Ask HN: Is running your own code on your servers now “old-school”?

[hawth]

Hello,

I spent this last weekend building a little passion project and getting it up and running on a virtual server. I showed it to some people and they seemed to enjoy it, but everyone had a similar question: "Why did you build this yourself when you could have just done X?"

I'm a self-taught hobbyist so I admit my expertise is minimal, but it seems like so many people are turning to push-button "send this company your code and they'll run it for you" hosting solutions instead of just running things themselves. I don't want to badmouth this new practice (we're programmers, new practices are always worth investigating), but I'm just wondering if the classic "my code running on my server" methodology is now considered obsolete?

Thanks for your input. I'm really curious about this.

[alzoid]

I don't think that method is obsolete. If your're a self-taught hobbyist then it makes sense to try to gain experience with hosting a product. I have been doing things that way since I was in college.

However, I still love what the cloud offers and I think that's worth learning too. For your next hobby project you may see the server set up as mundane and time consuming. If so then you could use one of the PaaS/IaaS products that are out there.

Rolling your own is always fun. I have worked in places that have their own data centers or that couldn't go to the cloud for various reasons. These skills are good to know. Also as a dev I still set up my own local servers for development - so you still have chances to learn.

[cimmanom]

It sounds like they didn’t understand your goals.

If your goal was to write some software or to learn something, then your approach was sensible.

If your goal had been to use a tool to accomplish XYZ efficiently, then their approach was sensible.

Most people - even software developers - are perfectly happy using software other people wrote or hosted. This allows them to do other things with their time that they find more enjoyable or higher leverage.

There’s nothing wrong with the choice you made as long as you’re aware of the reasons you made it.

[iamNumber4]

New does not mean improved. Sometimes you have to stick to what works and you know.

The serverless hype, yes hype. Really means you are handing control of you application and it’s infrastructure over to someone else.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t self host. Also keep in mind running in a container on your server is still self hosting.

If you need a a full vm like container then use a vm, if your project can run in a docker container then use docker. However these are considerations for scaling your project not a prequsite how you host or develop your project.

[Annatar]

It's only obsolete if you are okay with giving up control in exchange for not wanting to master how to build the physical server, how to system engineer provisioning, and how to administer it in addition to developing software on it.

Most people nowadays take the opposite approach, but knowing more and having a deeper understanding of what's required end to end doesn't make your approach wrong.

[is_true]

It's by no means obsolete. You could think of it as a matter of constraints.

For the world cup I hosted a results feed in an nginx serving an static file and it worked great, my other option was using S3 which was much more expensive and as I had time and wanted to keep the project's budget low I ended up with a cheap VPS.