The "start over in an hour" philosophy is underrated. I've been running my own infrastructure for years and the single most empowering thing isn't the setup, it's the peace of mind that you can just nuke it and spin up somewhere else.
Knowing that, I started looking at every SaaS subscription very differently.
At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.
Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.
Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.
I have been going partially down the same road, getting my own domain for email, so I can switch between providers (or self-host) in the future. A couple of notes:
- You dont actually own the domain, you kind of lease it, and will have to pay every year for renewal. The renewal price can be significantly higher than the "purchase" price, so be carefull to pick one with a low renewal price. I dont really know if there is any guarantee against the renewal-price increasing in the future, so you might end up kind of stuck.
- The email provider must support using a custom domain, which many do on their paid plan.
- Some support "catch-all" feature, that emails sendt to any adressess @yourdomain.com goes into the mailbox. Then you can register at places with e.g hackernews@yourdomain.com or possiblespamsite@yourdomain.com. But if you do this you can only move to other providers providing the same in the future. You can not neccesarrily send from the same adresses though!
Good idea, but I don't think it's good to teach habits like "SSH into root, and get my script" or inputting random commands if you don't understand what they do. Something in this long, technical sequence of steps could contain malware.
Further to this - even if the script doesn't contain malware and you're 100% happy to run with this persons' defaults, you probably still shouldn't, as it doesn't teach you what you're actually doing.
Presuming you're a relatively non-technical person who follows this verbatim, what happens when this page goes down? Or Vultr is no longer an option? Do you even really know what you've set up?
The "start over in an hour" philosophy is underrated. I've been running my own infrastructure for years and the single most empowering thing isn't the setup, it's the peace of mind that you can just nuke it and spin up somewhere else.
Knowing that, I started looking at every SaaS subscription very differently.
I really care about the teardown / re-deployment workflow. You got any general tips for the beginner self-hoster?
At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.
Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.
Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.
Ansible, git ops, actually testing it out. Backups with snapshots using restic, encrypted secrets using vault.
I have been going partially down the same road, getting my own domain for email, so I can switch between providers (or self-host) in the future. A couple of notes:
- You dont actually own the domain, you kind of lease it, and will have to pay every year for renewal. The renewal price can be significantly higher than the "purchase" price, so be carefull to pick one with a low renewal price. I dont really know if there is any guarantee against the renewal-price increasing in the future, so you might end up kind of stuck.
- The email provider must support using a custom domain, which many do on their paid plan.
- Some support "catch-all" feature, that emails sendt to any adressess @yourdomain.com goes into the mailbox. Then you can register at places with e.g hackernews@yourdomain.com or possiblespamsite@yourdomain.com. But if you do this you can only move to other providers providing the same in the future. You can not neccesarrily send from the same adresses though!
Good idea, but I don't think it's good to teach habits like "SSH into root, and get my script" or inputting random commands if you don't understand what they do. Something in this long, technical sequence of steps could contain malware.
Further to this - even if the script doesn't contain malware and you're 100% happy to run with this persons' defaults, you probably still shouldn't, as it doesn't teach you what you're actually doing.
Presuming you're a relatively non-technical person who follows this verbatim, what happens when this page goes down? Or Vultr is no longer an option? Do you even really know what you've set up?
Is there a changelog on this thing or last updated?
Some previous discussion:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546255