[BBLISA] self-hosting

[stephen g. wadlow]

On May 27, 2014, at 9:59 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

> stephen g. wadlow wrote:
>> I used to host a lot of stuff at home, but honestly...it wasn't worth it. 
> 
> "Worth it" as in offering cost savings, then yes, I believe that's
> correct. The options for shared, virtual, and co-located hosting are
> going to be highly competitive with the cost of maintaining your own
> servers and sharing your home or small office bandwidth with the
> servers. Especially if you opt for a net connection that provides good
> upstream bandwidth.

I think we're of a similar philosophy, not opposing ones.

it was a "It wasn't worth it to host at home compared to hosting in a datacenter."

I was fortunate enough to have a T1, data-center grade UPSes, and generally a pretty good infrastructure at home.
I had pretty good reliability and uptime.

I know many people who have tried hosting-at-home on DSL or cablemodems, and have had much less success.
Ports get blocked.   Power goes out.   Their server is their desktop, and reliability goes out the door.   You name it.

All my stuff is in datacenters.   On my hardware.   With my virtualization.   It works well.

>> The important stuff I put someplace reliable, so that I don't have to
>> worry about the last mile nearly as much.
> 
> I think it is wise to outsource or properly co-locate anything that is
> customer-facing or accessible by the general public.
> 
> There are, however, other reasons to self-host.
> 
> We had a thread some months back here about self-hosting a mail server.
> The upside there was getting increased flexibility. Configuration
> options that a typical mail provider won't offer. Though if that's your
> only concern, a VPS would still do the job.
> 
> Another consideration is privacy: what if you don't want private
> personal or business records to reside in the cloud? For example, a few
> decades of email archives, an internal web-based accounting application,
> business dashboards, time tracking, or project management. These
> services may need to be accessible off-LAN by yourself or a limited
> audience, possibly via VPN, but are not public facing. They don't need
> high bandwidth and can tolerate some down time.
> 
> Another consideration is legal: while hopefully this never becomes
> relevant, it has been shown that there is a rather low barrier for 3rd
> parties (notably the government) to obtain access to your data stored in
> the cloud, and to do so without your knowledge.
> 
> Until Homomorphic encryption[1] becomes a reality, these last two
> considerations will be with us for certain types of data, and certain
> types of people that have a high privacy threshold.
> 
> 1.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Toward_fully_secure_Internet_applications
> 
> Probably the biggest down side to self-hosting is that now it is your
> responsibility to keep the server secure, fully patched, and monitored.

I'm for self-hosting, not against it.   I just don't want to have my home be my datacenter.  :)

I like the flexibility.   I know why things work, and I can enhance it at my whim.  I recently brought up my own Owncloud server, so 
that I can have my own private install of something Dropbox-like. 

Since it's in the realm of what I do normally, I don't mind securing/patching/monitoring the server.   To me, the downside is that every so
often, I have to upgrade the hardware.    Once you get things to the point where everything just runs, then it becomes easy to ignore
the hardware, and over time, you'll have failures.     Better to pre-emptively replace things as needed.

						-Steve