Me running everything on a single postgress instance on my shitbox 0€/month
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I realised I don’t need my servers being online 24/7, so for me that’s Raspberry Pi and equivalents, plus powering on computers on demand.
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More likely your system is more sophisticated, I have just joined the hobby, so to say. But I am sure you can go much cheaper than that with bare metal. If I’d really need to host something, I’d rather buy a real server, and invest in solar power instead of paying some rent. Was a happy Digital Ocean customer, before I realised I can do the same with a Raspberry Pi. I was buying a couple of Pis a year for them. Right now, de-facto one Pi can host everything I really need. I regret I wasted about half a thousand on nothing. Could have bought a great NUC instead of wasting money on the cheapest VM for years.
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This is why im doing my homelab on low powered processors (5825u NAS boards). Runs way cooler and is way more efficient. Same performance as my 9900kf gaming PC cpu wise.
Edit: this hasn’t happened yet
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I think I’m at a family of four or five, but I’m alone with my dogs and my weed and my servers. Being able to legally self-host your own drug supply is great.
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ich habe meins nicht vergessen
Mine blew my socks off, but i smoke so little that I have to grow once a year max.
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And it’s just wifey , the servers and me.
So you, wife and your 6 digital kids, checks out.
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My solar covers more than my entire electric bills in the mild weather months.
I was thinking of moving to more modern systems with modest power consumption too. One of the systems I picked up is basically a case-as-a-heatsink with no fans.
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My electric bill last month was $15. It eventually is financially worth it.
Don’t know how hard you went on your home lab, I use office rather than datacenter equipment and it’s quite and plenty for my needs. For my professional test/dev needs I have such equipment at work, so I don’t need to home train on gear for the sake of competence in the field.
15 bucks is impressive, yes…i just currently don’t care very much for the bills. Dunno even if solar would be great here, we’re not on the overly sunny side 😁
I don’t work (and never really did), so home is all there is. Office surely is enough most of the time, especially considering I wouldn’t want to pay license fees or be online with stuff. Professional stuff can be pretty shitty in that regard. So I use whatever fits my criteria best.
It grew more and more to be honest, and it already comes close to be a part-time job that costs money and has no salary 😑
How does running a server, assuming it’s used some amount of internet bandwidth, handle residential internet speeds? If I’ve got a gig up and down, can I reasonably run like a jellyfin for my friends?
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If I’ve got a gig up and down, can I reasonably run like a jellyfin for my friends?
Easily
I was running it on a couple hundred Mbps up for a while, and gig up is fine
My isp hasn’t complained. I have fiber at my house and symmetrical gigabit. You should be fine if you transcode to reduce bandwidth needed as you still use your own internet. But I’m not running jellyfin on my home server.
Most servers you rent are only going to have 1Gbps internet speeds too unless you’re paying extra, so if you’ve got symmetrical gigabit at home, you’re 100% good to go, except for maybe higher downtime than a datacenter. My fiber at home seems to go out for a bit overnight occasionally as they’re doing maintenance.
I also self host and I wouldn’t say the cost is zero. In the UK, energy costs alone mean that a 40W computer cost £8 per month to run (assuming a 28p/kWh price).
Of course, that’s assuming you run it 24/7 at full energy use, but I know my PCs run on more than that.
I have 50.000 dollars of server hardware and zero visitors. 😵😜
50 dollars and 0 cents isn’t a lot
Its a Dutch number notation.
Ok so if I’m reading this correctly: They migrated from an OS and MySQL version receiving no updates since at least 2 years to MySQL 8.0 which will stop getting updates in 4 days. Also every service is running without any containerization and there is a single database for everything… and it all runs on a single host and I didn’t read one word about a backup strategy or disk encryption. Also not a single word about infrastructure as code like ansible so that you can reliably recreate the system… and The whole stuff is hosted in Germany for a Turkish software company - sounds like very good latency.
My personal conclusion: This system WILL fail and the guy who designed it is stuck somewhere 10-20 years in the past.
every service is running without any containerization and there is a single database for everything… and it all runs on a single host and I didn’t read one word about a backup strategy or disk encryption.
Man, a paragraph that can give someone some serious PTSD flashbacks…
The number of times I’ve had to clean up a customer’s environment after they let little Billy play corporate IT and things went boom…
the guy who designed it is stuck somewhere 10-20 years in the past.
Well, using containerization for everything is very 2015-ish.
Sounds like my homelab has better redundancy than these guys, and my monthly bill isn’t much different than their new one. I only pay for power and networking, since I own my own hardware. I’m colocating in my city, so my latency to home is about 1ms, and I’ve got a full mirrored server in my house. Certain files are further backed up elsewhere for proper 3-2-1 backup (+ each server running raidz2 with disk encryption). Even if my home Internet goes out, I still have full access to my files at home, and all my public services stay running in the data center. If either server fails, it’s all set up with containers so it’s easy to spin up each service somewhere else.
One thing that’s tricky to get right with disk encryption (especially with encrypted /boot) is having a redundant boot partition. I was able to hack this together by having sofware raid duplicate my boot partition to a second drive. Now if I remove either OS boot drive it falls back to the remaining one. To prevent breaking EFI boot, you need to use the Version 1 RAID format so the metadata is stored at the end of the partition, not the front where EFI reads.
Always nice to see people moving away from enshittified US services.
Seems like it would have been a good moment to split the database from the many web servers and reduce the single point of failure.
And get some replication in there. Even if there’s not a single point of failure, if a DB instance ever goes tits-up, you’d better have a standby.
Source: I’ve cleaned up others’ messes where they didn’t.
Once the dump was complete, we transferred it to the new server using rsync over SSH. With 248 GB of compressed chunks, this was significantly faster than any other transfer method:
rsync -avz --progress /root/mydumper_backup/ root@NEW_SERVER:/root/mydumper_backup/that’s a bit weird. rsync -z is compression, but they did compress in the mydumper export already, so this is a slow down (or neutral at best). also in my experience rsync is as fast as scp is as fast as piping anything to the tcp port on the destination etc. rsync does not win for speed but for enabling resume so to say…
besides this: nice read!
Wait until you learn that Hetzner can and will take your public IP away at their own will without any warning. Happened to me.
One downtime is enough for me to never use that service again, no matter how cheap it is.
Interesting, why did it happen?
They suspected me of serving “illegal” traffic. The server was located in Germany and they were contacted by typical DMCA lawyers, who were referencing a US District Court Order.
Hetzner blindly waved that through and just took my public IPv4 address.
At no point they were trying to contact me. At no point they asked themselves if a US District Court Order has any validity. At no point anyone of Hetzner explained what happened. At no point they apologized for their obvious mistake.
Do tell
Copy Paste since I am lazy:
“ They suspected me of serving “illegal” traffic. The server was located in Germany and they were contacted by typical DMCA lawyers, who were referencing a US District Court Order.
Hetzner blindly waved that through and just took my public IPv4 address.
At no point they were trying to contact me. At no point they asked themselves if a US District Court Order has any validity. At no point anyone of Hetzner explained what happened. At no point they apologized for their obvious mistake.”
Not a sysadmin but just an hobbyist: is it ok to have such a large install bare metal and not containerized?
For example the issue of MySQL 5 being unavailable would be a non-issue with a container
Don’t quote me, but as far as I know containers can’t fix the issue if the host kernel is too old.
Yes it’s ok, in general. It’s not the most modern or efficient way of managing infrastructure but it’s worked for decades now. It all depends on what you’re hosting, for who, and for how many people.
If you’re hosting internal company infrastructure for a relatively static number of users in a single of set few regions to deliver to, bare metal monolithic stuff is absolutely fine. It’s when you’re an app or service company and your infrastructure is for the back end for a public service that needs to be able to scale dynamically, and you’re worried about high 24/7 uptime, and latency to end users is a global issue that things like microservice architecture, containerization, and iac starts becoming important.
The whole containerization crazy is important for microservices architecture where you split your app into different pieces. This lets you scale different parts of you app as needed, it prevents your entire app from failing just because one part of it failed, it allows for lifecycle management like blue/green deployments with no downtime, allows developers to work on different parts of the app and update at a faster cadence than one big release for the entire thing every time you update one small part of it, things like that.
Totally fine. Containerization comes at a cost too. It’s a matter of system design, knowing your risks and complexities, and handling them accordingly.
With such a size, before containerization I’m wondering if these services are not independent enough to split them onto multiple servers.
Having everything together reduce system complexities in some ways, but not in other ways.
Baremetal is definitively making a comeback. But you should have some way of orchestrating the deployment as code regardless.
For example the issue of MySQL 5 being unavailable would be a non-issue with a container
So people careless enough to “just container it” for old, possibly security-compromised software - you call that a “non-issue”? How about upgrading and configuring for compatibility?
They’re the ones running a 10 years old database on a 11 years old os in a public facing server “because it just works”, not me
If it was a container, they could just tag a new version when the database went EOL 5 years ago, without being locked on what the package manager was offering
Because they used MySQL 5 on CentOS 7 from the package manager and couldn’t easily upgrade
Wha?
You do realize there are plenty of bare metal infrastructure deployments out in the world, yeah? Being in a container solves no problems in this scenario at all.
They may not. Hence hobbyist. Relax.
you can just set up containers on your bare metal server. in fact if you’re going to install insecure services you definitely want to containerize them, though tbh you need to run really far away from whatever it is you’re doing that requires sql5, or at least don’t let it be reachable on the internet, that should be network-isolated, which really limits its utility.
in fact if you’re going to install insecure services you definitely want to containerize them,
While this is true, if you’re running a platform that is root by default (looking at you, docker), you’re not shielding yourself as much as you might think you are.
If you’re running an insecure app as root, you better hope they don’t also have an exploit to get out of the container after the app is popped, otherwise you’re fucked.
what it feels like charging my phone from my laptop
nice writeup
Really good blogpost, as a sysadmin, this is a great way to handle a migration with zero downtime.
When I was migrating my servers to NixOS I did the same thing, I tried to make my configuration the same as the old OS so everything works cleanly, and it worked fine, but since it was all in the same server, I had to do manual migration for things like files and databases.
I’m in the US and when I tried migrating from DO to Hetzner, I got asked to upload my passport to prove I’m not spam or something. Same experience with OVH.
Is this a thing for all European hosting companies? I ended up finding some Canadian hosting that would just let me sign up and pay like normal.
I never had that kind of experience with Hetzner or OVH as a European. I suppose there are extra hoops to jump through for US customers for some reason?
Is this a thing for all European hosting companies?
Absolutely not. At least not in Europe.
Have you tried netcup as well?
Netcup was the one I had most problems years ago about uploading identify check. Last year when I signed again they actually put a system in place that it’s simpler, you just show your face for some photos and show your identity card and it checks if it matches. So an external identity provider. Simpler than having to see how to upload copies by email with pgp (which they support and have documentation about).
It’s so weird. Where from? I never had any such requirements with any provider, even when I, from Europe, bought something from abroad.
I’m in europe. If you put a name that may seem a bit non standard they will fire that verification immediately. I think i tried hetzner before and same thing. On ovh was no problem for the little time I tried. Anyway they all always want full physical address and name and a bunch of personal details.
Europe or EU?
If you put a name that may seem a bit non standard they will fire that verification immediately.
You mean you also tried with a standard name? What exactly is “non standard”? How exactly is it “fired”?
My name isn’t standard either.Is there anything else out of the ordinary in your application? Like, payment method, no/invalid smartphone, no/invalid email, no/invalid mailing address, etc.?
I repeat, I had to do no identity check whatsoever. Neither with one other European provider I used.
EU, normal name.
