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For the first time in 25 years, I no longer have any servers at all for personal use
Feels pretty weird because I was so used to having a bunch of servers for personal stuff - even tens of them at some point. I just didn't want to maintain them anymore so I switched to hosted services for everything. I manage lots of servers and clusters at the day job though.
Who else has considered getting rid of all their servers altogether? 
LowEndBox & LowEndTalk.
Comments
everyday
Have you ever been close to doing it?
No. Having less yes.
Zero, never.
Self hosting is a way of life. My data should be managed by myself.
Vito, is this your first day? How are you holding up? Do you need to talk to someone?
Yeah I will probably need therapy
my rule now is if i use i keep. pipedreams are money wasters now.
Can you give (us) examples?..
btw, congrats ... you passed BF with no servers ... amazing.
Cancelling the $6/year 4GB chess special would be a sign of growing up.
Are hosted services cheaper than this btw?.... I am really curious to hear more from the OP~
A few random examples:
These are the things I was self hosting lately, after getting rid of some stuff I was hosting just for fun but never used.
I know! I am proud of myself.
Funny thing, there isn't much difference overall. It's more or less the same but without the hassle. I can spend the time I used to manage my servers on hacking and bug bounties.
I use Stremio with real debrid as well as the paid debridio plugin too and the iso quality is still not always comparable to a good encode grabbed off Usenet. I don’t think I have spent a lot of time maintaining Usenet though, I just use a mobile app called nzbget to manage any downloads and things are chugging smoothly.
Now if I was serving isos to folks outside the immediate family then yeah I would stop doing that and just tell them to go to Stremio.
As for hetzner storage share, can you encrypt/decrypt data during storage + access steps?
For me it's so nice that I can just select a movie or TV show and watch it right away. And a subscription to ReadDebrid or Premiumize/simili is cheaper than Usenet stuff plus sorage servers.
I think you can enable end to end encryption. I should have done it perhaps, but Nextcloud has a big performance hit when you enable encryption
Looking at your list: I do not think it is the same amount of expense, hosted services are definitely more expensive...
I m laughage cat. This is very funny.
I haven't calculated it properly, but I really don't think the difference is big because anyway I had to pay for a few servers before. Some of the hosted services I use now are actually free or very cheap
Just the storage alone is at least half priced already when self-hosted, and you don't pay the stupid VAT if you host it outside of the EU..
I would always have a selfhosted service at home anytime if the internet cuts off. I wouldn't trust having everything on the "cloud"
Wow impressive
My 2¢: it is always a matter of volume. I still pay for 200gb of iCloud+ (gasp!). For $4.49/month, it would be cheaper to buy some low-end (or even not-so-low-end - refer the Hetzner discussion) storage. I could easily get 1TB for that price range and possibly more. However, at the 200gb tier, the iCloud pricing is just right. I wouldn't want to store 2TB, let alone 12TB, at Apple's prices. But, for 200gb of family-shared storage, $4.49 is a good price because it "just works
". In other words, $4.49/month is cheaper than spending 5+ hours each month explaining to certain people how to back up their collection of telegram spam greeting cards.
On the other hand, if I want to store large amounts of data, it makes sense to run a NAS or to rent a storage server. This last BF we've seen multiple offers of about $0.90/TB if you bought in the tens of terabytes. Buying a 104tb storage server at $100/month would be quite wasteful if I only wanted to storage 200gb of (bad) photos backup. But not if I wanted to store 80tb of offsite backups. The industry-standard cost for block storage seems to be $6/TB (i.e. the over-the-counter cost for going straight to Google/Microsoft/Backblaze/half of LET providers outside BF). For the 80tb offsite backup, that would be $480/month - much more painful than $100/month. But then you could probably get cheaper storage with AWS Glacier if you didn't expect to restore. And so the calculation goes on and on and on. It is always a question of volume.
Same with email. Most commercial email providers (Gmail/Microsoft/Hosted Exchange) will want to charge you $4-$6/user/month on average. That pricing makes sense if you're the only user. And even when there are two of you. If you want to selfhost email and do it "properly". you're going to be spending more than $12/month on redundant MX handlers. But once you get to 3, 4, or 6 users, the calculus shifts. Would I rather pay $36/month to Google for six seats of CIA-read email, or would I rather rent four VMs at $9/month that I can configure as redundant mail handlers and potentially host tens of users?
There are of course other providers. Tuta used to offer $1/user/month. We have many providers who don't charge per user but rather per storage. But that is, as ever, a question of volume.
Speaking for myself, this year I consolidated my servers. I calculated that for the price of three weaker servers I could get get one more performant, useful box. For example, I got rid of the handful of Intel Atoms I had at Online.net and replaced them with one Ryzen box. Perhaps if I was running a cluster, something that required three distinct machines, I would have kept them. But in my case, I kept adding machines as my demands increased, but I kept adding the cheapest machine each time. A periodic audit really helps in these cases.
Arguably, hosted servers would be cheaper if I was renting a new server each time I wanted to deploy a selfhosted app. Hosted email for 2 users and hosted Bitwarden for 2 users is probably cheaper than running separate servers for each (+ redundancy). But, if you're already running a server for one project, the marginal cost of adding something on top is actually cheaper to selfhost than to outsource.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Blasphemy!
r u sick?
if you need a friend i recommend @yoursunny
Congratulations, you're a free man.
not yet. he's still hosting his own soul, needs to wait till he finds a service for that
you never truly become free.
I dont like this guy
How to remove the soul and eliminate all emotions?
True. Most of PaaS has free tier which is designed to become the foot-in-the-door. It's mostly reasonable, but quickly become a moneygrab.
My biggest concern with non-selfhost is vendor locked-in. Afterall, they could increase pricing to their likings.
With selfhost, migrating is easier than negotiating with the vendor.