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?
I use a VPS as a homelab gateway of sorts from the outside.
Essentially, the VPS runs a Wireguard server that I connect to on my OPNSense Router. The VPS then reverse-proxies all incoming traffic through the tunnel to my homelab. All my DNS entries point to the VPS's IP. This pretty much gives me a static IP, hides my real IP, and lets me do some light caching on the VPS. Kind of like a DIY cloudflare.
I also run Uptime Kuma on the VPS, since it will continue to work if my local network is down.
Indeed, this is perfect. No need for something like Cloudflare proxying in this case.
Which reverse-proxy do you use?
I do the same thing, except with openvpn. I need to upgrade it to wireguard. I ended up just masquerading the traffic opnsense router, but now everything looks like it is coming from the internal openvpn ip address.
How are you identifying traffic that needs to go out the vpn, vs traffic that doesn't, if you don't mind sharing?
Right or wrong, the line I draw is "will I need to use this if I'm away from my home network?" If the answer's "yes," then I go with a VPS. I'm sure lots of people are angrily pounding their keyboard telling me to use Tailscale, but I have no interest in hacking/tweaking my home network's infrastructure.
I'm not angrily typing this but I'm curious why not Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunneling? You get built-in authentication and don't need to worry about dynamic ips. It's pretty game changing for me as far as self-hosting goes. It also doesn't require you to change your network infra as long as the host has some sort of connection to the Internet.
This didn't come to mind when I wrote my comment, but there's also a "workflow friction" element. Most VPS providers have 1-click installs for the majority of the apps that I want/need to run, and I'm more of a developer than a sys admin. So I don't really get anything out of figuring out how to do it, it just becomes another headache-inducing barrier to implement the stuff I need.
Fair enough! Curious if you've tried out Portainer with Docker templates which feels pretty close to 1-click installs.
I've been dicking around with Portrainer (and Yacht) in the last week, and in my short experience many of the templates are not really 1-click ready. Especially things that need persistent storage for settings or other things are often a mess with the preoconfigured volume paths. Also most things are not available as a template...
Think it really depends on who you ask. 1-click can mean different things to other people but for me personally, nothing is truly 1-click. I've always had to configure something and I like the flexibility Docker gives while also allowing you to understand how things are wired up without going too deep.
Services that need a lot of storage, I host at home (Gonic, Jellyfin, Audiobook Shelf etc). Services where I care about availability when I'm away from home, I host on a VPS (Vaultwarden, Synapse, Wordpress, DokuWiki etc).
With Cloudflare Zero Trust there is absolutely no reason for me to host on a VPS anymore. I have old hardware that's all been revived and bootstrapped with cloudflare. If you have good Internet and decent upload IO why not start there especially if it's just for yourself.
Because I don't want to be centralized around a single company and service. Any company can provide a vps endpoint. I can literally be set up again in a manner of minutes on another ip, vps, or vps provider.
Fuck Cloudflare.
They’re the biggest threat around to a free and open Internet.
An i2p node. (https://lemmy.world/c/i2p) VPS's tend to have better uptime and lower latency than home connections.
Any web service. I have lemmy and email on rented servers.
I have my monitoring software running on my VPS so that if my server goes down for whatever reason I can still look at what might've caused it to go down. I also have Authentik running on it because I need my authentication system running to be able to login to said monitoring software. Lastly I have Mastodon on my VPS because the internet at my parents house doesn't have the upload bandwidth for it.
I have all of this running on Oracle Cloud Free Tier. I don't trust oracle in the slightest but I'm a broke college student so I take what I can get.
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.