Good post; kinda surprised sshfs is outperforming cifs and makes me need to take a second look at that because, boy, do I ever not like how samba performs, though I'm willing to chalk some of that up to configuration weirdness on my end since I have samba configured to allow any version of Windows that could ever connect to smb/cifs shares to be able to. (Retro computing yay.)

Also, I'd also like to toss in iDrive e2 as a cheap S3 blob storage provider.

I'm paying ~$30 a year for 1tb, with "free" egress. (They operate on the IT'S ON SALE! pricing nonsense so your price will certainly vary because well, it's always on sale, but always different amounts but $30 is the usualish price.)

You get zero useful support, less than the best performance I've ever seen, but it's shockingly cheap and in the last ~2 years (out of the VA datacenter) I've had exactly ONE downtime where it wasn't working, for about three hours.

Good enough to stuff server backups and object storage for a couple of websites.

Oh, and "free" egress means up to 3x the amount you have stored, so it's probably bad if your majority use is going to be public downloads, but if it's not, it'll probably never be an issue; I have like 600gb of backups sitting there so lots of buffer.

Nice article.

why bother? Why I self host

Most of this article is not purely about that question, but I dislike clickbait, so I’ll actually answer the question from the title: Two reasons.

First of all, I like to be independent - or at least, as much as I can. Same reason we have backup power, why I know how to bake bread, preserve food, and generally LARP as a grandmother desperate to feed her 12 grandchildren until they are no longer capable of self propelled movement. It makes me reasonably independent of whatever evil scheme your local $MEGA_CORP is up to these days (hint: it’s probably a subscription).

It’s basically the Linux and Firefox argument - competition is good, and freedom is too.

If that’s too abstract for you, and what this article is really about, is the fact that it teaches you a lot and that is a truth I hold to be self-evident: Learning things is good & useful.

Turns out, forcing yourself to either do something you don’t do every day, or to get better at something you do occasionally, or to simply learn something that sounds fun makes you better at it. Wild concept, I know.

Contents

Introduction
My Services
Why I self host
Reasoning about complex systems
Things that broke in the last 6 months
Things I learned (or recalled) in the last 6 months

• You can self host VS Code
• UPS batteries die silently and quicker than you think
• Redundant DNS is good DNS
• Raspberry PIs run ARN, Proxmox does not
• zfs + Proxmox eat memmory and will OOM kill your VMS
• The mystery of random crashes (Is it hardware? It’s always hardware.)
• SNMP(v3) is still cool
• Don’t trust your VPS vendor
• Gotta go fast
• CIFS is still not fast
• Blob storage, blob fish, and file systems: It’s all “meh”
• CrowdSec

Conclusion

Retail UPS batteries don't even last a single year, in my experience. The weekly brownouts and momentary blackouts probably aren't helping.

At this point, I'm just thinking of building my own with a charge controller, inverter and a bank of car batteries.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #942 for this sub, first seen 30th Aug 2024, 18:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Interesting read, Hetzner's been on my radar for a while.