wltr

Ah, yes, it’s the same thing (or a similar one), but reversed. You’re a proprietary product, which is free if you’re willing to host it yourself.

Not sure I’ve got the idea properly, but if so, I agree. I think offering help with self-hosting may generate decent income for a developer. Plus, give them insight into their users.

E.g. I have this idea to develop a set of neat Immich servers for friends (for free, but they buy needed hardware, say, Mac mini or something similar). As an extension of this idea, sell pre-made Immich-ready servers for general public, with the initial setup and extra support being paid. Including the donation to the original project off the money, if their licence allows selling the support. I expect it is, but haven’t investigated that further. Treat this as an example of the idea.

Obviously, this model would work for your own software. Perhaps, that’s not the fuck-you-money you can get with this, but still that may be more than open source projects get via the shallow donations that they usually get.

I have some ideas for some for-me software, which can live on any computer. So I think of deploying a fleet of SBC (Raspberry / Orange Pi or alike) servers to gift to friends, with bunch of neat services there, like Pi-Hole, etc. Plus some of made by me software, if I think the particular friend may have a use for it. The extension of this idea might be the broader audience. Won’t likely to be millions of users, but still. And who knows, one day … perhaps.

Hey, I solved the issue with the media by writing a custom app (it’s a bit more advanced than just a script) that copies the media to my server and inserts the links right into my posts. I’m at the stage of testing it, but so far it works. That allows me to host my blog on Cloudflare, plus have all my media on my own bare metal server, with as much storage as I need. Which is incredibly cheap. So far, I pay only for the domain name, and electricity to run my servers. But since they’re very energy efficient, that’s negligible.

I would be worried about the battery, as many others pointed out too. I had a somewhat similar project with old MacBooks. I thought taking the battery off would make its fan to spin at 100%, yet turned out it does not. Right now one of my servers is MacBook Pro from 2011, and it kicks. It has no battery installed, and it looks like a pretty good server to me. It starts automatically when there’s a power loss, which is ideal for a server. Can totally recommend.

Not in perpetuity though

Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.

So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).

I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.

All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.

All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!

If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.

Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.

My bet is that the tech bros hang in the same bar, and they’re just doing that for fun, and they don’t really care about the plebes not getting it.

Glad I left Digital Ocean like almost a decade ago, yet it still feels I’ve been with them for too long.

For the rebellion!

Here I am, with my Raspberry Pi 2B and a few Orange Pi Zeros. Plus one Intel Atom 230 (an obsolete thing from circa 2010s if not older, it has DDR2 memory) as a file server. Most of my servers are at Intel Atoms old motherboards with these integrated processors. They are decent for what I do.