What are things you would rather host on a VPS as opposed to a local machine?
What are things you would rather host on a VPS as opposed to a local machine?
Hey, I was thinking about getting a VPS and hosting my own single user Lemmy instance. I am trying to think of other things to host. I already have some old hardware running unRAID with Plex, the *arrs, Kavita and home assistant. This is pushing my hardware to the limit but I still want to mess around with some self hosted things. Is there anything you would rather host on a rented server as opposed to a server sitting at your home?
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The only thing I can really think of is email.
Email is the only one I won't touch, I just want it to be rock solid reliable. Unless someone can point me to a solution with fault tolerance and redundancy that's easy to setup via Docker, I'm all ears :)
Selfhosting mail with redundancy is easy. Staying of blocklists and filtering spam out is less easy.
There are some pretty good guides available online, and since dovecot and postfix are old and stable, years-old guides are still relevant. I'm on mobile though, so can't immediately link any. (Almost all of them are standard deb/rpm+systemd based, no docker. But if you really want docker, building those containers is pretty easy, it's just a package, a few configs and a service after all...)
Yeah, I'll just stick with the mail services. When you start talking about all the complexity to maintain a spam-free environment their value starts to show. I'd rather have more time to self-host other things. I don't think we realistically as a community self-host every single thing in our life. Although I can def see a case for someone who's really interested in how email works and just absolutely wants to maintain all those things. I love how self-hosting has become really flexible.
fault tolerance and docker in the same sentence?
Honestly, it's not worth it, especially because setting up a mail server requires some tricky stuff at DNS level, and your mail will not go anywhere without a valid reverse DNS which is kind of difficult to obtain for a home connection.
Email isn't easy end of story. Fault tolerance in email is easy, email servers keep emails queued for hours so even if your server is down you'll get your emails later.
You may also setup a backup MX server that will simply receive and hold all your incoming mail and deliver it to the main server when it becomes available. The ETRN setup I described here (https://lemmy.world/comment/406145) can be used to accomplish that.
I wouldn't dare self host email