Re:Self hosting is important
by wpietri on Saturday July 24, 2021 @01:16PM
(#27942681)
Glad to answer questions if you'd like. I started and helped run a bandwidth cooperative from 2000-2015 or so. I decommissioned my last box in the coop at the beginning of this year.
The basic story, though, is that before the dot-com crash, a lot of SF nerds kept their pet projects on work bandwidth. That became risky during the crash, so I and some pals rented a fractional cabinet in a colo provider and split the costs. I think we ended up using 4 providers over the years and peaked at a full cabinet, almost all 1U servers.
I was glad I did it and at the end I was glad to be done with it. A co-op is hard to wrangle and it's basically impossible to make sure that the workload is evenly spread, so you have to be comfortable with the fact that somebody, probably you, is going to be doing a bunch of unpaid work, even if it's only keeping track of what needs doing and herding people into doing it.
Eventually, I decided running physical hardware was more hassle than it was worth to me. Trying to solve mysteries like, "Why does google sometimes decide my email is spam" was a multi-year effort that I never did solve, even though I knew people at Google. And I grew to dread the chance that something would break and I'd have to rush down to the colo, possibly having to return from vacation (or beg a friend to be remote hands). So eventually I shifted some of the stuff I was hosting off to service providers (yay Fastmail!) and the rest into Terraform-built slices of AWS.
I do sometimes miss the ability to fully run down a problem (e.g., by looking at mail server logs). But mostly it's a relief. I'm happy now to get my hardware kicks on things where uptime doesn't matter.
The basic story, though, is that before the dot-com crash, a lot of SF nerds kept their pet projects on work bandwidth. That became risky during the crash, so I and some pals rented a fractional cabinet in a colo provider and split the costs. I think we ended up using 4 providers over the years and peaked at a full cabinet, almost all 1U servers.
I was glad I did it and at the end I was glad to be done with it. A co-op is hard to wrangle and it's basically impossible to make sure that the workload is evenly spread, so you have to be comfortable with the fact that somebody, probably you, is going to be doing a bunch of unpaid work, even if it's only keeping track of what needs doing and herding people into doing it.
Eventually, I decided running physical hardware was more hassle than it was worth to me. Trying to solve mysteries like, "Why does google sometimes decide my email is spam" was a multi-year effort that I never did solve, even though I knew people at Google. And I grew to dread the chance that something would break and I'd have to rush down to the colo, possibly having to return from vacation (or beg a friend to be remote hands). So eventually I shifted some of the stuff I was hosting off to service providers (yay Fastmail!) and the rest into Terraform-built slices of AWS.
I do sometimes miss the ability to fully run down a problem (e.g., by looking at mail server logs). But mostly it's a relief. I'm happy now to get my hardware kicks on things where uptime doesn't matter.