Downsides of Self hosting services
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 พ.ค. 2024
- Self-hosting may seem like a great idea to save some resources and even money but don't be delusional. Self hosting option comes with many disadvantages and risks.
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"Delusional" is pretty strong. Skill, size, and connectivity vary wildly for people. I'm up to three 44U racks and host my own compute cloud with about 200TB of storage and around 60 CPUs. For the cost of a cloud provider to host me, well, I would have been homeless pretty quickly. Instead I can afford equipment. And no cloud provider can shut me down, inspect my data, or eavesdrop on my activities because of my political views.
I do a lot of self-hosting and I agree with many points here, however there is definitely a break-even point, and that usually comes down to storage. I cumulatively have around 200TB of data (I'm also backing-up my data locally, so that's actually 100TB x 2). Storing that quantity of data in the cloud can cost thousands of dollars per month, and then you have incredibly slow access times to read or write your data from the cloud. You could easily buy all the hard drives you need and have change left over for the price of one or two months of cloud storage.
For such an amount of data, I totally agree you need to self-host :) And if you don't know how - you need to find someone who will do that for you.
Obviously everything is not just black and white
@@DmitryLambertTech With all the self-hosting videos out there, I do appreciate hearing a contrary viewpoint and questioning if it's the right choice for everybody. It might make for an interesting video series to compare self-hosted solutions with equivalent cloud-based options, covering points such as cost, time, technical capabilities, and control. Just an idea.
Small self hosted home lab is way cheaper for me to work with where I live (countryside Brazil), work area is cheap, but internet connections and cloud providers are absolutely terrible. High end hardware is crazy expensive here, but older/discontinued hardware is dirt cheap and still* have community support. Tinkering and security updates are a easy trade off for me and most companies here.
Thanks for feedback!
I feel like self hosting viability heavily depends on what you're hosting. Self hosting storage is much better than cloud because storing multiple terabytes of data in the cloud is wildly expensive and not at all practical. Self hosting your email? massive pain, you'll spend tons of time troubleshooting. Websites? depends what kind of site but usually much better to have it hosted by a service.
Everything in this video is valid and on point. Lots of useful information. I do a lot of self-hosting with 5 SuperMicro servers and I have had to replace hard drives and even 2 servers. But it was worth it for the learning process.
Thanks for sharing!
Pretty bad take...
Most homelab PC don't have to be expensive or powerhungry or noisy. Think n100 or n305. Which for most people should be powerful enough for running some basic services. Neither does it have to be difficult to secure with something like Tailscale.
Also, if something brakes you will learn on how to fix stuff.
This is 100% valid for someone who enjoys tinkering around with these things, however, what I said was mostly based on someone to whom opening CLI equals becoming a high-grade hacker. What I do see in many homelab videos is that many creators put it as "it will take 5 minutes and 0 skill" which just just not always the case.
I'm an IT pro who loves to tinker, so I'm probably not the audience for the video. I have to say that you are spot on regarding the pitfalls, but one of the biggest problems not mentioned was the sheer verity of self hosting applications available, some more suitable for lower spec hardware than others. I could spend a lifetime just evaluating the various options available.
Having said that, dipping your toes into the self hosting world on an old laptop is often enough o understand if it's a route you want to take. Don't ever start a project buy running out and buying a server and a bunch of hard drives from the get go, you are likely to get something wrong in the process.
This is why most people opt for a ready built NAS solution to start off with, that does the much of hand holding, makes self hosting a fairly straight forward process, and negates the majority of the problems highlighted in this video. That way it's only when you understand your needs and the applications that you can look to going down the custom route.
Thank you very much for your feedback and opinion! I guess that is the main goal of my videos: that people not only blindly watch them but also share their take on a particular topic. In this case, I completely agree with you. I myself have worked in the IT industry for my entire professional career, and I do enjoy tinkering around with any tech things, and even better if I can teach others about that.
And I guess you mentioned the most important point. It is more than great if people want to try out different things and self-host something even if they don't have experience in that. But they absolutely should start small, instead of purchasing a top-end server that very likely will just collect dust if things do not go as well as described in some how-to video or tutorial.
To all the viewers, self host all the way and don't be afraid, self hosting is never finished, and that's s good thing, you will be learning all the way and getting a few new skills in hardware (specification, maintenance etc) and software (Linux, storage architecture and management, virtualization etc etc).
And you will actually own your stuff, remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer.
PS: hardware almost never fails, especially enterprise hardware. Got a HP workstation Z420 dirt-cheap off of eBay, more that 10 years old, still works like a charm.
@@duartefh88Yes it never breaks.... Until it does. I've had over a dozen less than 3 year old vxrails die for various reasons. I've also got a 5th gen nuc that still won't die with its original 2.5inch HDD. But you won't know until it happens. That's the point.
It's not about whether you can self host but whether it is worth it to you to self host. Maybe they don't care about all that and just want to have a website. No need for firewall changes or cloudflare tunnels or learning to install dependencies, just find a shared hoster and go.
Different strokes for different folks.
Am I hosting a lot of stuff? Yes I am, about 520-540gb of ram in use on average. But that's because I already know what I'm doing and I'm hosting it because I enjoy tinkering. Some people just want a thing to do a thing and don't want to have to be assed with anything else
Well, obviously selfhosting is a learning experience, that's why I'm doing it! It's like your own mail server)
It is! And it's great if that experience is part of what you are ofter. But it can turn in a nightmare if someone comes only for an end result :)
Of all the things I self-host, a mail server is not on the list, and ironically, I'm a systems admin who has specialized in email systems for over 25 years. The problems are numerous, such as SPAM / Malware filtering, 99.99x uptime requirements, access to external DNS for SPF / DKIM records, Constant patrol over blacklists, and of course, ISPs not allowing port 25 traffic on most residential connections. It's a nightmare so I just use Gmail.
I usually just retire my old desktops as servers, so there is no cost involved. As for power usage, I live in Sweden, so as all power which goes into the server comes out as heat, which is useable anyway. So, for me, it's pretty much zero cost. It also puts my data under my control. On top of that, I like tinkering, so it's fun.
So, for me, self hosting is the way to go.
Reusing old hardware is definitely a thing to do :)
Exactly what I do. For the last 3 years I have literally paid nothing for heating because of my servers (in fact I have to sometimes open the windows in the winter because it gets too hot).
For me, it's a hobby! The time I spend on it is time well spent. I have an old HP Z420 with Quadro P2000 that I got for free and I have only spent money on power and hard drives so far. I also really enjoy the problem solving aspect of it.
Maintain proper (as close to real-time as possible) 3-2-1 backups and you won't have to be afraid of data loss.
Old enterprise gear isn't necessarily power inefficient. I maintain a HA cluster only for failover with a 2013 thin client. When it fails over it only resumes critical applications and it draws >100w.
Auto-updates should always be turned off in production. Even my Windows VM feature updates are set to fully manual (registry tweak).
Vulnerabilities are always be a concern, so configure your router to log incoming requests so that you can properly find them when they occur.
A few of these might be overkill for your average homelab, but I use my servers near exclusively remotely and depend on them for work. I've had VPN connections fail in such a way that I had to drive 2hrs+ to get physical access to the server, so I'm aware that I'm somewhat paranoid in how I configure my servers. lol
self hosting is more profitable for a small IT business than outsourcing it to another company to make a profit off you. We have apache servers for everyone of our clients, each one hosted at there site, along with Nas/cloud storage. Sure you can outsource it to a already built infrastructure and give them a part of your sales if your lazy, or do what any other tech dose and be a computer technician. HDD Fails? recover from back up on new hdd and install it. These arent problems, this is your job. One time purchase on hardware, that you now own and can host anything. or pay for someone elses server at a monthly fee for ever.
Well for business it's a completely different story. In terms of business In most cases, I would advocate for self-hosting. And I am quite annoyed that many service providers transform into cloud only solutions.
IT pro here. Spot on assessment. For most people they dont need to self host. If they arent interested in learning how the stuff does what it does then they have plenty of hosted turnkey options.
All the videos pointing people to enterprise hardware because it is cheap also arent helping when they forget to mention how loud and powerhungry they are. I say this being a person that had two full 42U racks in my workshop at one point.
That said, im still self hosting all the things, but thats because its my funtime. Like at work if its not my funtime, the matrix comes out to determine whether it goes on the home stack or is provided by some provider as a service.
Thank you very much for your feedback :)
Cloud is just another mans computer, that you have no control over. There have been many data breaches and lost data on various cloud platforms, so even if were to I save money, i wouldn't trust them more than myself. Reliability will always be an issue, unless you have multiple internet connections and high availability setup, but that trade-off is undoubtedly worth it, if you care about your data.
If you are running a VM in a cloud provider, you're responsible for everything inside the VM - so breaks, errors, misconfigurations can all occur irrespective of the platform.
Which still excludes availability of VM in terms of hardware
The video lacks essential context, details, and a broader perspective.
Who is the target audience for this content? What specific context frames the advice being given?
You are comparing loud, expensive computer equipment, possibly taking up a room in size, to spending $10 a month to have it all hosted. This is not a fair or accurate comparison; it's actually laughable.
The video fails to clarify its intended audience-is it tailored for high-stakes businesses or an individual's blog? It is as if your intended audience is the layperson who isn't going to be inclined to start self-hosting anyway.
There are many reasons to self-host and many reasons not to, and I don't think you articulated them well. You could technically self-host something from a Raspberry Pi 3, which is silent and only sips power. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't; the point is that you can, and this is a big difference from you suggesting that you will need a data center in your living room.
You even missed a couple of crucial points against self-hosting, like your power or the internet going out.
Overall, this information isn't beneficial content and feels more like an attempt to get sponsorship from a hosting provider.
This guy reminds me of one reddit user that was trying real hard to make me believe that self hosting will get boring and there won't be enough time for managing systems when I get a job... I don't really care about that. I just don't want my photos and passwords to be saved on someone else's computer. I want them available localy. I even have local dns separate from cloudflare one to work even if the internet goes down. And if electricity goes out, my nas, router and ISP router can stay powered for a good hour.
Yeah I think for a home user, getting something like a Synology NAS for your data and a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant OS will go a very long way with very little investment over time.
You'd be surprised how fast a Raspberry Pi can be if you attach a proper SSD to it. Unless you start doing video transcoding, it'll be good enough for many home users.
I think that for home use, getting actual server equipment is complete overkill. I'm running my whole setup on an old gaming PC (minus the GPU) I got for free after building a new one for a friend. With some tuning it's also quite light on power consumption while it offers a good amount of performance for my needs. It runs 30+ Docker containers that handle everything from my smarthome to recipes, photos, backups, music, file sharing, etc.
There are so many ways to self-host without breaking the bank. Subscriptions add up, and they tend to only get more expensive. Hosting one service on one machine may not be cost-effective. Running tens of services on a single machine can save you a lot of money.
But it does take time and knowhow to manage. I'd never recommend it to laypeople.
Funny enough, even if you self-host, you still need to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy, so you will need to store the important stuff in the cloud at some provider 😀
really depends if your hosting for a business reason or a personal one.
This goes double for cloud hosting. You’re not really doing 3-2-1 if any of them are on the same cloud provider, and often competing “providers” are ultimately running on the same platform, like AWS or Azure.
So my 4 server, 50 CPU, 220GB Ram, and 30TB Proxmox home lab is not such a good idea? :-D
Thank you for this video, it's a very good one and basically addresses lot of the gripes I have had with other videos when it comes to self-hosting. They rarely tell about these downsides in them, even though they are quite important ones. And I personally think when you decide on having a server, you should always consider does it make it more sense for it to be on a cloud or something you host self-host. Something like Plex for purely local personal use is probably better to be self-hosted but LAMP stack might be better for cloud environment because that way you are not risking your home network and you proably mind less losing few movies if a hard drive fails compared to having your business website becoming inoperable for months because of simple hard drive failure or broken software update.
I think people should consider it same way they consider buying a PC or a car. What is the things I need, how much I need it and so on and do the decision between cloud vs self-hosting after those considerations. Because 5 bucks a month to run a website on a cloud will still be cheaper than adding a server to your household as it does indeed use more electricity.
Spot on! :) Thank you for sharing
Obvious, but very important points. Very timely for me - so thank you! Great video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Who paid you
:D I wish someone would pay me
@@DmitryLambertTech I just did :D. I don't agree with the video for myself, but just a tip for anyone wanting to self-host for friends and relatives: don't. Either they can take of it themselves (which it won't happen) or you'll become the free support. Be warned...
@@electrosoundz Not sure what you are on about.
I host f.ex a password manager server for my family, never had any trouble keeping my families passwords safe. If they call me and ask for support, I give them that because they are my family and I like to help them...
Obviously it was cloud storage providers: Goggle, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Backblaze, Storj and so on... 😂
@@electrosoundz So it was you... :)) Well thank you very much for coffee and your opinion