I have started setting up a server with three domains and three users using Yunohost, but I find it hard to get to work.
The documentation can be frustrating to go through and the community on the forum answers slowly or not at all (because due to the sparse documentation questions from beginners like me tend to touch similar topics I guess). A big part of the forum answers are in French, which I don’t read very well.
All in all I have been trying very hard to like the project. The work done by the developers really deserves all my respect and I would love to remain involved, but trying to get Yunohost to work as a non-techie leaves me often desperate and looking for alternatives with a more active community or a more thorough documentation.
I’m a bit divided here. I like the project but I’m a half-techie stoopid who needs more support. What do? And what would be my alternatives on a Linux VPS? Especially if I don’t want proprietary stuff?
I think yunohost is great to get your feet wet with selfhosting. But as soon as your setup is a little bit more complex or not following the cookiecutter templates, you will end up building systems from scratch.
And to be fair, most of the software for selfhosting comes with good documentation. Yes, there is a learning curve, but if you are serious about it, you will stick to it until you find the piece of software working.
I’m serious about not wanting my email, files, publishing in the hands of corporate anymore, so I’m determined to get that running for myself. But I don’t want to sit in front of a screen all day to keep it running. I just want my two static professional websites for my clients to look at, and one or two small wikis that so far will not have more than two or three collaborators to start with.
What means ‘from scratch’ for you? Installing a linux distro and then telling it what to do over command line? And what exactly would I need to tell it to do? If you have any learning resources that would be great. I wonder if all those services that supposedly make the work easier just add more layers of complication in the end.
But yes, to get a vague idea about what the basics of server administration even are, yunohost is great! I’ve learned so much in a few days.
I tried docker and stopped shortly after, because it was adding a layer of complexity I was not prepared for at the beginning. So I started with services I could run on bare metal with an OS like Ubuntu. For this a basic website for clients could be a good starter because it might only need a reverse proxy with php and a database. BUT this already opens questions around how secure is your server, which would be the first topic I would focus on, especially when hosting stuff for clients. Because if something happens to their data, you‘re responsible for it.
If it‘s just a static page like a portfolio, simple things like restricting access with firewalls ACLs and other basic server configurations might already be enough.
For hosting email, this topic still hasn‘t come to a mence for me, because it sounds like a lot of time and effort that goes into maintenance so I keep looking for hosted services with a good privacy approach.
What resources are you thinking of (there are many). Again, the best way of approaching it is take something with little dependencies and components that are well documented and easy to learn, so you can focus on how to monitor the host, and make sure you can administrate it fast and efficiently.
Later on you can add more complex services and learn about the new components.
Sorry, wasn’t clear, it’s my own and my kids portfolios I’m hosting, I do not host anything for professional clients (yet). So it’s basically our own choice how concerned we want to be about uptime right now. I have been looking around and I think I’ll end up hosting these portfolios as HTML and CSS sites with My Webapp. They are now Wordpress and Dokuwiki, but that’s just overkill and just happened because that’s what we had available per One-Click install on shared hosting before. Then I can install one or two or even three Dokuwikis, one for personal note keeping and one or two for collaborative projects.
I found emails to be working fine under Yunohost, got all of the accounts I created there set up in Thunderbird eventually after finding out where to change DNS zone entries at my provider.
I think I will play with it a little longer, and as a learning resource for the basics I decided to dive into the Debian administrator’s handbook (books are my favourite resource), after all that’s what Yunohost is built on.
Now for all of that: I’d love to have it all in a home computer git repository to work on, and then push it to the server. Would that be possible?
For the future (maybe a project for dark winter evenings), I might decide to split up my setup and run my personal websites or even all of them on a solar-powered setup at home. I predict that I will not be able to resist this idea for very long, given that I have all the components already at home. So far about sitting in front of a screen, or tables full of cables and plugs. I guess I do enjoy it at times.
It’s just that I do need time for my animals, and my garden, and my job - so server admin is hopefully not a 24/7 thing for the things I have in mind.
My opinion as well.
I entered the self hosting with literally zero experience and went into docker with portainer as management frontend.
Still suits me well and I’m running 3 servers with well over 30 services now
I have been looking into docker and I’m afraid it looks rather complex, how much time did you have to invest to have something up and running?
Well, in terms of learning, I‘m still learning, and I‘m already a few years in. In terms of time in front of a screen, it depends on how much automation you throw at your services and builds. It will always come back to questions like: what if an update changes the way the software works? What if something breaks, like a config or a dependency overwrites another. How good do you know the parts of the services for troubleshooting? Do you have a backup? How fast can you rebuild your systems? If you have answers to these questions, you can feel confident in hosting services for yourself and others. If not, you can try but will run into these moments at some point, where you need to fix something fast. And that‘s the moment where you spent your time in front of a screen.
