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?
- you do not need kubernetes
- you do not need anything to be „high availability”, that just adds a ton of complexity for no benefit. Nobody will die or go broke if your homelab is down for a few days.
- tailscale is awesome
- docker-compose is awesome
- irreplaceable data gets one offsite backup, one local backup, and ideally one normally offline backup (in case you get ransomwared)
- yubikeys are cool and surprisingly easy to use
- don’t offer your services to other people until you are sure you can support it, your backups are squared away, and you are happy with how things are set up.
To piggy back on your “You don’t need k8s or high availability”,
If you want to optimize your setup in a way that’s actually beneficial on the small, self hosted scale, then what you should aim for is reproducibility. Docker compose, Ansible, NixOS, whatever your pleasure. The ability to quickly take your entire environment from one box and move it to another, either because you’re switching cloud providers or got a nicer hardware box from a garage sale.
When Linode was acquired by Akamai and subsequently renamed, I moved all my cloud containers to Vultr by rsyncing the folder structure to the new VM over SSH, then running the compose file on the new server. The entire migration short of changing DNS records took like 5 minutes of hands-on time.
I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.
About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.
I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.
So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.
I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.
I have a k3s cluster for fun and I can admit that k8s is way too complicated.
I don’t want to dig hours through documentation to find what I’m looking for. The docs sometimes feel like they were written for software devs and you should figure part of the solution yourself.
I have a ExternalName service that keeps fucking up my cluster everytime it restarts, bringing down my ingresses, because for some reason it doesn’t work and I have no idea where to look at to figure out why it doesn’t work - I just end up killing the service and reapplying the yaml file and it works.
I had to diagnose why my SSL certificates would get stuck in “issuing” in cert-manager, had to dig through 4 or 5 different resources until I got to an actual, descriptive error message telling me that I configured my ClusterIssuer wrongly.
I wanted a k3s cluster to learn but every time I have issues with it I realize it’s a terrible idea.
I wish I had podman + compose but it does seem like a docker-compose is more complicated. Also, I wish I could do ansible but I have no idea where to start (nor how it works).
EDIT: oh yeah I also lost IPv6 support because k3s by default doesn’t enable v6 and I was planning on using Hetzner CCM to have a 2 node cluster until I realized Hetzner Networks don’t support v6.
I just moved everything from vultr to self host because of their latest changes.
EDIT: As I suspected, the changes that u/mesamunefire is referencing are the ones that taken out of context awhile back and incorrectly assumed to apply to user VPS’ and the data on them, which is not the case. Those terms only apply to information posted publicly to their website, like the community forums.
What changes would those be
Not needing Kubernetes is a broad statement. It allows for better management of storage and literally gives you a configurable reverse-proxy configured with YAML if you know what you’re doing.
Well I guess podman works fine for the first few months. Interestingly I still use build-ah heavily for building my custom images
Heavy disagree on the storage statement from what I’ve used and seen but it works for lots of people so not going to detract. NFS is always a pain but longhorn seems to have advantages
NFS is a pain, no question about it. I used to use longhorn but these days since I’m doing a single node k3s I’m just doing hostpath. It’s that PVCs make intuitive sense to me, but I guess podman will likely work just fine for such cases other than canary deployments and OOTB service-meshes