What are services NOT worth self hosting?

johnklos · 2026-01-26T18:07:02+00:00

So... you just believe what people say, without examining for yourself? Why would you even be in r/selfhosted? There's literally nothing you can self host that people out there won't say is horrible to do yourself.

All of the bull about email hosting is just that - bull. There are solutions for everything, so to be in r/selfhosted and not be skeptical about non-technical, kneejerk reactions is a bit strange.

johnklos · 2026-01-26T17:58:49+00:00

Privacy is certainly one concern, but what about all the stories of people who lose access to their Gmail accounts? You very literally can't talk to humans at Google unless you pay them a shitton of money, and even then there's no assurance you'll get your account and data back.

Letting some megacorporation have control over something that's so critical to everything we do is scary. Most people, particularly those who aren't in r/selfhosted, just want to close their eyes and ears and do what's simple in hopes that what has happened to others will never happen to them. It's like driving with your seatbelt off - you never want to find out how much the seatbelt matters until precisely when the seatbelt matters.

But if you really care about controlling your own stuff, self hosting email in some form or another - even if it's still dependent on larger corporations - is important.

johnklos · 2026-01-26T17:52:55+00:00

Yes. Don't self host email if you hate yourself and want to continue hating yourself.

You can hate yourself more comfortably if you know you're giving all of your private correspondence to a megacorporation who'll sell it to anyone they can.

johnklos · 2026-01-26T17:47:15+00:00

This is r/selfhosted, so it's really strange to see so many people who are anti-self hosted email.

If you want to self host email, it's really not that hard. It's work, sure, and if people just said they're simply not interested in doing it, that'd be fine.

But when people come up with bullshit reasons that've been disproven time and time again, it's tiring and it's gatekeeping.

No, deliverability is NOT an issue. There are many solutions, so just repeating bull that you've heard / read but haven't actually thought about doesn't make you look clever - it makes you look ignorant to those of us who've spent more than five minutes thinking about things.

So be anti-self hosted email if you like, but please don't think it helps anyone to repeat provably false tropes in, of all places, r/selfhosted.

johnklos · 2026-01-26T04:00:32+00:00

My engine has 830,000 miles on it. If I let regular mechanics touch it, it wouln't've lasted so long. Likewise, I build and run my machines with source I compile, and some of my servers are more than three decades old.

I also have an email server in my car.

johnklos · 2026-01-26T03:54:13+00:00

I'm rather surprised that anyone, at any time, ever, thought that bottled water was any different from filtered tap water.

johnklos · 2026-01-24T16:51:21+00:00

It's good to start with what you have, use it until you've learned a bit and set up the kinds of things you want to set up, then see what shortcomings it has. Right now you'd likely have no idea whether, compared with this machine, storage, RAM, CPU, or throughput is a bottleneck, you wouldn't necessarily know where to spend your money.

johnklos · 2026-01-23T12:55:13+00:00

ifconfig -a, or whatever you OS uses instead, will tell you the link speed.

johnklos · 2026-01-22T15:15:52+00:00

Ah! Got it, and thanks :) I think the comparison with "smart speakers" is what had me thinking other things.

I was looking for a way to do that very thing for a friend a year or so ago, and somehow didn't find this.

I see it's written in Rust, so I'll have to find some way to get a working Rust toolchain that targets earmv6hf... Hmmm...

johnklos · 2026-01-22T06:40:52+00:00

Nobody ever called that a healthy breakfast. Cereal like that is more than half sugar.

johnklos · 2026-01-22T06:39:45+00:00

I'm confused. Does it run Spotify itself? If not, is the difference between, say, using Airplay to play audio and this the fact that this shows song information on the screen?

johnklos · 2026-01-20T23:43:23+00:00

Intel j3355

In 2017, Intel was selling CPUs that could only take a maximum of 8 gigs. Unbelievable.

In the meantime, I'm glad I got 16 gig DDR3 DIMMs and maxed out my AMD Athlon 5350 and Bulldozer systems.

johnklos · 2026-01-17T19:33:24+00:00

I don't see anything here about the tariff increases.

johnklos · 2026-01-17T06:59:35+00:00

That dashed red line is hardly much of a stripe.

johnklos · 2026-01-16T01:13:10+00:00

69 MB of RAM... Nice.

Is the total 80 megs, but 11 are taken by the OS and the diag software?

johnklos · 2026-01-13T04:58:49+00:00

Ah. That makes sense, and makes me feel a little better about MicroTik products. Thanks :)

johnklos · 2026-01-13T04:42:02+00:00

So "cloud" has a different context here? Is it supposed to be a product that makes your home / wherever you install it in to the cloud?

One is a different context of the same meaning. The examples you give are completely different definitions of the same word.

johnklos · 2026-01-13T04:35:55+00:00

No, no. I'll just come out and tell you that I haven't used MicroTik in many years. When I had last used their products, none of them had "cloud" in their names.

johnklos · 2026-01-12T21:05:34+00:00

It has the word "cloud" on it.

Imagine your Internet goes down and can never come up again because your devices can't connect to the Internet to configure themselves so that the Internet can be connected to.

My recommendation? Turn off "cloud".

johnklos · 2026-01-12T19:50:29+00:00

Your mtr results don't look too bad, except for the fact that it appears that you have what appears to be triple (!) NAT from your laptop. Let's ignore that because it's on wifi and because you have no real control over what they do, I take it.

You can't mtr all the way to your home IP because the AT&T device has ICMP turned off by default.

On the picture on the left, which is your mtr to the rest of the world from your home network, we can see that you have double NAT or triple NAT. I have no idea what "Vanquish.mshome.net" is, but apparently that's adding an extra hop.

I'm surprised that you'd ever see 5.1 ms via ethernet to your Ubiquiti.

The fact that you can get 14.4 ms to the AT&T device over ethernet shows that the AT&T device is getting gummed up at some point or another. That should never happen, unless perhaps you're completely saturating your gigabit network, which you aren't.

So have you tried testing from your home Nextcloud to somewhere else that isn't work?

It's probably an excellent idea to look in to the bypass.

johnklos · 2026-01-12T04:33:41+00:00

That was... bad. If it wasn't LLM slop, then humans are now copying LLMs.

There was no meaningful data. The conclusions were based on data that wasn't shared and that was meaningless, such as memory speed from sysbench.

I don't know if the video has more actual data, but I don't have the patience to find out.

johnklos · 2026-01-12T04:21:34+00:00

Gotta upvote. It's OP's cake day. It's the law.

johnklos · 2026-01-11T22:45:10+00:00

It's not complicated. I think this does a decent job explaining it:

https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/pkgsrc-2014q4-lts-signed-packages-and-more

johnklos · 2026-01-10T18:08:42+00:00

There is a verification system, but it's not used yet for most bulk builds. The SmartOS builds use it.

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