I don’t think there’s anything in the self hosting world that really paints you into a corner.
If ypu have the hardware but not the forwarding capability like me, you can use cloudflare tunnels for free, or setup headscale on a free orical vps. Otherwise go with the cheapest vps you can find (Im using Hetzner, but ive heard good things about netcup, or even Oricals free teir vps and move off of it if you end up not ditching selfhosting), play around, and if you need more power its as trivial as backing up your services and putting them on a more powerful server
Data storage: you can do pretty much whatever, they won’t look at your stuff unless you do something that attracts attention. Of course encrypt it anyway.
Streaming: yes that attracts attention if you stream to the public. If it’s edgy or pirated content you can’t use the big providers. If it’s your private collection that only a few people know about, it’s like the situation with storage.
no shame in getting a VPS. it might cost you more over the long term if you want to run any real workloads or store anything on it.
what i would do is get your hands on some sort of computer you can attach storage to.
what i do is i have a small VPS that i expose to the internet that routes traffic to my home server(s) over my Tailscale VPN. that way i get the benefit of having a stable public IP, some traffic protection from the provider, and a stable failsafe in case my home internet or power or whatever goes out, and it’s a lot cheaper to run workloads and store files on my local machines than to rent all that out. my workloads can be pretty heavy, so i would end up paying hundreds if not over $1k per year, which is easily enough for a machine that can do most anything you need.
I’ve found Hetzner to be reasonable for VPSs and even bare metal servers, especially if you keep an eye on their auctions.
Whether you’re hosting it all at home, all on a remote server, or some combination of the two, it’s worth taking the time to first learn some form of automation tooling, so that your setup is reproducible and you know exactly how everything is set up. From the first time you have to rebuild everything due to a hardware failure trashing your server, or a careless
rm -rf, you’ll be glad of it.Ansible is a good place to start as it’s pretty straighforward to get going, and your playbook can grow with your requirements. If you’re using a lot of containers, make sure you understand docker, and maybe consider Kubenetes, especially if you want to split your workload across servers.
