Hello everyone,
One thing I’m sure is in common between self-hosters and people over at r/nosurf is our aversion to the popular big services like Google, Facebook…
I started self-hosting a few years ago because I was sick of depending on big corps, but over time I started getting sick of anything related to technology (even though I’m a dev lol). Recently I’ve been experiencing downtime on my server and I still haven’t figured out the cause, and it’s kinda making me feel that I am a slave to my setup, the same way I was a slave to the big corps.
I was wondering if any of you felt something similar, and how would you design a self-hosted setup that’s as low-maintenance as possible (I’m already using a VPS instead of a home server to reduce maintenance).
I try to minimize the maintenance cost (time and energy) by keeping in mind that I don’t have to update or migrate to something new if everything is working as I want it to be. And if I really have to update, I make sure I also have time for any consequences. I also believe the key to a low maintenance server is automation and templates as this makes rolling back to a last known good configuration easy most of the time.
I have also accepted that time and mental energy has always been the price of self hosting. If you lack these things, you would feel like its a chore. If you have plenty, it can be exciting.
Yeah that’s a good point about updates, but what about security vulnerabilities…
About templates, it’s true that my setup is far from being one-click-deployable, but I feel like it takes even more effort to make it as a template?
I do have time and mental energy, I am just starting to be less interested in spending them on server administration… (but I know that it’s a compromise anyway, cuz using the normie services has a hidden cost on the long term)
I can only access my services through VPN (tailscale) when I am outside, so I don’t worry that much about security vulnerabilities. And in my experience so far, security updates are usually more stable than feature updates so I install those without hesitation when I have the time.