Blau's Blog

I’ve either seen or been directly recommended to self-host things quite a lot - most firmly in my memory is recently when I was asking about Github alternatives, and almost every reply was self-hosting a Git service. Which, while useful, is not exactly the kind of alternative I was looking for (one that someone else hosts, and not me).

From the title, you can probably guess that I am a little, ah, weird about self-hosting. This isn’t for any kind of like… ideological reason, but more as a result of Life Experiences™ that I’ve gone through, and my current life situation, that make it a little infeasible for me to self-host things.

Again, for clarity, I would like to! I would like to learn how to do this and there are a few applications I can think of specifically that I could make good use of right now (e.g. building a Plex collection for my mom). But I’m just not in a position to do so, and it’s hard to explain why in a short-form format, so here’s a blog post about it.

Also, I’m aware that there are two “kinds” of self-hosting: where you have the hardware at your actual location on your home network, and where you rent out empty space on someone else’s server. I’ve seen both of these called self-hosting, and it’s not always entirely clear which one I’m seeing recommended when folks vouch for it, but I’ve got hiccups with both, so I’ll cover them both.

Also, obligatory disclaimer: These are my thoughts right now. Eventually, I’ll probably get into self-hosting things and my thoughts will change with experience. As they should! I may make another post in the future, or update this one, if/when things change.

Some Background

Back in 2017, I had just moved into an apartment with mom and hadn’t found work yet, and we weren’t able to pay our Internet bill. It got shut off until we could cover the back amount. This outage ended up covering the majority of 2017 - I forget the exact months, but it was really close to a year. Long enough that by the time I got back, one of my friends transitioned and I had no idea!

I live in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town (and library, and anywhere else with free wifi) is about 10 miles away. My area had (still has, depending on your provider) godawful cell service - could only get a single sketchy bar by putting my phone at a particular angle on the arm of the couch by the window - and my phone was prepaid with a limited amount of data, so I couldn’t use it as a hotspot. My mom’s job was kind enough to let me lug my huge ass computer tower (that did not have wifi) over there and use their internet a few times to re-download some fresh games from Steam and check in with my friends to let them know I was still alive.

Also just, in general, internet service in my area sucked big ones until a few years ago, when our area finally got cable access. Prior to that, it was extremely overpriced, extremely sketchy DSL. As in, I’m pretty sure I was paying for 3Mb/s down, and was getting 0.5Mb/s down on a good day¹. I switched to my current ISP after fighting with my old one for months over fixinng a dead hop in their network² and making no progress. I’m currently paying about the same price as I was with my old ISP, but for 150Mb/s that has been absolutely solid except for two notable issues, neither of which the ISP’s fault, and were resolved very quickly (a power surge toasted the modem, which they replaced, and a squirrel destroyed one of the pole lines). If there’s any downtime, there’s usually a truck outside actively working on the lines.

That stretch of no steady internet access, or no internet access at all, left its mark in my brain. If I host something at home, and have it internet-facing so other people can use it, and then lose internet, their access to the thing is gone. Sure, I can still use it on my local network, but that doesn’t help the other folks. There’s also the concern of, if I have something internet-facing that other people can access, making sure that the bandwidth used is cool with my ISP. We don’t have data limits anymore, but they do have a “do not abuse this” clause. I would rather not find out what the limit for that is. (Probably higher than I would ever hit, but still.)

Around the same time that the internet went out, we were behind on rent. Our landlord at the time was a genuinely good guy³ and worked with us to half the back rent amount, but we still had to scramble to get the rest or we’d be living in the car. Thankfully, with help from family, we were able to cover it. Two years later, we ran into rent trouble again, when my mom was diagnosed with leukemia and my single income was not enough to cover the full rent amount. While I was waiting on HUD to process my assistance application, he worked out a deal with me: I’d help out keeping the flowerbeds clear of weeds and looking nice and he’d take a significant chunk off of the rent. We kept up this arrangement until winter, but by then, HUD was helping cover half the rent, and mom’s disability payments had started. Our new landlord is not this forgiving - much more detached from the tenants, you know the kind - so in the event something happens again, given I have no income right now⁴, I’m unsure how things will go. Probably not well.

Again that left a mark on me: If something were to happen to my housing situation, what would happen to my hardware? Though, of course, this extends to all of my things, not just my computer things, but it’s still a worry that’s in the back of my head that I need to account for.

Anyway, with that context, some specific concerns:

Self-Hosting with Actual Hardware

This is probably the kind most immediately accessible to me. As I understand it, this is where you take some hardware - often an old computer that isn’t doing anything interesting - and set it up to be a server. You can then load things onto this server - Plex, Gitea, a multiplayer game server, etc - and can access it from other computers on your local network. You can also set it up to be accessible from The Internet, if you want to be able to dial in when you aren’t home, or want other people to be able to access the stuff on your server.

This is cool! This is something I would like to do. Like I said earlier, I’d like to eventually set up a Plex server for my mom, who’s always fighting streaming services and their constantly rotating show availabilities.

Of course, this requires hardware. I don’t have any spare computers at the moment, unless you count my nearly 16 year old laptop that’s struggling to boot Lubuntu on a good day. I did have a few decomissioned office computers, but those were all missing hard drives (which, good! that’s good practice when getting rid of a computer!), and I ended up not doing anything with them, so they went for scrap. But I could probably find something fairly easily that I could make work.

The specific hurdles here would be home internet access and stable housing. Internet access is not critical if I’m only using it as a local server, but if anything were to happen and my housing situation change, I’d have to figure out something to do with the hardware.

Also, I have the weird little brain worms that go, why would I need to spin up an entire other computer just to store things that I could store on my primary computer? Especially if I’m the only one using them, like if I spun up a Gitea instance, since my repos right now are all private. I also don’t like the idea of having the main data (on my computer) and the backup (on a server) be in the same physical location.

In brief: Self-hosting with actual physical hardware in my apartment is probably the most accessible option to me, but the little thing in the back of my head that plans for potential disasters is very loud about “what if this or that happens”, because they have happened before. Losing internet or having my housing situation change are very unlikely, but still possible.

Self-Hosting by Renting a Server

The other type of self-hosting involves renting a server, or space on someone’s server, at a remote location, then spinning up whatever software you need on that and using that to self-host your things.

This helps alleviate the issue I have with “having all your data in one physical location” that self-hosting with a physical server has. It’s got its own set of concerns though; for example, whoever runs the hardware your remote server is running on could have a hardware failure, or vanish, or whatever. But that’s honestly about the same concern set as using almost any remote web service.

My primary hangup here is, very simply, the cost. Like I said in the last section, I do not have steady income right now. (Even when I did, I did not have very much spare at the end of the month.) If I were to pick up a remote server for self-hosting things, and I end up not being able to pay the bill, the stuff on that server is probably gone. I would, of course, not like that to happen.

Though, I’m already kind of doing this. I have an account on NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting the new Kinzart website (which is still a work in progress as of this writing), and I’ve got a static site server spun up there. I’m planning to move this site from Neocities over there at some point in the future, probably when I come up with a good enough custom domain name. The thing that makes it easier there is that their hosting is extremely cheap (I think for the 2 sites in maintenance mode, one static and one Wordpress, the base cost is roughly $3/mo), and Umbra will be chipping in to help cover the hosting costs. But, still - if the funds ever ran dry on there, they do have a grace period, but after that, your stuff is gone.

Someday, when my financial situation is more stable, I could see this becoming much less of a hangup. But, for now, as it has been for a large chunk of the past for me, things are not stable, and I don’t want to commit to an ongoing charge that I’m not 100% sure I’ll be able to cover month to month.

This is why I prefer using non-self-hosted things, for now anyway

As much as I’d like to give self-hosting a spin (having my own physical server sounds fun honestly, even if I don’t know what I’d put on it) there are just some Life Circumstances that make it not entirely feasible for me right now. In the future, when my situation becomes more stable, it won’t be as much of an issue. I hope.

But in the meantime, that’s why I have a strong preference towards using services someone else is running, that I don’t have to worry as much about losing access to. One of my old project blogs⁵ was made on Wordpress dot com specifically so that if something happened and I couldn’t afford the hosting and domain costs, it’d still be up and available for people to reference, since its predecessor is not. It’s why it took me so long to actually make a personal website instead of just running off of social medias and a Carrd to link them all together. It’s why I still use Github as my primary Git thing⁶, even though I heavily disagree with their “Copilot” bullshit. I need that assurance that the service will still be there tomorrow, even if something unfortunate happens to me, again.