I’d like to learn some technical details about how this forum is hosted. Is it on a VPS that Lunduke pays for? A personal home server? Is it running in a VM or on bare metal? What OS?
I’m an avid self hoster, so I love hearing about this kind of stuff.
Try digging records for the domain.
https://www.shodan.io/host/5.161.221.66
He’s using a third-party managed host, who relies on Hetzner. https://www.shodan.io/domain/discoursehosting.net
CNAME
TTL:
59 minutes 57 seconds
TARGET:
lundukecos.discoursehosting.net.
A
TTL:
4 minutes 57 seconds
DATA:
5.161.221.66
Yeah, that’s probably the commercial offerings at Discourse pricing | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
I thought Lunduke would go full self-hosting, but this definitely frees him up to work on other things.
Nerd wrangling ain’t easy.
Cool! Hetzner is a good host. And I’m sure Discourse has a decent backup/restore function if Lunduke wanted to move it elsewhere down the road.
Yep, paid hosting — using a fairly stock set of software — with daily backups. So I can migrate to any sort of VPS (or other host) I want at pretty much a moments notice.
I don’t get why paid hosting is a problem? That’s… uh… how the Internet works… yeah?
My own sites are on paid hosting. Where else would you put them, if you were expecting high volumes of traffic?
See the story of the KiwiFarms and how capitulation by Domain registrars, VM Providers, Tier 1 ISPs, etc. runs rampant when a site is ‘unwanted’ or ‘evil’.
You could probably afford to host your stuff at home. Doubtful Lunduke has the same luxury.
Im actually fully versed on the saga. Was also directly acquainted with what happened to Gab.
Self-hosting just for those reasons is silly.
Absolute control over Security, Privacy and Data are the only ones i can think of.
It depends, the hosting provider could function as a DMZ. Especially for home users some separation of concerns may be preferrable.
At the end of the day security is context-bound, I host my sites at a local company. I can take the car and go see them in case I want to discuss things. That helps! (And it’s run by nerds, which is awesome. They unofficially support SSHFS on their cloud storage if you ask the resident nerd nicely xD)
Yeah that’s different, you can go yell at them in person, not a faceless service rep following a script while being halfway around the world.
By and large, it doesn’t matter unless you start stepping on the wrong toes.
If by self-hosting you mean on your own computers, in your own home, there are drawbacks to that.
Most consumer ISPs, and even some supposedly business class ISPs, in the US do not offer symmetrical connections, with upload speeds typically being much lower than download speeds.
Most consumer ISPs in the US do not offer stable IPs. You can use dynamic DNS to get around this one.
Most consumer ISPs in the US do not offer multiple IPs. Which means that when the self-hoster connects to other servers out on the net, those servers’ operators be able to connect that traffic to the domain’s IP.
Many consumer ISPs in the US will shut down high volume servers on their residential networks.
By hosting a public server on the local network one is opening themselves up to attack. Obviously, there are plenty of things one can do to try to protect their network, but one is undoubtedy less safe for having self-hosted.
One is also opening themselves up, if they host controversial content, to having their home internet DDOSed, or reported and cut off by their ISP.
Don’t get me wrong, I think self-hosting is great, but it isn’t well supported by ISPs, and most people would be well over their heads trying to design their networks to be even half-way secure.
SELF-self-hosting is only useful for personal projects, development, or for things like a home video or audio repository.
If you’re SELF self-hosting a service available to the public, then you’ve turned your home into a bus station.
self-hosting on a service like Linode or whatever, just means standing up your own instance of some tool like gitea or apache or whatever, on a service that’s already equipped to handle public traffic and offers all the benefits of such a service.
The question isn’t whether or not you’re running your message board on a pizza box in your bedroom closet. But, rather, whether you’re careful about what hosting services you use, and that you configure your system in such a way that it’s relatively easy to zip it up and drop it somewhere else, if the circumstances change.
Unless you’re super interested in turning your home into an operations center, or you hang out a lot over at Jupiter Broadcasting, then just use a paid host.
Yes. I should have made clear that I was speaking strictly of public facing self-hosting.
I self host many servers and services for myself and my family.
Ever try sucking Postgres database dump over standard output via SSH because your VPS disk was full? that was fun.
I’ve been using paid stand-alone hosting since 2006, and never had an issue I couldn’t solve on my own (or with a little assistance from the hosting service).
Maybe it’s a you problem.
I’m also not made of money to solve all the worlds problems.
