Title: Why self hosting is important | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 23 July 2021 | |
Tags: fediverse selfhosting chatons life internet | |
Description: | |
# Introduction | |
Computers are amazing tools and Internet is an amazing network, we can | |
share everything we want with anyone connected. As for now, most of | |
the Internet is neutral, meaning ISP have to give access to the | |
Internet to their customer and don't make choices depending on the | |
destination (like faster access for some websites). | |
This is important to understand, this mean you can have your own | |
website, your own chat server or your own gaming server hosted at home | |
or on a dedicated server you rent, this is called self hosting. I | |
suppose putting the label self hosting on dedicated server may not make | |
everyone agree, this is true it's a grey area. The opposite of self | |
hosting is to rely on a company to do the job for you, under their | |
conditions, free or not. | |
# Why is self hosting exactly? | |
Self hosting is about freedom, you can choose what server you want to | |
run, which version, which features and which configuration you want. | |
If you self host at home, You can also pick the hardware to match your | |
needs (more Ram ? More Disk? RAID?). | |
Self hosting is not a perfect solution, you have to buy the hardware, | |
replace faulty components, do the system maintenance to keep the | |
software part alive. | |
# Why does it matter? | |
When you rely on a company or a third party offering services, you | |
become tied to their ecosystem and their decisions. A company can stop | |
what you rely on at any time, they can decide to suspend your account | |
at any time without explanation. Companies will try to make their | |
services good are appealing, no doubt on it, and then lock you in their | |
ecosystem. For example, if you move all your projects on github and | |
you start using github services deeply (more than a simple git | |
repository), moving away from Github will be complicated because you | |
don't have _reversibility_, which mean the right to get out and receive | |
help from your service to move away without losing data or information. | |
Self hosting empower the users instead of making profit from them. | |
Self hosting is better when it's done in community, a common mail | |
server for a group of people and a communication server federated to a | |
bigger network (such as XMPP or Matrix) are a good way to create a | |
resilient Internet while not giving away your rights to capitalist | |
companies. | |
# Community hosting | |
Asking everyone to host their own services is not even utopia but | |
rather stupid, we don't need everyone to run their own server for their | |
own services, we should rather build a constellation of communities | |
that connect using federated protocol such as Email, XMPP, Matrix, | |
ActivityPub (protocol used for Mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube). | |
In France, there is a great initiative named CHATONS (which is the | |
french word for KITTENS) gathering associative hosting with some | |
pre-requisites like multiple sysadmin to avoid relying on one person. | |
[English] CHATONS website | |
[French] Site internet du collectif CHATONS | |
In Catalonia, a similiar initiative started: | |
[Catalan] Mixetess website | |
# Quality of service | |
I suppose most of my readers will argue that self hosting is nice but | |
can't compete with "cloud" services, I admit this is true. Companies | |
put a lot of money to make great services to get customers and earn | |
money, if their service were bad, they wouldn't exist long. | |
But not using open source and self hosting won't make alternatives to | |
your service provider greater, you become part of the problem by | |
feeding the system. For example, Google Mail GMAIL is now so big that | |
they can decide which domain is allowed to reach them and which can't. | |
It is such a problem that most small email servers can't send emails to | |
Gmail without being treated as spam and we can't do anything to it, the | |
more users they are, the less they care about other providers. | |
Great achievements can be done in open source federated services like | |
Peertube, one can host videos on a Peertube instance and follow the | |
local rules of the instance, while some other big companies could just | |
disable your video because some automatic detection script found a | |
piece of music or inappropriate picture. | |
Giving your data to a company and relying on their services make you | |
lose your freedom. If you don't think it's true this is okay, freedom | |
is a vague concept and it comes with various steps on a high scale. | |
# Tips for self hosting | |
Here are a few tips if you want to learn more about hosting your own | |
services. | |
* ask people you trust if they want to participate, it's better to have | |
more than only one person to manage servers. | |
* you don't need to be an IT professional, but you need to understand | |
you will have to learn. | |
* backups are not a luxury, they are mandatory. | |
* asking (for contributing or as a requirement) for money is fine as | |
long as you can justify why (a peertube server can be very expensive to | |
run for example). | |
* people around usually throw old hardware, ask friends or relative if | |
they have old unused hardware. You can easily repair "that old Windows | |
laptop I replaced because wifi stopped working" and use it as a server. | |
* electricity usage must be considered but on the other hand, buying a | |
brand new hardware to save 20W is not necessarily more ecological. | |
* some services such as email servers can't be hosted on most ISP | |
connection due to specific requirements | |
* you will certainly need to buy a domain name | |
* redundancy is overkill most of the time, shit happens but in | |
redundant servers shit happens twice more often | |
IndieWeb website: a community proposing alternatives to the "corporate web". | |
There is a Linux disribution dedicated to self hosting named "Yunohost" | |
(Y U No Host) that make the task really easy and give you a beginner | |
friendly interface to manage your own service. | |
Yunohost website | |
Yunohost documentation "What is Yunohost ?" | |
# Conclusion | |
I'm self hosting since I first understood running a web server was the | |
only thing I required to have my own PHP forum 15 years ago. I mostly | |
keep this blog alive to show and share my experiments, most of the time | |
happening when playing with my self hosting servers. | |
I have a strong opinion on the subject, hosting your own services is a | |
fantastic way to learn new skills or perfect them, but it's also | |
important for freedom. In France we even have associative ISP and even | |
if they are small, their existence force the big ISP companies to be | |
transparent on their processes and interoperatibility. | |
If you disagree with me, this is fine. |