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.
(HTM) [English] CHATONS website
(HTM) [French] Site internet du collectif CHATONS
In Catalonia, a similiar initiative started:
(HTM) [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
(HTM) 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.
(HTM) Yunohost website
(HTM) 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.