[ale] Hosting wordpress at home

[Solomon Peachy]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 05:55:53PM -0500, DJPfulio--- via Ale wrote:
> Get a VPS, on the VPS setup a wireguard VPN to connect the LAN 
> computer(s) to the internet. Use htproxy to forward https traffic down 
> the tunnel to whatever services he wants to host at home. I use a 
> $4/month VPS.

If they're going to do that, then why not just host wordpress on that 
VPS and save themselves a f-ton of complexity and hassle?

The questions that need to be asked:

 0) Why are they doing this?
 1) Is this kosher with their home ISP's ToS? 
 2) What is their expected traffic volume/bandwidth?
 3) What's their reliability tolerance? 
 4) What equipment do you intend to use?  
    (ie be realistic about power and cooling costs!)

The fact of the matter is that it's very hard to justify the extra 
expense of hosting at home, and I say that as someone who's been doing 
it for a couple of decades now.  

For the privilege of self-hosting, I pay $ISP a $100/mo premium over 
their residential rates, which gives me uncapped/unfiltered 
"business-class" service with a /29 block of IPs.  For 27/1.8 service.  
(Yes, that's Mbps)

In theory the local power co-op here will hook me up with symmetrical 
1Gbps fiber around the end of the year.  Then I can ditch $telco and get 
a _lot_ more bandwidth for about the same money.  However.. this is 
where question (3) comes into play.

...In September I had a hurricane take out my local power grid 
(including my ISP's equipment) for just shy of a week.  Even though I 
had a beefy propane-fired generator (which also cooked one of my UPSes!) 
there's f-all you can do without connectivity!  Thankfully I had a 
starlink dish and after two days of data transfer I was able to spin up 
a dedicated server in a colo facility.

Meanwhile, a month ago I had a fire take out my power pole (along with 
my service drop, meter, master distribution panel, my big generator, and 
~6 acres of woods).  Repairs were done within three days but it took ten 
additional days to get the inspection the power company needed to turn 
things back on.  Suffice it to say I was _very_ glad the truly critical 
server was still offsite.  (And if I'd had fiber already, it would have 
also been taken out by the fire!)

So far be it from me to say "don't do that" -- but before you take on 
the hassle and expense of hosting stuff at home, you need to be clear 
what you are trying to accomplish and why.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libera.chat)
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