dan

legacy tlds (com, net, org) tend to be more affordable

Verisign are trying their best to make .com and .net less affordable. Their contract with ICANN is on a six year cycle, and it lets them increase the price by up to 7% for the last four years. So far, they’ve always increased it the maximum amount.

Wholesale price has gone up from $6 in 2000 to $7.85 in 2020 (before this contract structure), to $10.26 now, and they’re increasing it to $10.97 on November 1.

Having said that, it’s still better than ccTLDs and newTLDs, where the registry can increase it as much as they want.

Makes sense! I didn’t realise it has a UI.

I’ve got a bunch of snippets in /etc/nginx/snippets/, so for example I just need to add include snippets/proxy.conf to a server block to add most of the configuration needed for a reverse proxy. I’ve been using Nginx for long enough that I just write the rest of the server block by hand.

I’m just using regular Nginx, which I’ve been using for 20 years. What does Nginx Proxy Manager or npmplus do better?

I’ve been meaning to try Angie too, which is a fork of Nginx.

Caddy is a good piece of software.

I’ve been using Nginx for 20 years and don’t really have a reason to switch, so I’m still using it. I use certbot, so it’s just one command to create the certificate initially, and then it auto-renews automatically via a systemd timer.

A private key leaking is bad, since anyone with the private key can decrypt data that was encrypted with it.

Traditionally, the way that leaked certs were handled was via Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL). CRLs contain lists of revoked certificates - their serial number, revocation date, and the reason why they were revoked.

However, CRLs are imperfect. Checking for revoked certificates every time you go to a site would slow things down a lot, as the lists are now too large to check and download real-time. Modern browsers and other TLS clients periodically download the lists in the background. Also, it might take a while between when the certificate is compromised and when the company notices the compromise.

Because of this, the CA/Browser forum (a group with all the major browser and TLS certificate vendors) have started dropping the max lifetime of certificates. The idea is that even if a private key does leak, the time frame that it’s usable for will be significantly shorter and any leaks should (in theory) cause less damage.

• The original maximum duration was 39 months: Three years plus an extra three months leeway for obtaining and deploying new certificates.
• March 2018: Reduced to 825 days
• September 2020: Reduced to 398 days
• March 2026: Reduced to 200 days
• March 2027: Planned to reduce to 100 days
• March 2028: Planned to reduce to 47 days

All modern deployments, regardless of if they’re using free or paid certs, should have their renewals fully-automated, so in theory the validity period shouldn’t matter as much as it did in the past. All major vendors (Let’s Encrypt, DigiCert, Sectigo, GlobalSign, AWS, SSL .com, etc) support ACME now.

I’ve already got solar panels on my roof. Originally they fully covered our usage, but my wife and I have two EVs now (a BMW iX and an i4) and charge them at home, so we’re back to having to pay the electricity company.

I’ve got 1:1 net metering (grandfathered into an old plan) so don’t need batteries.

Makes sense! 30W is great for your system. My home server has an older 10Gbps NIC that uses an Aquantia AQC107 chip, which has poor support for ASPM and prevents the CPU from entering lower C states. I’ve been considering swapping it out for something newer (like an AQC113), I just need to work out whether it’s actually worth it.

Mine used to cost $0 in electricity since I’ve got solar panels, but we’ve got two EVs now (my wife has a BMW iX and I’ve got an i4) so we’re back to having to pay the electricity company again.

Creating a cluster could help me self host more websites I create as I want to move away from using hosting services

Just jeep an eye on electricity prices. This is probably not an issue with a phone server, but for me, hosting at home with a decent server PC costs more per month just in electricity compared to using a cheap VPS. Continuous draw of 50W 24/7 is ~37kWh per month which can cost $15 or more in California.

I do still host some things at home, but all my sites are on VPSes. The enterprise hardware and fast, data center grade internet connection is worth it for me. Some of my VPSes are only $40/year.

A friend is running Linux, Nginx, Hermes Agent, and a few other things on her old phone. Definitely doable! It’s a decent idea - very small form factor, phones have pretty powerful CPUs, and a lot of people have an old phone they’re not doing anything with.

I’m not sure about the Note, but the Samsung Galaxy S series phones have an option to limit charging to 85%.

Cycling the battery is a good idea too though. I used to do that with a wall mounted tablet and a smart plug, until I swapped it for a Lenovo tablet that has this as a built-in feature

Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you’d want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.

Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.

A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.

I forgot to mention - stay far away from SSDNodes. Their prices look good, but they massively oversell their RAM. They use ballooning (virtio_balloon) to overallocate RAM, and require you to use their customized Linux distro images that have it enabled. Ballooning means that they take unused RAM from your VM and lend it to other VMs to use. If you try to use all your RAM, they shut down your VPS.

GreenCloud, HostHatch, and RackNerd all let you install whatever OS you want, by mounting an ISO, connecting to the VPS via VNC, and going through the normal setup process just like you would on a regular computer. They do have pre-built images, but I always prefer to install from my own ISO so I know that the installation doesn’t have any non-standard modifications.

My guess would be renting a dedicated server, or a home server. It can end up cheaper than colo.

self host?

Hosting at home, renting a dedicated server, or colocating are all considered self-hosting.

They’re reliable, but overpriced for what you get, especially after the Akamai acquisition. Akamai are not known for affordability :)

I use GreenCloudVPS for a bunch of things. They used to have VPSes starting at $15/year for 2GB RAM and 20GB disk, but their current budget deals are still good (starts at $25/year for 4GB RAM and 35GB disk). These are on older hardware (mostly AMD EPYC Rome Zen 2 systems, ~5 years old) which is why they haven’t been affected by increased RAM and storage prices yet.

greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

They also have “premium” plans which are newer (AMD EPYC Milan Zen 3 or Genoa Zen 4, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage in RAID10): greencloudvps.com/billing/store/premium-kvm-sale

I suspect they’ll eventually increase the pricing, but I’ve been using them for five years and haven’t seen them increase pricing for existing customers, just new customers.

HostHatch is good too. Their regular pricing aims to compete with Hetzner, but in 13 locations worldwide. hosthatch.com/products. They do sometimes have sales on LowEndTalk with pricing similar to GreenCloud’s “premium” plans.

If you want to stick to big names, OVHcloud and Hetzner both have pretty good VPS pricing. OVH runs theirs on very old hardware like Haswell (2014/2015 era) Xeon E5 CPUs which is the main reason why they have cheaper pricing that Hetzner.

If you’re using AWS for anything, they have a service called Lightsail that’s essentially Amazon’s version of a VPS. Storage and data transfer are included in the monthly price (unlike EC2).

I wish more modern TPUs were available for purchase. Google’s TPU v8i is very powerful, but you can only rent it via Google Cloud. (that and they’re most useful in big clusters, and the pricing for such a cluster is definitely out of reach for anyone that’s not running their own data center)

For small options, there’s mini PCs with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, and the Nvidia DGX. Their memory bandwidth is quite low compared to a GPU though, so expect slower performance.

Do you want to run TensorFlow Lite / LiteRT models? PyTorch Mobile? onnx? YOLO? Something else?

Google Coral was decent for TensorFlow Lite, but it’s EOL (end of life) now. I’ve got the dual TPU Mini PCIe version in my home server, via a PCIe adapter board. I use it for object detection with Blue Iris + CodeProject AI and it works pretty well for that use case.

It’s not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the sender_dependent_relayhost_maps setting in Postfix.

Sure, it’s not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).

Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:

• Cross-fading when playing random tracks, but gapless playback when playing an album in order
• Analysis of the music using a local neutral network, such that you can tell it to play play “similar” sounding songs to the current one
• Automatic playlists - liked songs, decades, etc
• Downloads for offline playback
• Multiple libraries, for example I keep regular music separate from DJ mixes
• Equalizer with presets for common headphones

And probably other things I’m forgetting.

Thankfully CGNAT isn’t as common in the USA as it is in other countries. In the US, ISPs generally either offer native IPv4 (most of the major ones), or only use IPv6 and provide IPv4 at all. The latter is the case with a lot of the mobile carriers, especially T-Mobile. Your phone only gets an IPv6 address, and their network uses 464XLAT to connect to legacy IPv4-only servers.

Do you have a CVE for this?

Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)

If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB file in the file explorer and double click it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

I’d say 9/10 aren’t doing proper backups given most people don’t actually do DR runs and verify whether they can fully recover from their backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have backups!

Which containers do automatic backups?

Where’s the MySQL option? Some of my servers are running MySQL instead of MariaDB because it allowed binding to multiple IP addresses (although I think Maria has implemented this now), and some query plan optimizations were implemented in MySQL but not MariaDB.

You still need to know what database system is being used in order to make backups of the database. You can’t just snapshot or backup the data directory while a database is running, because you might end up with an inconsistent state that won’t restore properly. You need to either stop the DB before doing the backup, or use the relevant DB-specific tools to perform a backup.

The book was written to sell Windows Home Server.

At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.