Comment on It will be great, they said...
stickly@lemmy.world 1 week agoAWS offers an SLA of 99.9 availability, which it has usually exceeded each year. That means your server can’t be down more than ~8h per year to beat it. Your residential ISP (in a nearly optimal case) has a 15-30 min service period overnight every few weeks.
Hope your area gets less than ~3 hours of power outages per year or you’re going to be breaching your SLA before you even hit software.
ysjet@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Your ISP is kind of dogshit if it’s forcing 15-30m of downtime overnight every few weeks. And power outages are kind of a weird thing to focus on, you should be on a UPS anyway.
In any case, someone interested in self-hosting email very likely has a redundant connection anyway. I’m not even hosting my own email and I have 5gb/mo of cellular backup in dual-WAN, and enough battery capacity to run my entire stack for several hours.
Not to mention a generator to recharge them, if it comes down to that.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Lol the commenter you replied to didnt expect a one of a kind person to reply.
Normal people don’t have a ginormous battery and a generator for when the power goes out.
Every ISP is dogshit too. If it doesn’t go down from incompetence, it’s their physicial infra being broken from weather or some other “natural event”.
Even then, I can’t justify paying their crazy rates for 5g backup year round just for it to kick in once or twice a year or a couple nights where I’m not awake anyways.
Every email server that sends mail should have a rety mechanism if it fails to deliver too, so you shouldn’t miss any mail as long as your server isn’t offline for too long.
Ofc you are allowed to need 99.99% uptime for your home server, just disagreeing that it’s a need for most of us (including me).
ysjet@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, my use case is abnormal and generally has more beef behind it than most people would have, yes, but a simpler, cheaper version of what I have set up is kind of a no-brainer if you want to self-host.
e.g. I don’t think a simple cyberpower/APC ups on your home server is any kind of a weird ‘specialty’ thing, and it should definitely run your server for 2-3 hours during an outage for like $100-150 if you grab it on sale (which, you know, why wouldn’t you?) As for the generator, I don’t have that for my network stack, I have that for my fridge/deep freeze lol. It can just also recharge my UPS if it’s really that big of a deal.
As for cell backup, that’s definitely less a ‘common’ homeserver thing, but I’m only paying like $14/mo for my cell backup connection from tello for 5gb of 5G. Hardly breaking the bank, and honestly probably overkill, you could likely get away with their $10/mo 2gb plan. No complaints with it either, I use them for my regular cell plan too. if you were interesting in self-hosting your own email server and wanted better uptime than 99.9%, you probably don’t even need that if your ISP only sucks slightly instead of mostly, but it allows you to just not care about your ISP having extended downtime.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
If you have a regular data plan that you use if your internet goes down, you’re server would technically have an internet connection, but your services (like email) still wouldn’t work would it?
Do you have some type of setup that keeps that working on data?
I don’t know how buying the ISPs data addon works, but I’ve been skeptical that that swap over would keep anything online either (but getting a generic data plan surely cant work at all right?).
stickly@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Point being that these are not “skill issues”. AWS’s actual uptime over the last decade was something like 5 or 6 9s, 99.9 is just their official SLA. From where many people live (shit ISP, brown outs, floods, tornadoes, etc…), they can’t even match that bare minimum. God forbid budget enters the equation (no money for 3-2-1 backup? oops everything is fried from a freak accident).
So yeah you could definitely do OK with a real budget, a quality server setup and enough hours during the week for firefighting. But that’s not really “self hosting”, you’re just making your homelab a $0 revenue small business. For the 95% of people who can’t do that, they wouldn’t get anywhere close to a cloud provider’s service.
ysjet@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I would actually disagree- it doesn’t take much budget at all, or even a quality server setup, to have a decent uptime. A consumer router with a sim card slot is possibly something you already have. If not, a cell modem can be as cheap as $30. You could stick your email server on a old shitty raspberry pi. A data sim is $6/mo. If all you’re running is a cable modem, a router, and a rpi, you don’t even need a big fancy UPS, you can just get a DC battery UPS for like $40. It doesn’t need a lot of budget, quality stuff, or even a ton of hours in the week for self hosting- once you get this stuff set up it should stay working other than the standard upgrades/maint your email server will need.
Everything past that, like setting things up so your mail server is reachable on two IP addresses, is just… skill.