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).
Low maintenance and self-hosted don’t really go together. The reason those large companies are so successful in this space is that they are obfuscating and removing all of that maintenance, HA design, etc, which you’re now responsible for when you self host.
What you can look into is designing the self-hosted solutions to be as low maintenance as possible. Design services in clusters, compared to single instances, to allow you to drop some for updates without impact. Design for failover. Design for proper backups. Design with application stacks in mind that are supported and widely used vs someone’s random github you found. Design for modular setups (not just one giant Mariadb, multiple smaller ones, etc)
All of this is work, however, so it’s a trade off on your side how much and where you’re wanting to put the work in.