When hosting on my own machine, should I use a virtual machine or not? - eviltoast

Hey all,

Just wondering what the consensus is on hosting directly on a computer versus virtualization? Right now I’m hosting my Lemmy instance on a Hetzner VPS, but I would like to eventually migrate to my Linux box at home. It currently runs as a media PC (Ubuntu) in the living room, but I always intended to self-host other software on the side since it should be more than capable of doing both (Ryzen 5600G, 16gb DDR4).

I’m just torn though - should I host a virtual machine on it for Lemmy, or run it directly on Ubuntu as-is? I plan to do some further self-hosting projects as well later down the line.

  • skilltheamps@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    You want so isolate the things you host from one another (security, making updates easier etc). So if you host just one thing you can do so on the host directly. If you host multiple services you may seek some separation method.

    VMs is one method, but it wastes a lot of resources, especially RAM. A more elegant way is containers. Both the docker/podman route as well as the LXC way are quite polular.