I used to think self hosting was something only sysadmins or homelab nerds did.
You know, the kind of people who run Proxmox clusters in their base...
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not to nitpick but Developer != Web Developer.
Also, please DO NOT self-host your startup, especially one that has people trusting you with their money - with only amateur self-hosting skills. there are many catastrophe scenarios from which you are guarded by a PaaS these days..
When and if you product starts gaining traction, you're ineitable going to become a target by automated bots by the uptick in popularity/indexing, as soon as they detect a misconfigurtion you become a chosen target.
This is only 1 of them many catastrophe scenarios and not the most srious one either.
Surely this is part of the journey of discovery. Ship fast and break things?
Agree. Setting up server at home it part of the journey and learning. I highly recommend it if you like to know more about the hardware side of thinks. And have the money to invest into FS switches, dac cables and firewalls. It's fun!
Depends on your skills. How good you are with networks. As well as your hardware setup. I have dedicated firewalls. Load balancers and core switches at home. So Yea, it's possible.
btw, who is a Developer? Is it someone working with C++, building low level systems?
I was just about to comment this. Dev != WebDev
I dont really understand, do you think its not necessary to understand how the internet works if youre an embedded dev?
doesnt change it imo as long as you are a software developer thats relevant! Even for embedded, robotics, whatever:)
Why stop at hosting? Go all the way and host a server on an old laptop or buy a raspberry pie or something similar.
When I got into computers the cheapest way was to build one yourself. So I was in a hobbyclub where we learned from each others mistakes. Once laptops became cheaper i never looked back.
Getting down to the machine makes you appreciate all the cloud services that are available today.
I wouldn't bother with adding a ssl certificate manually, there are enough services that offer them for free and have an easy setup. The task isn't that hard to begin with.
The most common mistake is picking the wrong type of certificate.
Agree, but i think a vps is a bit more accessible for a lot of people in the beginning! My first server was also pieced together from electronics trash pile because I didnt have a bank account to get a vps! :D
I think today people moved too fast to the cloud and missing the opertunity to learn from the hardware setup. I also started small with an old pc. Some kind of 3 core amd cpu (when amd couldn't made a stable 4 core cpu). Yeah those times.
I think with the rising costs of cloud it's a better time then ever to learn the hardware side of thinks.
Lol maybe change that cover photo
why?:D
Because it's theft
... because its AI generated?
Because it's specifically taking another artist's copyrighted art style, and that artist has issued a cease and desist to OpenAI regarding its use. While that legal warning doesn't apply to users of DALL-E, it's still a shitty and lazy move.
what was the cover photo? im curious now
It's still the same. I think he is referencing to the "studio ghibli" style
You don't have to break anything.
if you dont break anything youre not learning
see yur point, but totally disagree.
why?
I had also started out my freelance journey with 0 knowledge about management stuff. Someone gave me the task of hosting a website in a VPS. I had to configure things apart from my area of interest, such as DNS and SSL.
I have learnt a lot from that task, and now I feel comfortable about the devops things.
Just mere learning won't teach much. The best way to learn is to do stuff practically. This post should be an inspiration for all.
Nice! Thanks for sharing:)
Actually I did self host too. To build a whole platform on cloud is terriblely expensive each month even when my platform is not yet popular and especially I know what I am doing as a veteran devops and solution architect
One sample is my current skill-wanderer.com/ also come with a wordpress blog and a moodle lms . Clouflare can help a lot for security and act as dynamic dns also
For now with my calculation I saved about 70 usd each month as I self host a complete k8s at home
I also dislike the fact that very website is behind cloudflare. Cf is eating too much from the market. And making the internet too centralized by a single company. I understand why people are using it... I just don't like the movement and the promotion of cloudflare.
I know; today we have way more bots and ddos attacks than ever before. Yet I think it's possible to do something about it. Maybe a good firewall. Maybe some kind of Lua scripting with OpenResty... But anything is better than going to cf in the long run...
I like to host everything myself. I never went to the cloud or vps to host my services. I run everything locally. And you should to. Just start small. Using old hardware or a raspberry pi perhaps. And continue from there. It's fun to learn both the network and hardware setup as well as the software deployments.
It will also safe you money in the long term, vps is not cheap anymore today. It might not sound much but $/€ 30 per month for only one small vps adds up (besides other costs like the domain). I have a high count cpu and enough memory. Also thinks like storage is not cheap in the cloud anymore. I now have terabytes of very fast ssd storage, something that is not cheap when you go renting. And adding more storage is very easy and cheap. No increase in monthly fees, just a one time invement.
Sure you need to learn how to setup all this but that is party of the journey!
Congrats for the great post! Maybe, even thought u said there's a learning journey to be walked through, u could make a tutorial oon how u would set up your minecraft server now, with all the new knowledge u have after all this.
Insane how the whole journey can kick off from just spinning up one little server, I always end up learning way more by messing with this stuff than any tutorial ever taught me.
Is this entire website just Ads disguised as articles? AI generated content to self promote your cloud hosting. It's all just hosting providers writing posts as if they were people
im an actual person actually writing articles :D
Lovely story. Thanks you for posting it :)
It's going back a few decades, but before The Cloud I remember having a similar journey.
Production environments still scare me though !
Couldn't agree more, my friend whom I think genius at coding started their career by running up a server when they were a high school student.
Thank you for sharing, I also learned a lot! I also want to recommend an environment building tool that I commonly use. Personally, I think it is very light and fast. servbay.com/
A hundred times yes to everything in this article.
Great article! In Us though most of the home ISP use dynamic IP address, which makes installing your own server mutch more challenging. Usually, only Business Internet Service caries static IPs..
Muy de acuerdo 👍🏻
Gracias.
Pretty much a rough way to go, currently passing through it and I can say, of a truth "there are more that meet the eyes than we see." Never knew all of these until I decided to self host.
Nice! Just power through it, it gets easier:)
Yes, self hosting makes you a roundup developer. I can share my Traefik dockerised simple solution for self hosting on a vps. github.com/marcandreuf/traefik-vps-1