> Self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs.
What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).
> What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.
Support has costs.
Anyone here can grab an N100 off of ebay, install "self hosting stuff" (much like the guy in the post did), put it back on eBay with a 50-100% markup. "Plug and play, self hosted. Plug in a TB drive for more storage. Total solution!"
And it's still not enough. They need a domain, they need a tunnel, they need to hook up with Lets Encrypt. They need to leave the machine on, and they need a backup strategy. Much less now having to cope with all of the Fine People that inhabit the wild interwebs and will soon come knocking...and knocking...and knocking.
This all has to be explained to folks that don't know, have no aptitude for, and simply don't care, about the mechanics of this process. They just want it to work.
It's not just a couple of dockers shoved onto a small Linux box. It's free like a puppy.
Self hosting is arcane, fiddly stuff. Fine for those comfortable with it, but a nightmare to those who are not.
This. It’s come a long way since the early days of hosting content out of the home off Torrent Seeders, FTP Servers, and Shoutcast offerings, but support is still the biggest bugbear - both end user support, and product support of industry best practices.
Plex doesn’t automatically generate a valid certificate, for instance, even though Let’s Encrypt is a drop-in affair. Home Assistant’s own SSL support is an arcane nightmare out of the box, reminiscent of mid-2000s certificate processes. Proxies like HAProxy and NGINX can better support connection security and encryption termination, but now you have an additional layer to support and manage.
This is what I mean by “support has to improve [for self-hosting to be viable for the masses]”: if something isn’t as easy to setup in a secure manner as install, point to your content, and tie a DNS record to it, then that eliminates 99% of the potential customer base right then and there.
Yeah, you need to have (I would argue basic) Linux sysadmin skills. If you don't have those skills, and aren't interested to learn them, then you shouldn't self-host, just because it's the hot new trend.
The thing I like the most is the area effect. I have those skills so 5-20 people get a self-hosted experience managed by me. But even so, many people will be left outside of any such area. This too, is fine.
My dad knows how to do basic woodworking, so if I need a simple piece of wooden furniture, I go to him. I have a friend who knows how to 3D print stuff (I know nothing about it) and another who's in medical school and gives me medical advice (including "go to the doctor" when the problem is not minor). But I don't have any friends which are good at car mechanics, so I go to the shop (and get charged) for all problems related to that.
Now, I do not live in the US, so maybe these sorts of relationships spanning wide fields are less common there, but the solution to rugged individualism doesn't seem to me to be "collectivism on a grand scale", be it corporations or the government. The solution seems to me to be "collectivism on a small scale", building friend-family groups that can solve the most common 80% of problems in most fields within themselves, and that reach into professionals from the larger collective for the other 20% of problems, or for the problems in fields they have no experience in.
What costs? I run a self-hosted soultion for ~5 people off a $150 N100 machine + storage costs and currently my bottleneck is Jellyfin transcoding speed. I want to scale out with a couple more $150 N100/N150 machines to ~20 users: my entire extended family and friends.
As a point of comparison an iPhone 16 non-pro starts at $799.
That's the fixed costs, the running costs are extremely tiny. The N100 eats up electricity like an anorexic model chewing up red meat, the domain is $10/year and the dynamic DNS is ~$3/month (and I didn't even go for a particularly cheap one).