irotsoma

Can you use a dummy address or a friend’s address in another country and/or sign up via a VPN to mask your location? There are companies that will open and scan your mail and make it available online so it could be a real address. But they are a little pricey. It’s likely due to UK laws not the provider themselves, so probably all reputable providers (that follow the law) may require it.

If it’s closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn’t require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don’t consider that self-hosted. That’s just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without internet access and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.

That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it’s useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.

I run a single instance of Postgres and one of MariaDB on my NAS that all services connect to. And all of my containers store their settings in NFS shares from that NAS and backup most other things to the NAS. This greatly simplifies off-site backups overall when a copy of almost everything critical lives on the NAS.

Of course, the NAS needs to be powerful enough to handle the load, but since settings don’t get changed often and backups are during off hours and NFS has good caching anyway, the DBs are really the only heavy load on the NAS outside of storing and serving media. It has plenty of memory and has two 2.5Gb ports trunked together and a couple of small SSDs for fast caching in addition to the RAID array of HDDs. So it’s easily able to handle all of its file sharing duties as well as hosting the DBs.

Only negative might be that there’s no fail over if the NAS goes down. But I also don’t have a second router, so that’s another even more devastating single point of failure. But since everything critical is backed up to the NAS and then off-site, it’s an acceptable risk considering the cost to properly remediate it and the unlikelihood of major issues outside of times I’m doing maintenance..

Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media. Tailscale can do it for free.

Tailscale isn’t exactly free. It requires a lot more knowledge, configuration, maintenance, etc, than Plex alone.

Sure, many self-hosters have the ability to figure it out and the proper networking and/or server hardware to implement it. But many Plex users aren’t really self-hosters in that sense. Hosting a local media server that deals with all of the networking stuff for you is much easier than maintaining a tailscale or similar setup on top of the media server stuff. I mean for me, if I hadn’t gotten a lifetime Plex Pass early on for cheap, I probably would have put more effort into my Jellyfin setup. But Plex mostly just works and I have other bigger priorities. I hate the functionality they’ve removed that makes things more difficult than it should be, or I wouldn’t be switching, but it’s not all that bad. So if I didn’t have the expertise and hardware already, I could see it being worth the money to stick with it.