Re: Self host EVERYTHING
Post last updated 1 month, 2 weeks ago
Gary's self host EVERYTHING appeared on my RSS feed today and I wanted to add a few impressions after toying around with a homelab myself for some time.
The premise is appetizing
You'll get rid of relying on big tech, you'll own your data, you'll save so much money. And it's not that hard.
Yeah, about that
As Gary points out, using things like PikaPods is rather easy, but when you want to delve deeper into self-hosting things like media streaming or password managers things complicate. If you intend to make them available on the internet and to family or friends you'll start getting headaches.
I work in DevOps and tried to do most of the above in my homelab which is basically a small PC because I didn't want to over invest in this from the get-go. Despite being familiar with a lot of what I was supposed to do I had at most moderate success. With Docker I could setup some media streaming, an adblocker and some other smaller services, accessible over the internet (hopefully in a secure enough manner).
Being masochistic, I wanted to add reliability and all the bells and whistles so I tried to do it using k8s. And after a lot of on-off work on it, I just gave up. As a learning thing, it was awesome: I learned a lot and most of that I could transpose to my job. But did I really want to return home from my job to another job? Not really.
I didn't calculate every penny, but I have a feeling for heavier things most people come out more expensive by self-hosting than just using whatever subscription. The hardware cost, the electricity, the working hours you spend on setting up and maintaining everything add up.
Addendum
I still believe self-hosting is worth for some things: (backing up) frequently accessed stuff like music or photos, hard to come by stuff like older movies, wanting a single entry point for stuff like your RSS reader, or budgeting tool and not wanting to create an account or pay a separate subscription for that too.
Would I bother pirating and self-hosting Stranger Things or my own email? Hell no.
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