[ale] Hosting wordpress at home

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 12/5/23 18:43, Solomon Peachy wrote:
> 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?

For just 1 website, I'd agree.  If you want to run 20+ services, not all websites, or have lots of data, hosting at home can be more cost effective.

Also, if you are privacy conscious, not putting data you own inside someone else's storage, connected to someone else's computers, at the end of someone else's network, inside someone else's building is very appealing.

If the majority of the access will be for you, while at home, but enough will be "public", that's the main reason I prefer self-hosting.

> 
> 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.

I've been self-hosting since the late 1990s.

Some ISPs don't care about people hosting stuff at home. Others do.  It matters least on connections with symmetric fiber connections.  I specifically asked AT&T about this and they didn't seem to care and there wasn't a different price to do it, unless you need more services, like a static IP or 8.  I dropped AT&T when they couldn't/wouldn't fix billing issues after 3 months of complaints. Perhaps next year, I'll try again. If it wasn't for their billing screwups, I would probably have switched completely for 300/300 service.  During that 3+ month trial period, there weren't any outages from AT&T and the service exceeded my needs.  Plus is was about 50% less and 10x the bandwidth.

Today I'm paying through the nose for Comcast Business - $125+/month for ... let's check 30/6 with 8 IPs (/29).  I haven't needed the 5 usable IPs, since I closed the business, but they wouldn't give me a time for the change in service needed, so I kept it.  Asymmetric service is a bit of a hassle. At least they never screwed up billing in the 15+ yrs I've had their business service.

I'm stubborn to the point of stupidity. ;(  Character flaw, most definitely.

> 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)

Yep.

> 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.

I can get 1 Gbps+ service from either of the 2 most hated companies in America.  Is that really a choice?

> ...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.

Running servers in an area prone to natural disasters has always seemed foolish to me.  My prior corporate day job included doing disaster recovery planning, deployment, and testing.  I saw some parts of the corporation with data centers in terrible locations, against corporate standards, but historical locations have much political power keeping them in those locations, regardless of stupidity.

> 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!)

Most people running systems at home accept certain points of failure. I do.

> 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.

Good advice.