My opinion as well.
I entered the self hosting with literally zero experience and went into docker with portainer as management frontend.
Still suits me well and I’m running 3 servers with well over 30 services now
Comment on Yunohost frustrations of the beginner self hoster
schmurian@lsmu.schmurian.xyz 1 year ago
I think yunohost is great to get your feet wet with selfhosting. But as soon as your setup is a little bit more complex or not following the cookiecutter templates, you will end up building systems from scratch.
And to be fair, most of the software for selfhosting comes with good documentation. Yes, there is a learning curve, but if you are serious about it, you will stick to it until you find the piece of software working.
RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
schmorpel@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I have been looking into docker and I’m afraid it looks rather complex, how much time did you have to invest to have something up and running?
RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
It’s easier than it looks.
In 99% of cases you can basically just copy paste the docker compose or the docker run commands and just change the paths for your system.
schmurian@lsmu.schmurian.xyz 1 year ago
Well, in terms of learning, I‘m still learning, and I‘m already a few years in. In terms of time in front of a screen, it depends on how much automation you throw at your services and builds. It will always come back to questions like: what if an update changes the way the software works? What if something breaks, like a config or a dependency overwrites another. How good do you know the parts of the services for troubleshooting? Do you have a backup? How fast can you rebuild your systems? If you have answers to these questions, you can feel confident in hosting services for yourself and others. If not, you can try but will run into these moments at some point, where you need to fix something fast. And that‘s the moment where you spent your time in front of a screen.
schmorpel@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I’m serious about not wanting my email, files, publishing in the hands of corporate anymore, so I’m determined to get that running for myself. But I don’t want to sit in front of a screen all day to keep it running. I just want my two static professional websites for my clients to look at, and one or two small wikis that so far will not have more than two or three collaborators to start with.
What means ‘from scratch’ for you? Installing a linux distro and then telling it what to do over command line? And what exactly would I need to tell it to do? If you have any learning resources that would be great. I wonder if all those services that supposedly make the work easier just add more layers of complication in the end.
But yes, to get a vague idea about what the basics of server administration even are, yunohost is great! I’ve learned so much in a few days.
schmurian@lsmu.schmurian.xyz 1 year ago
I tried docker and stopped shortly after, because it was adding a layer of complexity I was not prepared for at the beginning. So I started with services I could run on bare metal with an OS like Ubuntu. For this a basic website for clients could be a good starter because it might only need a reverse proxy with php and a database. BUT this already opens questions around how secure is your server, which would be the first topic I would focus on, especially when hosting stuff for clients. Because if something happens to their data, you‘re responsible for it.
If it‘s just a static page like a portfolio, simple things like restricting access with firewalls ACLs and other basic server configurations might already be enough.
For hosting email, this topic still hasn‘t come to a mence for me, because it sounds like a lot of time and effort that goes into maintenance so I keep looking for hosted services with a good privacy approach.
What resources are you thinking of (there are many). Again, the best way of approaching it is take something with little dependencies and components that are well documented and easy to learn, so you can focus on how to monitor the host, and make sure you can administrate it fast and efficiently.
Later on you can add more complex services and learn about the new components.