I know this isn't exactly self-hosted, but does anyone have experience with this? - eviltoast

Not exactly a self-hosting thing, but I’d like to know if anyone has experience with this service. Is it worth it? A scam? I don’t know. I don’t really have the hardware to truly self-host a Lemmy instance (mostly because of storage restrictions), but I’d like to know if this service that seems cheap for what it offers if legit.

I know that this isn’t a pure self hosting question, but I nailed .com domain for $1/year and was wondering if it’s actually worth doing this. Any insight is appreciated.

Editing to add that I’d love to do pure self-hosting here, but storage is a real issue.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    2 months ago

    Not sure. The website looks alright. I always have a look at the contact details and see if it’s a proper company. It says K&T is a brand name of “Operation Enterprise” which doesn’t give any results when googling it. So I’d be wary. But check for yourself.

    You can just pay for a month and see what happens? But I’d add: $11.25 USD isn’t very cheap for a VPS with that specifications. For that price you could also pick lots of other hosting providers. You’d just have to set up Lemmy yourself.

    • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      2 months ago

      You are quite right in that it is not a cheap VMS. Since I don’t know 100% how to set thing up, though, the cost might be worth my time.

      I may just pay for it and report back as a service to the community.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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        2 months ago

        Sure. I’d say the price is alright if they manage everything for you. There is some labor involved in designing such a platform, packaging the applications, maintaining the infrastructure, preparing updates etc and offering support of an application level. If they do that, it’s probably worth the additional bucks. I maintain some services myself and get away way cheaper. But there is a substancial investment in time to learn webhosting and maintaining stuff.

        • yonder@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          I know for me personally, its worth the time to set things up myself since I usually learn something new along the way. If you don’t care about the learning aspect and just want the finished product, paying someone else is probably a good idea.

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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            2 months ago

            Good point. I think it’s super important to make this decision early on. Whether you want to invest time and do self hosting, or not and you’ll want to use managed services or regular non-free platforms. Doing things by yourself certainly teaches a lot. I do it. And I gain knowledge, independence and I think it’s important to understand the tools I use on a regular basis and not let Apple/Google take care of my life. And since I do a lot of things with computers, I can make good use of the gained knowledge. However I can also feel how someone wouldn’t want to do that. They might have other hobbies, a stressful job or a family and it’s quite some time that I spend digging through configuration files, reading documentation and maintaining stuff. It has to be worth it in some way, or it becomes a liability. And I think that’s not super obvious when starting the journey. I’m glad we have managed services which give independence without spending too much time. But I also prefer going all the way and learning lots of stuff.