I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.
This is very cool. I have been thinking of a similar service that should exist.
Suppose you want to host your own email, or a mastodon server or similar. You download this application to your local computer. You pick what you want to install. It asks you which domain name provider you want to use, and which server host you want to use (eg. local or hetzner). It guides you into creating accounts for these services. Then uses their API, to set up the appropriate server, DNS settings etc.
It might not be fully automated, but something like this can seriously bring down the skill floor needed to host anything.
who's can also mean who has, which is where you've probably seen it used in ways that imply a possessive, but normally means who is, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257167 indicated
Further off-topic: You're not wrong, but maybe you should be. It's one of the most pointless irregular grammar rules in English. Nobody is ever confused by the wrong usage of the apostrophe here (when spoken there's no voicing of it). Native writers of English often get it wrong. If we had an Academy Anglaise we'd just regularise this usage. I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
> I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
The one that people get wrong all the time is "its" vs "it's" for exactly this reason. By the usual use of posessive apostrophe you would expect "it's" and yet that's only ever correct if you're eliding something (i.e. you mean "it is", "it has" etc.)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
This is a class of errors I never made when I first learned English (mostly by reading/writing). My pronunciation was so bad that I pronounced these words differently.
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
I feel like Cloudflare tunnels have trivialised a fair bit of the setup around this. You no longer have to directly expose your home server to the open internet, nor mess with routing tables and DMZ on your router... Just pop a cloudflare tunnel infront of your http server, and let Cloudflare do the rest.
Of course, the physical side still needs some work. Ideally one needs a battery backup and a small solar panel, so that you can weather the odd power cut. And constant connectivity is trivial (but a cheap cellphone as a backup for when your line drops probably gets you 99% of the way there)
I prefer Tailscale to expose via a very cheap cloud VM with a reverse proxy running at this point, I don’t really trust Cloudflare as far as I can throw it.
This is very doable nowadays and in fact may be cheaper, more reliable, and faster than renting a VPS with unpredictable noisy neighbours. Just grab a mini-PC from Beeline for $200 and you've got a 16 GB RAM powerful baremetal server for the price of renting an equivalent VPS for 2 months from DigitalOcean.
Backup power is easily achieved with a UPS, and backup internet connection with an LTE router (or two).
But the feeling of being able to tinker with something physically in your own space? Cannot be beat. You can do so much that isn't possible over SSH, just because it is there.
There are 2 reasons why i still have VPS: Static Ipv4 IP and isolation. I don't trust my skill enough to setup a completely secure server and confidently let it face the public internet.
My favourite home server is a laptop with a broken screen, built in UPS for cheap! I replaced the WiFi card with an Ethernet card and bob as they say, is my uncle!
Yep, my website (very WIP) is hosted on an RPi 5 in the corner of my apartment, and every once in a while my IP changes and I have to update DNS and tell my friends to connect to the minecraft server by IP. I'm probably around 98% uptime, so github levels of assurance.
Cloudflare lets you create tunnels for free which will keep your site online when the IP changes. This will also hide your IP as your DNS entry will be pointed to Cloudflare.
Giving a second shout out to pangolin. You can also manage a multi site set up quite easily with built in auth and without much command line foo. Super useful if you run something like proxmox and eany go spin up several services without too much configuration on each service to expose to the world. Really happy with pangolin.
In my case yes, because I did not care about breaking email delivery to that domain (it's a novelty domain pointing to my residential IP address, (surname-home.tld) which I use exclusively for my selfhosted
Services
I know the feeling. Ive already configured almost all services to be header auth or disabled auth entirely if possible, and just put them all behind a SSO forward proxy (nginx + authentik)
I also played around with injecting a tiny script into the proxied response to just add a small drop down menu with all services I've got available. .. while that worked, finding a good place to inject that menu was a chore so it's currently disabled again :)
Unrelated to the article, but a creative Canadian flag used the title to spell words out. They slowly circled characters in the title. I thought I was deciphering a cool message… but it was just "whore"
The internet in its purest form. I grepped for all words containing the substring whore in the hopes of coming up with some witty explanation and shame you in assuming the worst from our Canadian bretheren. To my great chagrin they all refer to, well, whores.
When I was a teenager, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom. People would call in at all hours to download (ahem) 'Public Domain' (wink) games off of my Atari 130XE and its array of half a dozen floppy drives. It was kind of noisy, but it always lifted my spirits when I'd hear the drives start grinding.
I used to run a BBS from my bedroom when I lived with my parents. I had attached a phone to the same line, and replaced the speaker with a led, so I would know someone was connecting because the led would blink intermittently for a few seconds while it "rang". Not sure if I remember correctly, but I think the BBS software even allowed me to see what they were doing.
I think you remember correctly! A lot of the BBS software would just show what the current user was doing as if it was their screen. I believe from there you could start a chat as the sysop and interact with them, else you kinda just watched.
The few times I ran one (was a sysop on a few, but remotely), I was always a little creeped out that I could see people typing messages, etc. Felt like invading their privacy.
Home internet is so fast now and hardware is so cheap and powerful its a good solution. It amazes me how expensive aws compared to having your own hardware.
I wish it was that fast. Somehow in the past 15 years prices for a 10/100/200Mbit have stayed exactly the same, only Gigabit came down a smidge to around 70 euro/month now. As if all the hardware and switches hadn't evolved at all.
And for some reason, nowadays over 5G you get pretty much the exact same speed/price combos as for DSL or cable, only with less guarantees.
That's the other point, fibre can be a bit cheaper but not even all 10 year old apartment blocks have fibre run in to building??? If you wanna get it installed that'll be at least a couple hundred extra
More than that. When I called about it they made it seem like I had to pay for the entire installation from wherever the nearest fiber line was all the way to my place. They quoted me a couple thousand dollar price and I never asked again because I don't even own this place.
I can get gigabit for about €32,50 a month. 2gbps for about €40. Unfortunately, the cheap ISP that offers these rates doesn't have IPv6 so I'll stay with my current one. €70/mo would get me 4gbps symmetrical with another ISP. All of those include a WiFi 7 capable router, of course.
Prices have increased, but high prices are a local problem. The €35 price for cheap gigabit would equate to about €20 in 2000, so I think prices have stagnated alright, but speeds have evolved a lot since then.
70 euro a month for gigabit? That's a great price! And way, way, way, more than you need for self hosting a website (maybe more for other things?). I've hosted my .com website from home since the late 90s and anything faster than a couple megabits is just fine .My current 80/10 megabits connection from comcast is $115/mo and has a 1.2TB data transfer cap with $10 per 50GB over. Even with such a terrible, expensive, exploitive ISP I host my dot com from home just fine.
Trying to host from wireless would probably not work so well. Do they even give you a real ipv4? And even if so, you're round trip time is inherently randomized which leads to tcp backoff and slowdowns in this context.
Anywhere outside of a tech hub, usually. The cable TV providers all had a lot of downstream (to carry television), and very little upstream, and they have largely done little to fix that state of affairs.
I have a small cluster I use to run my personal server/nvr/etc on. Instead of Raspberry Pi, I just bought some small mini pcs, which are amazingly powerful and cheap for their size. I have them stashed in a few random places around the house near my switches. Works great!
I run a bittorrent client in the corner of my room. The hard disk gets quite loud when it gets going, so between 00:00 and 09:00 it automatically throttles the bandwidth down to 1mb/s to prevent the noise from keeping me up.
I have a raspberry pi 400 on my desk which hosts some stuff on my home internal network. I've recently set up the num lock LED on it as a CPU activity indicator. It is nice to look at it flashing away while it is being utilized.
The idea of having your server just over there, and being able to touch it is a nice feeling and a great spectacle.
But in the age of scrapers, APT bots and whatnot, I don't want that kind of whirlwind in my home network, even though I can isolate it to its DMZ.
I sit in front of a fat pipe at work and can witness what a single, lone server has to stand against even with best practices applied to minimize its attack surface.
This is why all my personal servers are out there. I don't want my network to become a defense point.
One question about this: How do most internet plans work with this?
If someone connects with a request, is that metered as ingress/downloading, and if your server responds, it is metered as an egress/uploading?
If so, that means an unlimited plan is a must, and even then, might ISPs flag you for abuse if large frequent requests/responses are being received/sent by the server?
In general, many (most?) internet plans specifically prohibit running a web server with a residential account. A business account would be necessary in these cases.
Dear Mr. Architect, I've noticed you make this historical link effort frequently, so I hope it's okay to express my appreciation, and gently request you include a little more detail about what is behind it (age + comment count). Otherwise it's hard to know if a link is worth clicking or not.
This is one of the things that has me so hesitant towards upgrading my "server". I've been using an old Thinkpad for a while now and it has served me well, but lately I've been using it for more intensive things (like JetBrains remote development and a Jellyfin server). It's become a regular occurrence that, while I'm trying to sleep, its fans spin up and sound like it's trying to take off because someone downstairs is watching a movie from it. I don't begrudge them for it since I set it up for that exact purpose, but it can make it difficult to sleep soundly.
The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise. I've been considering something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr5MjhgPz_c)... but then how am I supposed to use it? Yes, I can ssh into it, but what if it fails to start? Just last month my Thinkpad server failed to restart properly. This was a trivial fix but it being a laptop whose lid I can just open and use immediately made it an extremely easy fix, which would not be true for a PC.
Thing is, I know that dumb terminals exist, ie, a screen, keyboard, and trackpad that takes the form-factor of a laptop but has no actual internals, it's just a convenient interface when plugged into a server. I've seen them. I've tried searching for them but there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon search category, and the ones I manage to find are more expensive than the PC itself and are usually designed as a server-rack drawer.
Genuinely, what do people do here? Do they just have their server setup somewhere like a desktop? Or are people keeping spare monitors, keyboards, and mice around that they then need to unpack, plug in, and use awkwardly before putting it all away again?
I have a tiny HDMI screen which I can power from a USB port which I can plug into a computer if for some reason it is unreachable over the network. (this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1L935ZT ), and a tiny keyboard with built-in track pad (something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9996LA ).
They're stored together in a small box with all needed cables, so they're easy to take with me to whichever computer is having issues. In practice I only use them a few times per year.
SSH most of the time of course, and a management interface (iDRAC, iLO, etc) if you have an enterprise server; otherwise an old monitor and spare keyboard. Sometimes they'll support serial out that you can use over a cable to another computer instead of the whole monitor+keyboard combo. Or nowadays you can use a network KVM like a PiKVM, NanoKVM, or JetKVM
the thing about network KVM is, they require ... network. So if you already can't ssh into your machine, it maybe network issue, thus you can't use network kvm
I just keep a cheap screen and a cheap keyboard near my servers. No need for a mouse. For my garage and basement servers, the KV stays in place always, and the MIL's condo, the KV goes away when not in use... and the keyboard got moved at some point, so I have to remember to bring it over when it needs adjusting.
Around me, most days I can stop at goodwill and get a monitor and keyboard for $30 or less.
> I can stop at goodwill and get a monitor and keyboard for $30 or less.
The issue isn't cost in this case, it's the storage and effort of having to lug it out and put it back afterwards. Even if someone gave me an old screen and keyboard for free, I'm still not going to build that server PC. I've been looking into PiKVM as advised by another comment and they're pretty pricey at ~£200 but that's genuinely orders of magnitude more preferable. In another conversation on another platform, I was told about nexdock, which is more for docking phones but can be used as a dumb terminal, which is pretty enticing... though their website is pretty dubious, eg: the shop doesn't even tell me what version of the nexdock I'd be buying.
Since you're mentioning opening laptop's lid I assume you mean literally failing to start, as after power cycling. For that, wouldn't simple hitting the power button be enough? It certainly doesn't require keyboard. If you plan to place it somewhere not easily accessible, there is Wake on LAN, which most modern PC motherboards are going to support.
If some maintenance task cannot be done with ssh/tmux, you can always use remote desktop software, in local network even RDP will do. And if something went wrong enough for you to not be able to connect to the server remotely then there is indeed no way around bringing and connecting a spare keyboard and monitor, but events like that should be quite rare normally.
> The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise
In the performance window of "old Thinkpad", why not go fanless? Those lovely little Intel N150 mini-pc boxes are mostly fanless and completely silent - I have on my desk running Jellyfin/web server/etc, and it's inaudible under load.
> but what if it fails to start?
In ~15 years of running headless linux boxes, I've never had one crippled to the point it wouldn't boot as far as ssh.
My server sits next to my existing desktop, and I just move the keyboard cable from one to the other when I need to get at a local interface on the server. One of my monitors has two inputs, and so is always plugged into both, I can just change the input selected. Not the "cleanest" solution, but it works when I need to get at it, and the space it's in wasn't being used by anything else.
I used to run a Web server (and email server) like this. The novelty wore off, and I currently structure it for static hosting via AWS S3 + CloudFront.
(No matter how personal a Web site, the occasional prospective employer will go look at it. If you're a techbro, you normally don't want this site sometimes acting like it's running on a potato and wet string. Even if you still keep your 2002 visual design, ahem.)
If that's not a concern, you can run a nonessential Web server from home, and it's fun and concrete, like the author suggests. You might want to forward/proxy the traffic through some external cloud server (even if you don't use CDN/caching features), to shield your home pipe a bit.
When you have a website or little server to play around with as your little sandbox online, that doesn't get much traffic, but it keeps things up that you can play with or share and learn about, great things can happen.
It's made _so_ much easier simply by installing a free cloudflare tunnel in front of it.
I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.
[1]: https://takingnames.io/ [2]: https://boringproxy.io/
This is very cool. I have been thinking of a similar service that should exist.
Suppose you want to host your own email, or a mastodon server or similar. You download this application to your local computer. You pick what you want to install. It asks you which domain name provider you want to use, and which server host you want to use (eg. local or hetzner). It guides you into creating accounts for these services. Then uses their API, to set up the appropriate server, DNS settings etc.
It might not be fully automated, but something like this can seriously bring down the skill floor needed to host anything.
who's can also mean who has, which is where you've probably seen it used in ways that imply a possessive, but normally means who is, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257167 indicated
Whose! Who's means who is
Further off-topic: You're not wrong, but maybe you should be. It's one of the most pointless irregular grammar rules in English. Nobody is ever confused by the wrong usage of the apostrophe here (when spoken there's no voicing of it). Native writers of English often get it wrong. If we had an Academy Anglaise we'd just regularise this usage. I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
> I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
It's a strange rule. I'd be interested if any more serious grammarians can explain where this irregularity comes from.
The weirdest thing about this is that eg “Pete’s” is correct. You can say “Pete’s over there” vs “Pete’s house is nice”, and the meaning is clear.
You guys really need an Academy Anglaise indeed! (I wasn't aware that does not exist before your comment)
The one that people get wrong all the time is "its" vs "it's" for exactly this reason. By the usual use of posessive apostrophe you would expect "it's" and yet that's only ever correct if you're eliding something (i.e. you mean "it is", "it has" etc.)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
This is a class of errors I never made when I first learned English (mostly by reading/writing). My pronunciation was so bad that I pronounced these words differently.
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
Whose cares
I feel like Cloudflare tunnels have trivialised a fair bit of the setup around this. You no longer have to directly expose your home server to the open internet, nor mess with routing tables and DMZ on your router... Just pop a cloudflare tunnel infront of your http server, and let Cloudflare do the rest.
Of course, the physical side still needs some work. Ideally one needs a battery backup and a small solar panel, so that you can weather the odd power cut. And constant connectivity is trivial (but a cheap cellphone as a backup for when your line drops probably gets you 99% of the way there)
I prefer Tailscale to expose via a very cheap cloud VM with a reverse proxy running at this point, I don’t really trust Cloudflare as far as I can throw it.
This is very doable nowadays and in fact may be cheaper, more reliable, and faster than renting a VPS with unpredictable noisy neighbours. Just grab a mini-PC from Beeline for $200 and you've got a 16 GB RAM powerful baremetal server for the price of renting an equivalent VPS for 2 months from DigitalOcean.
Backup power is easily achieved with a UPS, and backup internet connection with an LTE router (or two).
But the feeling of being able to tinker with something physically in your own space? Cannot be beat. You can do so much that isn't possible over SSH, just because it is there.
There are 2 reasons why i still have VPS: Static Ipv4 IP and isolation. I don't trust my skill enough to setup a completely secure server and confidently let it face the public internet.
Static IPv4 is easily achieved with either Cloudflare or Tailscale or Ngrok. Cloudflare also provides strong firewall/DDOS protection.
My favourite home server is a laptop with a broken screen, built in UPS for cheap! I replaced the WiFi card with an Ethernet card and bob as they say, is my uncle!
Yep, my website (very WIP) is hosted on an RPi 5 in the corner of my apartment, and every once in a while my IP changes and I have to update DNS and tell my friends to connect to the minecraft server by IP. I'm probably around 98% uptime, so github levels of assurance.
Spend 20 minutes setting up DuckDNS and you'll never have to worry about this again.
https://www.duckdns.org
Cloudflare lets you create tunnels for free which will keep your site online when the IP changes. This will also hide your IP as your DNS entry will be pointed to Cloudflare.
Or Pangolin [1] on a cheap VPS, in case you want to self host the tunnel as well :-)
[1] https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
Giving a second shout out to pangolin. You can also manage a multi site set up quite easily with built in auth and without much command line foo. Super useful if you run something like proxmox and eany go spin up several services without too much configuration on each service to expose to the world. Really happy with pangolin.
I solved this with a corn tab that runs a script that checks my ip and updates my cloudflare dns if it changes. https://github.com/pastorhudson/cloudflare_dns_updater
> with a corn tab that
A corn tab you say? I'm all ears!
I wonder if that tastes good.
I assume they meant crontab (TIL that means "cron table", never wondered before)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
fstab isn't named such because it makes you want to stab your face, either.
Why not use DDNS?
Alternatively your domain provider likely has some API for you to programmatically update the DNS records.
Because mine didn't I instead used a generic ddns and set a cname on my own domain to that. Works like a charm too.
Kinda breaks MX records so don't so it if you wanna receive emails on that domain, too
> Kinda breaks MX records so don't so it if you wanna receive emails on that domain, too
Is the CNAME on the root of the domain, @?
In my case yes, because I did not care about breaking email delivery to that domain (it's a novelty domain pointing to my residential IP address, (surname-home.tld) which I use exclusively for my selfhosted Services
Oh perfect
Just wanted to ask since I’ve been bitten by that.
I do something similar, but I have them all under <service>.home.<example.com>
But that’s because I do have resources outside. Just helps my mental model to name space them.
I know the feeling. Ive already configured almost all services to be header auth or disabled auth entirely if possible, and just put them all behind a SSO forward proxy (nginx + authentik)
I also played around with injecting a tiny script into the proxied response to just add a small drop down menu with all services I've got available. .. while that worked, finding a good place to inject that menu was a chore so it's currently disabled again :)
Use cloudflare tunnel. It’ll stay alive through that.
Unrelated to the article, but a creative Canadian flag used the title to spell words out. They slowly circled characters in the title. I thought I was deciphering a cool message… but it was just "whore"
The internet in its purest form. I grepped for all words containing the substring whore in the hopes of coming up with some witty explanation and shame you in assuming the worst from our Canadian bretheren. To my great chagrin they all refer to, well, whores.
I might be missing something here, but how does the Canadian flag relate to the article and how does it circle characters in the title?
I'm surprised how many different flags I saw while reading- I guess mostly from HN? Diverse crowd!
When I was a teenager, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom. People would call in at all hours to download (ahem) 'Public Domain' (wink) games off of my Atari 130XE and its array of half a dozen floppy drives. It was kind of noisy, but it always lifted my spirits when I'd hear the drives start grinding.
I used to run a BBS from my bedroom when I lived with my parents. I had attached a phone to the same line, and replaced the speaker with a led, so I would know someone was connecting because the led would blink intermittently for a few seconds while it "rang". Not sure if I remember correctly, but I think the BBS software even allowed me to see what they were doing.
I think you remember correctly! A lot of the BBS software would just show what the current user was doing as if it was their screen. I believe from there you could start a chat as the sysop and interact with them, else you kinda just watched.
The few times I ran one (was a sysop on a few, but remotely), I was always a little creeped out that I could see people typing messages, etc. Felt like invading their privacy.
Home internet is so fast now and hardware is so cheap and powerful its a good solution. It amazes me how expensive aws compared to having your own hardware.
I wish it was that fast. Somehow in the past 15 years prices for a 10/100/200Mbit have stayed exactly the same, only Gigabit came down a smidge to around 70 euro/month now. As if all the hardware and switches hadn't evolved at all.
And for some reason, nowadays over 5G you get pretty much the exact same speed/price combos as for DSL or cable, only with less guarantees.
I don't think they are ever going to run gigabit over to me if they haven't by this point.
That's the other point, fibre can be a bit cheaper but not even all 10 year old apartment blocks have fibre run in to building??? If you wanna get it installed that'll be at least a couple hundred extra
More than that. When I called about it they made it seem like I had to pay for the entire installation from wherever the nearest fiber line was all the way to my place. They quoted me a couple thousand dollar price and I never asked again because I don't even own this place.
It highly depends on where you live.
I can get gigabit for about €32,50 a month. 2gbps for about €40. Unfortunately, the cheap ISP that offers these rates doesn't have IPv6 so I'll stay with my current one. €70/mo would get me 4gbps symmetrical with another ISP. All of those include a WiFi 7 capable router, of course.
Prices have increased, but high prices are a local problem. The €35 price for cheap gigabit would equate to about €20 in 2000, so I think prices have stagnated alright, but speeds have evolved a lot since then.
Kinda off topic, but I'm staying on a 500 mbps pipe for now... simply because I don't see the reason for more.
I could get up to 2 Gbit by making a phone call to my curent ISP but why?
May I ask which country that is?
It's not that expensive everywhere. In the UK I can get 1000/1000Mbps for £29 a month, and 8000/8000Mbps for £99 a month.
with 30% inflation in the euro area over the past 10 years... the price has maybe gone down in real terms by staying the same?
And how much has equipment gotten faster/cheaper? Tad bit over 30% I'd say, on the side of 10x? 50x? 100x?
the cost of actually getting the equipment into use (laying down new fiber etc) probably went up though.
70 euro a month for gigabit? That's a great price! And way, way, way, more than you need for self hosting a website (maybe more for other things?). I've hosted my .com website from home since the late 90s and anything faster than a couple megabits is just fine .My current 80/10 megabits connection from comcast is $115/mo and has a 1.2TB data transfer cap with $10 per 50GB over. Even with such a terrible, expensive, exploitive ISP I host my dot com from home just fine.
Trying to host from wireless would probably not work so well. Do they even give you a real ipv4? And even if so, you're round trip time is inherently randomized which leads to tcp backoff and slowdowns in this context.
Home internet is only fast downstream.
Upstream is usually awful.
(At least in the USA.)
Verizon FiOS has had symmetric gigabit service available for well over a decade for a reasonable price.
Where in the USA are you?
Anywhere outside of a tech hub, usually. The cable TV providers all had a lot of downstream (to carry television), and very little upstream, and they have largely done little to fix that state of affairs.
Except for fiber, for all providers I'm aware.
My home fiber is symmetric gigabit in Seattle, for $65/mo
I have a small cluster I use to run my personal server/nvr/etc on. Instead of Raspberry Pi, I just bought some small mini pcs, which are amazingly powerful and cheap for their size. I have them stashed in a few random places around the house near my switches. Works great!
I run a bittorrent client in the corner of my room. The hard disk gets quite loud when it gets going, so between 00:00 and 09:00 it automatically throttles the bandwidth down to 1mb/s to prevent the noise from keeping me up.
You can actually view the interface statistics publicly here: https://collectd.levitati.ng/archpi/interface/end0
I have a raspberry pi 400 on my desk which hosts some stuff on my home internal network. I've recently set up the num lock LED on it as a CPU activity indicator. It is nice to look at it flashing away while it is being utilized.
I enjoyed this article very much. It used 99% of my CPU though.
You can turn off that "feature" with the "Quiet Mode" toggle on the top right
That's probably to show the massively distracting cursors of all current visitors.
Yeah something is very CPU intensive on this otherwise plaintext site. The cutesy concurrent visitor cursors perhaps?
The idea of having your server just over there, and being able to touch it is a nice feeling and a great spectacle.
But in the age of scrapers, APT bots and whatnot, I don't want that kind of whirlwind in my home network, even though I can isolate it to its DMZ.
I sit in front of a fat pipe at work and can witness what a single, lone server has to stand against even with best practices applied to minimize its attack surface.
This is why all my personal servers are out there. I don't want my network to become a defense point.
The only real hurdle to this now even for people with little computing knowledge is having a backup internet connection for when yours flakes.
If it’s just a personal site, you can just let it go unavailable during an outage (and maybe rely on a CDN to keep it partially functioning).
How to Create a Cache Server?
https://cyfuture.cloud/kb/howto/how-to-create-a-cache-server
One question about this: How do most internet plans work with this?
If someone connects with a request, is that metered as ingress/downloading, and if your server responds, it is metered as an egress/uploading?
If so, that means an unlimited plan is a must, and even then, might ISPs flag you for abuse if large frequent requests/responses are being received/sent by the server?
In general, many (most?) internet plans specifically prohibit running a web server with a residential account. A business account would be necessary in these cases.
Are there really any non-flatrate plans left? And if I'm getting fined for using all bandwidth that I'm paying for, what am I paying for?
(2022) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165836
Dear Mr. Architect, I've noticed you make this historical link effort frequently, so I hope it's okay to express my appreciation, and gently request you include a little more detail about what is behind it (age + comment count). Otherwise it's hard to know if a link is worth clicking or not.
This one was: Oct 2022 - 440 comments.
he's a pain in the ass
Judging from the number of upvotes my plea received, there is stronger than expected desire for more context and fewer low-effort link pasta.
And to avoid technicalities, make it big enough so you can see and use it.
This is one of the things that has me so hesitant towards upgrading my "server". I've been using an old Thinkpad for a while now and it has served me well, but lately I've been using it for more intensive things (like JetBrains remote development and a Jellyfin server). It's become a regular occurrence that, while I'm trying to sleep, its fans spin up and sound like it's trying to take off because someone downstairs is watching a movie from it. I don't begrudge them for it since I set it up for that exact purpose, but it can make it difficult to sleep soundly.
The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise. I've been considering something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr5MjhgPz_c)... but then how am I supposed to use it? Yes, I can ssh into it, but what if it fails to start? Just last month my Thinkpad server failed to restart properly. This was a trivial fix but it being a laptop whose lid I can just open and use immediately made it an extremely easy fix, which would not be true for a PC.
Thing is, I know that dumb terminals exist, ie, a screen, keyboard, and trackpad that takes the form-factor of a laptop but has no actual internals, it's just a convenient interface when plugged into a server. I've seen them. I've tried searching for them but there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon search category, and the ones I manage to find are more expensive than the PC itself and are usually designed as a server-rack drawer.
Genuinely, what do people do here? Do they just have their server setup somewhere like a desktop? Or are people keeping spare monitors, keyboards, and mice around that they then need to unpack, plug in, and use awkwardly before putting it all away again?
I have a tiny HDMI screen which I can power from a USB port which I can plug into a computer if for some reason it is unreachable over the network. (this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1L935ZT ), and a tiny keyboard with built-in track pad (something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9996LA ).
They're stored together in a small box with all needed cables, so they're easy to take with me to whichever computer is having issues. In practice I only use them a few times per year.
SSH most of the time of course, and a management interface (iDRAC, iLO, etc) if you have an enterprise server; otherwise an old monitor and spare keyboard. Sometimes they'll support serial out that you can use over a cable to another computer instead of the whole monitor+keyboard combo. Or nowadays you can use a network KVM like a PiKVM, NanoKVM, or JetKVM
the thing about network KVM is, they require ... network. So if you already can't ssh into your machine, it maybe network issue, thus you can't use network kvm
I just keep a cheap screen and a cheap keyboard near my servers. No need for a mouse. For my garage and basement servers, the KV stays in place always, and the MIL's condo, the KV goes away when not in use... and the keyboard got moved at some point, so I have to remember to bring it over when it needs adjusting.
Around me, most days I can stop at goodwill and get a monitor and keyboard for $30 or less.
> I can stop at goodwill and get a monitor and keyboard for $30 or less.
The issue isn't cost in this case, it's the storage and effort of having to lug it out and put it back afterwards. Even if someone gave me an old screen and keyboard for free, I'm still not going to build that server PC. I've been looking into PiKVM as advised by another comment and they're pretty pricey at ~£200 but that's genuinely orders of magnitude more preferable. In another conversation on another platform, I was told about nexdock, which is more for docking phones but can be used as a dumb terminal, which is pretty enticing... though their website is pretty dubious, eg: the shop doesn't even tell me what version of the nexdock I'd be buying.
> The issue isn't cost in this case, it's the storage and effort of having to lug it out and put it back afterwards.
Then connect it once and leave it. :p
Okay, thanks for the advice
> but what if it fails to start?
Since you're mentioning opening laptop's lid I assume you mean literally failing to start, as after power cycling. For that, wouldn't simple hitting the power button be enough? It certainly doesn't require keyboard. If you plan to place it somewhere not easily accessible, there is Wake on LAN, which most modern PC motherboards are going to support.
If some maintenance task cannot be done with ssh/tmux, you can always use remote desktop software, in local network even RDP will do. And if something went wrong enough for you to not be able to connect to the server remotely then there is indeed no way around bringing and connecting a spare keyboard and monitor, but events like that should be quite rare normally.
I have a keyboard and monitor somewhere in a closet. That's also what we do at work with our "real" servers.
I'd say it's needed about once a year at most though. Servers don't just fail to start, normally.
> The most obvious solution would be make a small PC: more powerful and bigger fans means less noise
In the performance window of "old Thinkpad", why not go fanless? Those lovely little Intel N150 mini-pc boxes are mostly fanless and completely silent - I have on my desk running Jellyfin/web server/etc, and it's inaudible under load.
> but what if it fails to start?
In ~15 years of running headless linux boxes, I've never had one crippled to the point it wouldn't boot as far as ssh.
My server sits next to my existing desktop, and I just move the keyboard cable from one to the other when I need to get at a local interface on the server. One of my monitors has two inputs, and so is always plugged into both, I can just change the input selected. Not the "cleanest" solution, but it works when I need to get at it, and the space it's in wasn't being used by anything else.
PiKVM
or really any cheap IP based KVM is what you’re looking for
Have it boot with serial out, get a cheap usb to serial dongle, and use the laptop you have to serial in. Or do you specifically want a gui?
Great article but I think I was having too much fun spinning my mouse with other people lol
I used to run a Web server (and email server) like this. The novelty wore off, and I currently structure it for static hosting via AWS S3 + CloudFront.
(No matter how personal a Web site, the occasional prospective employer will go look at it. If you're a techbro, you normally don't want this site sometimes acting like it's running on a potato and wet string. Even if you still keep your 2002 visual design, ahem.)
If that's not a concern, you can run a nonessential Web server from home, and it's fun and concrete, like the author suggests. You might want to forward/proxy the traffic through some external cloud server (even if you don't use CDN/caching features), to shield your home pipe a bit.
The joke about 2002 visual design was referring to my own said Web site.
When you have a website or little server to play around with as your little sandbox online, that doesn't get much traffic, but it keeps things up that you can play with or share and learn about, great things can happen.
It's made _so_ much easier simply by installing a free cloudflare tunnel in front of it.
Claude-Code has turbo charged my (basement) RPi4 development.
Same here! This is an underrated use of LLMs - actually being able to finish weird side projects.