My Return to Self Hosting

A long long time ago, I wanted my own email domain. As I was a poor student at the time, the only way to afford this was a repurposed desktop in my closet hanging off a 128kbps ADSL line. This “server” happily ran my email and various webservers.

As time went on, and I had more money, the “server” was upgraded, moved to a commercial DSL connection, then a cheap dedicated server, and finally a VPS when that became fast enough.

At one time, the VPS was handling email for a dozen people, several websites, an XMPP service, and various other projects that have since been forgotten.

Over the next ten years, the various services were migrated off the server into the “cloud”, and then with a whimper, email was quietly migrated to a paid Google account around 2018. I no longer had time to be a sysadmin, and the cloud offerings were cheap.

With the end of ZIRP, the cloud bills have started to rise, and many services have started to charge for previously free services. The writing is on the wall.

While I was trusting my digital life to the hyperscalers, self hosted software improved markedly. Technologies such as docker made deployment easier, and golang offered a better option for web services than fussy scripting languages (Python, PHP, perl, Ruby, Node) or heavy bytecode (Java, .NET) with their associated runtimes. At the same time Moores`s law and virtual machines relentlessly drove down the pricing of virtual servers.

The time has come for me to return to self-hosting much of my digital life. It won’t be the same as before. I’ve had my turn managing email servers, and even with integrated options like Stalwart, I’m not interested in playing that particular game. Instead I’m going to stick with Fastmail, which has the benefits of being local (for me), not tied to the hyperscalers, and not bundled into other aspects of my digital life.

Other software I’ve deployed or am in the process of deploying includes Kanidm (identity management), Forgejo (a git forge), Headscale (VPNs). In the pipeline are replacements for Google Keep, Photo storage, and general File storage.

Stories on the orange site tell me I’m not the only one.

Patrick Dubroy: Cold Blooded Software

Jason Pargin: “onedrive just deleted all of my … files” / HN thread