This is a thread to discuss various hosting topics, including:
* Where do you host? Self-hosting from home? Colo? VPS? "Cloud"?
* What do you host? www/webapps, email, gopher, git, IRC...
* Why do you host your own services, and why did you choose the hosting platform you use?

I can't lie - this is somewhat selfish, because I'm looking at options for moving away from my current hosting platform. But I'm also curious about what everyone is doing - nixers folks are always working on cool projects that need to live online somewhere!

As for me, I run a t3.nano instance in AWS running a webserver. I also connect to that box for IRC. I also have access to my previous employer's webhosting platform because they offer lifetime hosting for anyone who's worked there - so I don't need to run my own mailservers for my domain, thankfully, and I trust them enough for now.

Previous related discussion

I'm hosting my stuff on DO VPSs, it's cheap and my bank still allows me to disburse my monthly foreign currency allowance there. I have two small instances.
I host my blog, the forums, my personal mail, personal files I need to share, and an IRC bouncer.

At home I also have a local DNS server that blocks ads, if that counts too.

(20-04-2021, 03:23 PM)venam Wrote: At home I also have a local DNS server that blocks ads, if that counts too.

is it just running on a regular machine at your house or is it a pihole/alix/pcengines-type embedded box?

(20-04-2021, 03:26 PM)sth Wrote: is it just running on a regular machine at your house or is it a pihole/alix/pcengines-type embedded box?

It's running on my personal laptop, it's not a dedicated machine.

I got 100€ worth of free azure credits thanks to my school, but I'm saving those for later..

On a more personal note, I've been thinking of getting a chepo vps for a while now, so I'm looking forward to hearing suggestions from other members (who host somewhere in Europe).

I run several VPS boxes at https://www.netcup.de/. That includes my web pages, gopher, mail, Matrix for our family, IRC server for me and a friend, a little DNS server for dynamic names, and probably something else I forgot. Those servers all run OpenBSD, but I ran Arch on them for many years, which worked very well. I originaly switched to OpenBSD as an experiment, but now I really enjoy lots of its programs/daemons and the simple config files.

My “router” at home is an Intel NUC running Arch, which does the standard stuff (DNS, DHCP, hostapd), runs WeeChat in tmux, and hosts a couple of private git repos. If I had a better (= more bandwidth, static IP, access to that IP’s rDNS records) and more stable internet connection at home, I’d move more stuff to the NUC. But this is Germany, so no.

As for the question “why do you self-host”: I like the greater degree of control and, often enough, it’s fun. I let a hoster host my blog for a while and it was just annoying. Missing feature here, broken feature there, I can hardly automate anything. Nah.

(20-04-2021, 03:48 PM)movq Wrote: My “router” at home is an Intel NUC running Arch, which does the standard stuff (DNS, DHCP, hostapd), runs WeeChat in tmux, and hosts a couple of private git repos. If I had a better (= more bandwidth, static IP, access to that IP’s rDNS records) and more stable internet connection at home, I’d move more stuff to the NUC. But this is Germany, so no.

i'm in the same boat - i'd love to repurpose an old laptop and host my webserver from home, but my ISP won't give out static IPs to residential customers, and they want $300/month minimum for a very slow 'business' line that includes a single static IP. i understand the rationale behind why business-grade internet is so expensive (still excessive), but i'd pay another $15 for an IP if they'd let me. not very interested in "dynamic dns" setups either, although it wouldn't be too hard to roll my own since i host dns with AWS, which has an API.

I use Vultr and host quite a few services there:
- DNS server which blocks ads and pr0n
- VPN (which uses the DNS server from above)
- Mail, Contacts, Events
- Website (blog only for now, https://blog.cron.world/)
- Syncthing relay

Locally I use a RPI with an encrypted, portable SSD to share my files via samba. The RPI has a few other services as well like checking if my work computer is inside my network and starting/stopping worktime tracking based on that.

(20-04-2021, 04:45 PM)sth Wrote: i'd pay another $15 for an IP if they'd let me

As for email: Yeah, if it’s from a separate pool of IPs, then I’d consider it as well. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if the IP is fixed or not. The point is to not have an IP from one of those ranges that everyone considers a “consumer connection”. You know, those ranges that are full of Windows boxes and are “known” to send tons of spam, so well, let’s just block the entire range.

(21-04-2021, 11:34 AM)movq Wrote:

(20-04-2021, 04:45 PM)sth Wrote: i'd pay another $15 for an IP if they'd let me

As for email: Yeah, if it’s from a separate pool of IPs, then I’d consider it as well. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if the IP is fixed or not. The point is to not have an IP from one of those ranges that everyone considers a “consumer connection”. You know, those ranges that are full of Windows boxes and are “known” to send tons of spam, so well, let’s just block the entire range.

hmm, good point, a necessary but evil consideration :(

-----

is anyone familiar with any vps/cloud hosts that place environmental impact high on their list of priorities that have some history in the space and aren't just cashing in on green consumerism?