Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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From reddit selfhosted: What do you wish you knew from the start (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

- Learning. If you ever found yourself tired of learning new things, your life is basically done.
- Cost. You already have an internet connection at home. It's practically a necessity these days. The connection is likely fast enough for most things. Renting even the most piddly of VPS is wildly expensive. Just throw a spare machine at it and go wild.
- Freedom. Your own data is constantly being collected, regurgitated, and sold back to you. More people need to care about this incessant invasion of our lives.
- Backups. 3 copies, on different forms of storage, in multiple PHYSICALLY distinct locations. Just when you have that teeny little imp in the back of your mind say "hmm, I should probably back up soon" -- stop everything you're doing and run a backup.
- Test your recovery! Backups are only good if you can recover from them. Many have lost data because they failed to ever fail-test their backups.
- Google. Legitimately the best skill you can ever attain is simply being able to search effectively and be able to learn jargon quickly. Once you have the lingo down, searches become clearer, quicker, more precise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

For #1 I would say not to focus on learning the same kind of thing that you started at some point recently. It took me a few months to get my local setup going since I would do it after work (also similar skills) and get tired of poking around.

At some point I gave up and started doing other things that brought me joy (video games, paint night with YouTube tutorials, movies/TV). When I finally decided to get back to it, it was enjoyable again. If I have to re-do it from scratch it could be done in probably a few hours or at most some nights after work and would be enjoyable since the annoying “got ya” lessons are somewhere on memory or some searches away that could be filtered much quicker.