Yeah good luck with that one.
I ran a home lab for a number of years. This was a fairly extensive set up - 4 rack mount servers, UPS, ethernet switch etc with LTO backups. Did streaming, email and file storage for the whole family as well as my own experiments.
One morning I woke up to a dead node. The DMZ service node. I found this out because my wife had no internet. It was running the NAT and email too. Some swapping of power supplies later and I found the whole thing was a complete brick. Board gone. It's 07:45 and my wife can't check her schedule and I'm still trying to get 3 kids out of the door.
At that point I realised I'd fucked up by running a home lab. I didn't have the time or redundancy to have anyone rely on me.
I dug the ISP's provided WiFi router out, plugged it in and configured it quickly and got her laptop and phone working on it. Her email was down but she could check calendar etc (on icloud). By the end of the day I'd moved all the family email off to fastmail and fixed everything to talk to the ISP router properly. I spent the next year cleaning up the shit that was on those servers and found out that between us we only had about 300 gig of data worth keeping which was distributed out to individual macbooks and everyone is responsible for backing their own stuff up (time machine makes this easy). Eventually email was moved to icloud as well when domains came along.
I burned 7TB of crap, sold all the kit and never ran a home lab again. Then I realised I didn't have to pay for the energy, the hardware or expend the time running it. There are no total outages and no problems if there's a power failure. The backups are simple, cheap and reliable. I don't even have a NAS now - I just bought everyone some Samsung T7 shield disks.
I have a huge weight off my shoulders and more free time and money. I didn't learn anything I wouldn't have learned at work anyway.
Author here, thanks for the warning! I'm all too familiar with this kind of situation! This homelab is for fun and learning.
I wrote about why I don't (want to) self-host services for others: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-se...
Yeah everyone who runs a home lab that others use will eventually run into this.
Having a uptime SLA for your "hobby" is a huge pain in the ass and absolutely sucks the fun out of it.
For me it was the constant requests for new media or midnight complaints about jellyfin being down.
If you want to learn infra ops just get a job in the field and get paid for it.
I’ve never had jellyfin + infuse go down, and it’s been a lifesaver when the power’s up and Internet down.
But yeah; things with SLAs are probably better off not self-hosted unless you really enjoy midnight fixes.
ive had issues with it chewing up all available cpu when it encounters corrupted files or a codec it doesnt recognize
Ah, that explains it. I handbrake everything into something that needs no reencoding for infuse to consume.
I can relate to this. I still run my own x86 box as a router to have the AP controller, but I'm strongly considering dropping this.
I need to update it and patch it, hoping nothing goes wrong in the process. If something breaks I'm the only one that can repair it, and I really don't want to hear my wife screaming at me at 7am when I wake up.
Eventually I came to your same conclusion, but I still run a hybrid setup that allows me to keep the router (for now), and a NAS for backup (3-2-1) and some local services. I run a dedicated server from Hetzner for "always on" services, so that the hardware, power redundancy and operational toil are offloaded. I gave up long ago on email: any hosting service will be way better than me doing it - I know I can do it, but is it worth my sanity? Nope.