Self-hosting - Why not?
We often talk here about different hosting solutions. Where to go? But there is one solution that no one ever talks about is self-hosting.
Let me tell you about my personal experience. I held 8 years with this solution but I have the chance it is true to have a reliable internet connection and especially a fixed ip.
The first 8 years with my Dolphin website worked well with a i7 body and 32 GB of ram.
When I created my second site with UNA the body i7 is quickly shown insufficient. I then transferred everything to OVH with a Xeon E2 and 64 Gb of RAM for something like $ 100 a month. It was a test period, it worked very well.
Now, I just upgraded my old personal server with something equivalent, the new body i9 8 hearts 16 threads 3.5 - 5Ghz and 12Mo cache, new motherboard of course, and at first 32 GB DDR4 3200 mhz It is true that it cost me more or less $ 1000 but this investment will be amortized in less than a year.
I just transferred everything home again and it works well now, I still have the reserve in that I can extend the Ram +32 GB easily when needed.
In addition, my provider has just switched the connection to 50/7 which was already working very well at 400/20 Mbps which is more than enough.
So what are the disadvantages? Maybe it's scary, but yet there's no reason, a server is nothing more than a powerful pc. A good case well ventilated, a good food, a good processor, the ram and it rolls. Installing Ubuntu Server is a breeze. With the connections we have today, this is simple enough to achieve and effective and ultimately cheap.
So I'm wondering, why am I all alone using this solution, tell me, what disadvantages do you see here?
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I have heard of people doing this and have been very interested in it. Where would I go to get more information to learn how to set this up? I can spend the money on a powerful computer.
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In fact, if for example I rent a server at OVH, I get only the machine and an image of the chosen distribution, with just SSH access. Most server distributions have this basic, so you install, you log in SSH and you have exactly the same result., Which takes less than 30 minutes. Until this stage, it seems almost impossible to make a mistake. To install everything else, php, mysql etc, you find tutorials everywhere, it's really not very complicated. If you try the experience, you find help everywhere, and my door is also open :-)
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Yes sir!
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Self hosting is perfectly viable, if you know what you’re doing and consider the specifics. Apart from the computer specs and the installation itself, it’s important to consider that:
- Your server should be connected to high-speed, low-latency internet 24/7.
- As the site grows, connection throughout is even more important - think about, say, a popular member of your site publishing a video and 100 followers coming to watch at the same time due to notification.
- Your connection should have high UPLOAD speed to cater for the above. At least 100Mbps is recommended. In Australia connection like this is going to cost at least $100/month if you’re lucky to get one - negating any savings from self-hosting. It may be different in your country/town.
- Make sure to setup off-site backups. Your computer may easily fail if it’s not a server-grade hardware servicing multiple connections 24/7. Also insurance may be in order.
- In most cases SSD is best for web server - more costly, but makes big difference in performance.
- If your target audience is not within same locale as your hosting provider then network bottlenecks may be an issue.
IMO by the time you factor in the above, remote hosting may work out to be more cost effective. If, however, your site is at early stages, your work computer is running anyhow, you have cheap good internet connection and your traffic is mostly local - self hosting may be a better option at first. perhaps you can even find ways to scale it up efficiently.
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Another option is a cheap cloud instance - AWS or Linode. It’s often possible to get good promotional credits deal and makes it easier to scale up compared to dedicated box.
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FIY, here’s our typical UNA Cloud cost structure:
$100/mo Cloud4
- $50 covers PowerApps and is pooled to fund development, testing and support of UNA core and modules.
- $30 covers Linode hosting and backups costs.
- $15 covers UNA Cloud orchestration development - cloning tool, installation automation, license sync, etc. This money is pooled to fund developer time on these tasks.
- $5 is in transaction fees.
So, it is not a profitable aspect for us until we reach perhaps 1000+ sites on UNA Cloud. We offer it as a way to quickly launch UNA and keep it running without much hassle. It’s not meant to be a general hosting service.
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There are advantages of self hosting as Baloo mentioned, the disadvantages and contextual advantages of remote hosting might be:
- Persistent physical location
- Electricity backup needed
- Data backup to be effective
- Very good and cheap internet connection, many providers don't let high upload bandwidth.when you ask for it, they say bring your server to our data center and putting in front of you many logical causes. All seemed correct and that's why there are data centers.
- Data security of the professional data centers is needed
- The flexibility of a vhost is a big comfort. If you have a video broadcast event increase the CPU power 10 times on these hours and then return to average.
- S3 may give a big storage possiblity with 0,002-0.006usd per GB,
- No worries about hardware failures in vhosts they always work.
- No worries about natural disasters. There is even a chance for a lightning strike to affect/destroy the self hosted server.
But if I had all the needed parameters of a good hosting environment in house, yes I would also prefer it to feel independent :)
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There are advantages of self hosting as Baloo mentioned, the disadvantages and contextual advantages of remote hosting might be:
- Persistent physical location
- Electricity backup needed
- Data backup to be effective
- Very good and cheap internet connection, many providers don't let high upload bandwidth.when you ask for it, they say bring your server to our data center and putting in front of you many logical causes. All seemed correct and that's why there are data centers.
- Data security of the professional data centers is needed
- The flexibility of a vhost is a big comfort. If you have a video broadcast event increase the CPU power 10 times on these hours and then return to average.
- S3 may give a big storage possiblity with 0,002-0.006usd per GB,
- No worries about hardware failures in vhosts they always work.
- No worries about natural disasters. There is even a chance for a lightning strike to affect/destroy the self hosted server.
But if I had all the needed parameters of a good hosting environment in house, yes I would also prefer it to feel independent :)
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You're not alone. I have a dual xeon processor server hosting 44 sites from my place raid array, battery backups and 200mbps internet. Does great even for UNA but I like more redundancy so my UNA site is hosted elsewhere.
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Of course, I agree with you, this solution is not valid for sites that will become viral, that is to say, 1% of us I think. Also note that this is not an irreversible solution either and I would like everyone to need more, even more, to see the need for a whole data center. Asked for backup, my site is saved 5 times a day over a period of 7 days on an old pc that manages the raid. So I have 35 restore points. Rsync does miracles.
Since your mishap with the fire I hope you are definitely given, and sharing your experience about it, I took my precautions.
I know, if a missile falls on my building, I lose everything, you'll be right. Only in the case where I am not in the building the day it happens, that I would have regrets.
So, okay, this is not the most professional solution but ...
1. I am free of any big bill.
2. I am free at all times.
3. I know where my data is.
4. I learned a lot.
... and 5, if I've always been with you for 10 years, it's because I can manage. That's why I shared my experience with this solution. -
Ah Jeremy, I'm glad to know, I feel less alone :-)
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You're not alone. I've been "self-hosting" for more than five years now with a simple recycled PC with a Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.50GHz, 2 cores 4GB ram and Comcast business class connection for around $100 a month with four IP address's; Webmin/Virtualmin on Ubuntu 16.04 with no problems. It's not a heavy loaded site as active members go for being online at the same time but I've got a lot of photos and the chat server running with no issues.
I have several UPS systems for server, modems, hubs.
I use the server for media storage too.
Backups are run daily to external drives via Webmin.
If you have the extra room I say go for it until your site slows down IMO.
It's great to have "total" control of your data!!
edit: this also includes my cable for TV's. 🙂
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Thank you for your feedback on this subject. You're right, it's great and it's also the satisfaction of getting it done.
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It must be very satisfying to watch both the front and back end of a website working together, listening to your server hum to life when the site gets busy and your community comes online - but I would suggest for most that self hosting is more complication and expense than it is worth - especially for new site developers.
Building out the front end of an UNA site, developing content and cultivating a community is a big enough task to consider - unless you have some technical know-how and an earnest DIY attitude, I would suggest that for most publishers, using a VPS or cloud based solution is the best path forward. -
It must be very satisfying to watch both the front and back end of a website working together, listening to your server hum to life when the site gets busy and your community comes online -
That is part of why I do it. But mostly to have total control over all my site's data, period.
I do agree with starting with what you and Andrew suggests. That's how I started. But for some that know how to manage a dedicated box, it's easy.
It would've been nice to have had these server choices provided by you now back when I first started with Dolphin.
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My site works perfectly on hosting for $ 2 per month.
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Totally valid, and great to see people still tinkering with hardware setups. 👍👌💪
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Self hosting is like being Ferdinand Magellan all over again. Some will make it back to Europe. Some will be beached in the middle of the Pacific. Some will be killed in the Philippines. Is it worth it? Sure it is but not for everyone. Somebody has to do it, if for no other reason than to say that humanity achieved it.
I got as far as installing XAMPP on my computer. Then I got scared that I would fall off the ocean. I turned back because our ship sprung aleak. My crew threaten to mutiny. We were booed when we got back to the harbor but at least we lived to tell the story.
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This is probably the answer to my initial question, it is uncommon because it is a way of seeing things that dates from a bygone era, there are just some relics :-))
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I have thought over the years this would be something really cool to do but never have taken the time to do it. I may consider doing this just for fun and to be able to say that I have done it and maybe use it for low-volume sites. I will probably be reaching out to you at some point.
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Hello,
No, you're not alone. I've also been "self-hosting" for more than ten years now with a more powerful PC and it is OK.
Every one is talking / writing about server spec and internet speed and how to configure web server but no one mentioned the space on hdd (or ssd this days) which is very important when seeking out for a cheap hosting...
I am still running D7 site which is now aprox. 81GB in size. Can you find me a host provider who is willing to give you ~100GB of space for a small price?? No one will even talk with you, not to mention how to transfer it over FTP 😏
On my self-managed web server (LAMP) I host "a lot" ( aprox. 10 other domains mostly using wordpress) and jet my "top" command returns very low resource use.
For those who knows what "top" is:
top - 22:38:34 up 56 days, 2:10, 3 users, load average: 0.83, 1.10, 1.80
Tasks: 488 total, 1 running, 403 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 7.1 us, 0.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 90.9 id, 0.9 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.6 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 32608884 total, 357928 free, 8982840 used, 23268116 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 2531324 total, 2531324 free, 0 used. 22843308 avail Mem
One just need to start with and it pays off. But you need to like working with this stuff....
My conclusion is: self hosting is OK!
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In Australia it doesn’t work out any cheaper to self-host, hence I’m biased.
You can get a 160GB ssd server from Linode for $45 with off-server backups with 40GBps/5000MBps/5TB transfer. That’s likely to handle about 30-50 online users. To be able to handle 30-50 online users self hosted and have backups in place you’d need to allocate a machine with 160GB SSD, permanently connected with at least 100Mbps uplink and unlimited bandwidth. Here in Au we have horrible situation with ISPs, so something like that would cost at least $100/mo. The server may be just $200-$300 to buy, plus energy cost, failover and backups - maybe $500 outright and it‘Lo last a few years. You may or may not be able to use your own computer for this - depends on whether you are OK with the site slowing down when you use photoshop. Also, here the internet is often congested around peak hours (Netflix hour) - may be an issue in your case as well.
So, all that overhead adds up and at least from here I couldn’t ever see self-hosting as a viable option. Its likely to be very different in other countries or in situations where webmaster already has multiple machines, backup storage and unlimited internet with good link anyhow.
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Hi Andrew,
I have dedicated "allocated machine" for the web server (LAMP) and it is running very well. No Photoshop on Linux 😈No problem with ISP's in Slovenia - we have unlimited bandwidth and on a private line (getting fibre-optic this days) so there is no problem with "internet often congested around peak hours". Power is stable maybe 1-2 outages per year or not even that. Normally outages are scheduled maintenance - and my small UPS can handle that.
Small machine (old server used for backup all of the data 😀 and as a MySQL replica server )
Every month at least $45 for Linode - hell no!
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Sounds like heaven on earth! Like I said, it's totally feasible for some situations. Just not here... in fact it looks like most of the Australia is about to be burnt to ashes... servers and all. Definitely hosting elsewhere. 😫
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I recommend renting a server that is housed in a dedicated server farm. If you are only just doing hobby, it is possible to host out of a spare bedroom. However, if you are running a commercial site of any sort, rent a server in a dedicated server farm.
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Your own server:
I feel the cost of hosting your own server can be an issue, since I've done it.
Cost and upgrades, maintenance and upkeep, as well a streaming and software updates and of course downtime, is all in your hands, as well as internet connection issues. On top of also running your site.
Paid host server:
They are responsible, for upgrades, repairs and configuration. They also carry any overhead involved with server and internet issues. They usually are running the latest and best equipment and software, that you aren't responsible for doing.Which leaves more room for you to manage your site.
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this is probably what kept the guy who started ChiNet doing it for so long... :D
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Если я хочу получить только хостинг, без использования PowerApps у Вас есть такого рода предложения?
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No, sorry... our hosting is automated to work with powerapps link.
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Если я конвертировал свои лицензии Дельфина в планы Powerapps, на данный момент у меня 3 таких пакета - если я оплачу ещё один у меня будет уже 4 пакета. А хостинг нужно будет искать в другом месте правильно ли я понимаю? Una в этом плане ничем не может мне помочь?
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I would add to what Cem wrote that sleeping at night is a part of good meditation session. Hence if you are a yogi consider that because if you host your own site, there will be sleepless nights when something crashes and you have to troubleshoot through the night.
Ask yourself this question:
Why dont I be my own phone provider?
It is possible to do it! Yeah! But why not? May be the answer to that is the same solution to hosting your own site.
Andrew mentioned something about knowing what you are doing. No Shit!
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Michael,
You are an exception.Most people can neither set that up what to speak of maintain it and get a good night's rest every night.
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I agree 100% with Mark P!
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I agree with Geek Girl.
