> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense.
I self host a ton of stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent writing code, but, ultimately, I think having good sysadmin and network admin abilities makes a difference in the quality of software development.
Sometimes I see developers that barely seem to know how networks and DNS work.
And the whole argument about time spent is getting weaker. My stuff has gotten to the point where it's a bunch of Docker containers that I could auto-update if I wanted. The hardest part is picking containers that are maintained, but all the official ones are nowadays.
> If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn)
Building the skill requires an investment of time, which has to be compared against more productive (read: profitable) alternatives. Remember that all endeavors have opportunity costs.
In the civilized world, we have 8-hour work days, some of the days of a week, and then we can do whatever we want with the rest. By which I mean, most people do not see the remaining hours as “potential money making time” but as “this is when I do something I like to do”.
hmmm... Let's count : 8 hours of work = 8 hours + 1.5 hours traveling to work + 1 hour for noon break. Then I sleep 7 hours. Then I need 1 hour to get ready in the morning. In the evening, it takes about 1.5 hour to cook (don't tell me it's my choice to spend time cooking instead of eating pre-made-full-of-sugar-and-fat food). Total = 20. So 4 hours left. But somehow, work is sometimes hard, so I need about an hour of rest. So in the end 3 hours left per week day. On the weekend, I'll spend 2 hours doing groceries, 2 hours keeping the house clean and doing repairs. Unless you are alone, you'll have time spent socializing, which is not exactly a choice neither, you need it for your mental health. And if you do some sports, again because it's fun but also because, at some point, it's for your health (i.e. being able to use your non-working time in a useful way). So well, it's not like there's much left. And I don't even count the kids... (but that was a choice :-) )
Well there are degrees here, aren’t there? I might hack away on some software in my free time but there are some aspects of that I like more than others where I’d rather spend my time. Besides that, nothing about this article led me to believe it’s just about personal hobby projects.
Or your own money. I did the math and I was spending more money on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it.
A raspberry pi is not sufficient for running things like nextcloud in any kind of performant way.
A box with an i5-4570 or similar and 8GB of RAM costs about $80 to buy, and uses ~25W or around $25-30 a year in power. A comparable VPS or Dedicated box is easily 10x the cost.
I think people see those ridiculous rack-mount servers some people run at home that suck down 300+ watts and assume that's just normal!
I went for even lower power usage, with an i3-7100u box that uses about 2W most of the day and cost $75 plus some extra RAM.
> on just electricity to run my home server than it would cost to pay for the services it provided. Not to mention the initial cost of the hardware you need to host it.
Most servers with enough GB of RAM and powerful processors can cost in the 50/100 USD range to rent per month. It's much cheaper to self host beyond a rock bottom VPS. Leaving a modern PC on the whole time will not cost that much in a month, and what you invest in hardware will pay for itself with the difference over time.
I automated as much as possible with ansible. I could upgrade my debian system in a few hours. With ansible I have a recovery plan ready in case of disaster. I could have used docker containers, but I'm a bit old school. It's not much work. I do check logs every day though. It was significant work to set up since I had to learn ansible.
I don't self host anything, but I have the skills and experience to do so. I think I would rather enjoy using those skills and more than using my skills in my current job. Though my current job over-values my time by a lot.
Some properties of self-hosted infrastructure can't be had for love or money with commercial solutions. Or alternatively, are so costly that you can't justify the money for it when there's a mortgage to be paid.
It can also just be enjoyable and therefore not wasted time.
That said, the learned skills are only actually valuable if you can use what you learned later on in life. I've done my fair share of fiddling around with raspberry pis and kernel compiling when I was younger, but can't think of a single time in the last few years where I had to use that knowledge in my day job now that everything is containers+k8s+<some cloud hoster>. Maybe we can argue that it gave me a slight speedup when trying to grok the container execution model or something like that, but I could have gained that knowledge much more efficiently in other ways.
There are infinite things to learn. Why should I prioritize learning all the broken things that will allow we to self-host, and not, say, carpentry. Or knitting. Or the history and evolution of a non-y language. Or...
factorialboy|4 years ago
Especially since it was originally used in the Linux desktop context.
If you have enough skill (or the willingness to learn) and initial investment of time, then the ROI on these DIY projects can be immense.
I am far more productive with a Linux desktop and self-hosted / managed "solutions" than their commercial alternatives.
For example: My media server setup far outperforms Netflix and Spotify in terms of ROI and /even/ convenience.
Similarly my Linux desktop PC is better for work and play compared to any off the shelf MacOS or Windows experience.
If you have the perseverance and initial time to invest, you end up over time saving so much time and money.
ryan29|4 years ago
I self host a ton of stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent writing code, but, ultimately, I think having good sysadmin and network admin abilities makes a difference in the quality of software development.
Sometimes I see developers that barely seem to know how networks and DNS work.
And the whole argument about time spent is getting weaker. My stuff has gotten to the point where it's a bunch of Docker containers that I could auto-update if I wanted. The hardest part is picking containers that are maintained, but all the official ones are nowadays.
systemvoltage|4 years ago
We're coming a full circle. At work, we just installed a couple of massive 64-core Xeon machines. On prem. Like it is 2002.
otterley|4 years ago
Building the skill requires an investment of time, which has to be compared against more productive (read: profitable) alternatives. Remember that all endeavors have opportunity costs.
phamilton|4 years ago
Every time I've done the math, this only comes out ahead financially if you already have a huge library or if you are willing to torrent.
Is there something I'm missing?
Jolter|4 years ago
wiz21c|4 years ago
hmmm... Let's count : 8 hours of work = 8 hours + 1.5 hours traveling to work + 1 hour for noon break. Then I sleep 7 hours. Then I need 1 hour to get ready in the morning. In the evening, it takes about 1.5 hour to cook (don't tell me it's my choice to spend time cooking instead of eating pre-made-full-of-sugar-and-fat food). Total = 20. So 4 hours left. But somehow, work is sometimes hard, so I need about an hour of rest. So in the end 3 hours left per week day. On the weekend, I'll spend 2 hours doing groceries, 2 hours keeping the house clean and doing repairs. Unless you are alone, you'll have time spent socializing, which is not exactly a choice neither, you need it for your mental health. And if you do some sports, again because it's fun but also because, at some point, it's for your health (i.e. being able to use your non-working time in a useful way). So well, it's not like there's much left. And I don't even count the kids... (but that was a choice :-) )
emodendroket|4 years ago
hughrr|4 years ago
foobar33333|4 years ago
A raspberry pi is not sufficient for running things like nextcloud in any kind of performant way.
Saris|4 years ago
I think people see those ridiculous rack-mount servers some people run at home that suck down 300+ watts and assume that's just normal!
I went for even lower power usage, with an i3-7100u box that uses about 2W most of the day and cost $75 plus some extra RAM.
ekianjo|4 years ago
Most servers with enough GB of RAM and powerful processors can cost in the 50/100 USD range to rent per month. It's much cheaper to self host beyond a rock bottom VPS. Leaving a modern PC on the whole time will not cost that much in a month, and what you invest in hardware will pay for itself with the difference over time.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
ekianjo|4 years ago
That's a ridiculous take, because the skills you get through self-hosting are actually marketable afterwards.
cpach|4 years ago
chmike|4 years ago
neals|4 years ago
selfhoster11|4 years ago
gsich|4 years ago
WJW|4 years ago
That said, the learned skills are only actually valuable if you can use what you learned later on in life. I've done my fair share of fiddling around with raspberry pis and kernel compiling when I was younger, but can't think of a single time in the last few years where I had to use that knowledge in my day job now that everything is containers+k8s+<some cloud hoster>. Maybe we can argue that it gave me a slight speedup when trying to grok the container execution model or something like that, but I could have gained that knowledge much more efficiently in other ways.
dmitriid|4 years ago