I went down the self host route some years ago but once critical problems hit I realized that beyond a simple NAS it can be a very demanding hobby.
I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Also (and that's a me problem maybe) I was using Tailscale but I'm more "paranoid" about it nowadays. Single point of failure service, US-only SSO login (MS, Github, Apple, Google), what if my Apple account gets locked if I redeem a gift card and I can't use Tailscale anymore? I still believe in self hosting but probably I want something even more "self" to the extremes.
My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds.
This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.
Yeah we did a similar thing. Same situation, spouse and I both work from home, and we got hit by a multiple day power outage due to a rare severe ice storm. So now I have an EV and a transfer switch so I can go for a week without power, and I have a Starlink upstream connection in standby mode that can be activated in minutes.
Of course that means we’ll not have another ice storm in my lifetime. My neighbors should thank me.
Thanks for taking one for the team.
Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
Well, its not a bottomless pit really. Yes you need a UPS. That’s basically it though.
Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages...
How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
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I really enjoy self-hosting on rented compute. It's theoretically easy to migrate to an on-prem setup, but I don't have to deal with the physical responsibilities while it's in the cloud.
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home.
If you are going to be away from home a lot, then yes, it's a bottomless pit. Because you have to build a system that does not rely on the possibility of you being there, anytime.
I have a desktop I use but if I had to start again, I’d build a low power r pi or n100 type system that can be powered by a mobile battery backup with solar (flow type with sub 10ms switching and good battery chemistry for long life) that can do the basic homelab tasks. Planning for power outages from the get go rather than assuming unlimited and cheap power
Starlink backup sounds fun now!
Way too expensive for that imo (but then again might as well just go all in). Probably a 5G connection is more than enough
Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?)
They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually.
That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
Some SOHO branch office routers like Cisco ISR models can take cellular dongles and/or SIM. Drivers for supported models are baked into ROM and everything works through CLI.
man I have this vague memory that I was at a neighbour's house and we were all kids and internet wasn't that widespread (I was really young) and I remember that they had this dongle in which they inserted an sim card in for network access. This is why this idea has always persisted in my head in the first place.
I don't know what's the name of dongle though, it was similar to those sd card to usb thing ykwim, I'd appreciate it if someone could help find this too if possible
but also yeah your point is also fascinating as well, y'know another benefit of doing this is that atleast in my area, 5g (500-700mbps) is really cheap (10-15$) with unlimited bandwidth per month and on the ethernet side of things I get 10x less bandwidth (40-80mbps) so much so that me and my brother genuinely thought of this idea
except that we thought that instead of buying a router like this, we use an old phone device and insert sim in it and access router through that way.
Long time ago, it was popular for ISPs offer a small amount of space for personal websites. We might see a resurgence of this, but with cheap VPS. Eventually.
Free static site hosting and cheap VPSs already exist. Self hosting is less about putting sites on the internet now and more about replicating cloud services locally.
VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized.
Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything
If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case)
The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it.
Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network.
For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you.
You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well
You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal.
You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything
But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy.
Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up
> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)
Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what
Thanks for the shout-out! If you have any experiential reports using QTM, I'd love to hear them!
Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out
But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked.
This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on but in the end, Good readme's make self hosting on a home server easier and fun xD
(I don't exactly remember chatgpt's conversations, perhaps they might have helped a bit or not, but I am 99% sure that it was your readme which ended up helping and chatgpt etc. in fact took an hour or more and genuinely frustrated me from what I remember vaguely)
I hope QTM reaches more traction. Its build on solid primitives.
One thing I genuinely want you to perhaps take a look at if possible is creating an additional piece of software or adding the functionality where instead of the careful dance that we have to make it work (like we have to send two large data pieces from two computers, I had to use some hacky solution like piping server or wormhole itself for it)
So what I am asking is if there could be a possibility that you can make the initial node pairing (ticket?) [Sorry, I forgot the name of primitive] between A and B, you use wormhole itself and now instead of these two having to send large chunks of data between each other, they can now just send 6 words or similar
Wormhole: https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
I even remember building some of my own CLI for something liek this and using chatgpt to build it xD but in the end gave up because I wasn't familiar with the codebase or how to make these two work together but I hope that you can add it. I sincerely hope so.
Another minor suggestion I feel like giving is to please have asciinema demo. I will create an asciinema patch if you want between two computers but a working demo gif from 0 -> running really really would've helped me save some/few hours
QTM has lots of potential. Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats and you can even self host the middle part itself. I had thought about building such a project when I had first discovered QTM and you can just imagine my joy when I discovered QTM from one of your comments a long time ago for what its worth
Wishing the best of luck of your project! The idea is very fascinating. I would appreciate a visual demo a lot though and I hope we can discuss more!
Edit: I remember that qtm docs had this issue of where they really felt complex for me personally when all I wanted was one computer port mapped to another computer port and I think what helped in the end was the 4th comment if I remember correctly, I might have used LLM assistance or not or if it helped or not, I genuinely don't remember but it definitely took me an hour or two to figure things out but its okay since I still feel like the software is definitely positive and this might have been a skill issue from my side but I just want if you can add asciinema docs, I can't stress it enough if possible on how much it can genuinely help an average person to figure out the product.
(Slowly move towards the complex setups with asciinema demos for each of them if you wish)
Once again good luck! I can't stress qtm and I still strongly urge everyone to try qtm once https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm since its highly relevant to the discussion