Why You Should Self-Host Everything

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 414 points –
Why You Should Self-Host Everything
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Oh, I wouldn't if I could avoid it. The "fun" of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that's not usually how it works.

Self hosting isn't super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.

I nowadays manage my private stuff with the ansible scripts I develop for work - so mostly my own stuff is a development environment for work, and therefore doesn't need to be done on private time.

With Proton you could get emails, calendar, contacts, drive for a fair price and good privacy, for example.

I like the idea, but I don't like that everything is tied to a single account. If it's compromised so are your emails, calendar, contacts, files, and passwords. But the service is good enough to replace Google, and choosing between the two, I'd choose Proton.

Mail servers are the one thing I refuse to self host. Years of managing enterprise email taught me that I don't need that kind of negativity in my life

I agree. I was thinking about using different services for different tasks instead of putting everything into the same basket. I'm not self-hosting an email server either.

If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically

That's true. But as we were speaking about an external service (Proton), I was thinking about diversification. I use Proton for emails, but I don't use Proton Pass opting for another external password manager.

I agree that it would be very bad if your Proton account got compromised with so much data tied to it. However, I'm personally comfortable with a strong password and 2FA for my Proton account.