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I did something very weird
Something that I am not sure I can say here 
But yesterday I switched all my self hosted apps to hosted services and got rid of servers for basically everything. 
It's quite a big change because I have been self hosting a lot of stuff for years, but I realized that I spent too much time with it that I could use for other things. It's weird but somehow it feels liberating
Thanked by 1Chuck
Comments
when you selfhost and manage your life .... your a man
now your something else.
LOL that sounds even worse than what I was expecting
Oh do you
not good new for us
Congratulations
I did about one and a half your ago, and I never regretted it. I switched for most things to Amazon's services, and some people said it would be more expensive after a year, but the fact is that it is much cheaper than running your own stuff, especially if you factor in the time spent and the stress if something break.
Of course your miles may vary, depending on the services you need.
When you go non-self-host you injecting laziness into your veins. Resist.
1 year later back to self host because realized spent too much money on hosted services can not do other things
Honestly pretty much what I did. I value my time and sometimes I don't want to spend it in an SSH terminal trying to maintain all these things.
I still have some critical servers in a single dedicated server here but almost everything's hosted or maintained by someone else for me
.
Also, my main line of work pays pretty well that I can afford the convenience. I'm not here anymore trying to make every dollar stretch for the service that's for sure.
Clickbait
To be honest I spent so much money with self hosting stuff, experiments etc, so I don't think hosted services are going to be much more expensive for me. > @HalfEatenPie said:
Exactly
If self hosting stuff is too much time consuming for you, then probably you are doing something wrong or lacking skills, imo.
I'm terrible at cooking and generally avoid it as much as I can, leaving this to people who enjoy doing it for themselves and others. If you have to spend 1 hour googling just to set up a web service and keep it up to date, you did a good choice.
I was spending too much time tinkering with things, experimenting, migrating from one thing to another and things like that. I'm pretty good skills wise as I am a devops and BE dev and have done this for a long time. I couldn't just stick with one specific setup in a way
You're being pretty brash about it, but whatever man it's your time not mine.
I'll put it this way. I love cooking. I also really enjoy fine food. I could spend an hour cooking up a really nice sous vide steak (seared on a cast iron) with hasselback potatoes and a nice side salad. Only thing I spend on this is my time + the costs of the materials. Or, I can go to a restaurant where I pay for the cost of the materials + a fraction of someone else's time to make it for me (assuming I get the exact same product in return just the way I like it). Let's say it takes them 20 minutes because they already have everything else prepared too ahead of time and they've optimized for it so that their unit cost of time to me is a fraction of what it really is.
If I really value my time that day that I just don't want to deal with cooking, then this is a great deal.
Basically, I make enough that 10 or 15 dollars a month for a SaaS solution vs a self-hosted makes sense because I don't need to deal with a SSH terminal and if shit breaks, I don't need to sit there for an hour or two fixing it, it's someone else's time (especially since I can make that 10-15 dollars back in a few minutes). The cost of hosting (minimal) + my time setting it up and maintaining it over time isn't worth saving 10 dollars on. It's worth paying that 10 dollars a month to have someone I can ask to maintain this so I can spend that time enjoying other things. Because working keeps me busy and I'd rather spend that time after work doing something else. Hell I get pimped out for a little less than half a grand an hour, they pay me a comfortable salary where 15 dollars a month isn't going to break the bank.
I know what you mean...after discovering PikaPods, I'm too lazy to type apt install.
Cooking is the single most stressful experience on the planet for me. Managing multiple tasks. Time pressure. Uncertainty of outcome. Lots of micro judgment calls and the whole outcome rides on them. People waiting to judge.
I've jumped out of a plane. I've been in a datacenter when it suddenly went dark. I've performed CPR. None of them are as stressful as cooking.
But some people enjoy it. Bunch of freaks.
Mentally strong people neither self host nor use hosted services.
YOLO and put everything in flash drives.
Even the amount of time I spend handholding my cloudron server gets on my nerves sometimes. Truth is not a lot of hobbyists save money by self hosting, and they definitely don't save time. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is let someone else handle something.
If self hosting consumes no reasonable amount of your time, one of two things is true:
Today a server hit 90% iowait and it can't write mail to the array as quickly as it's coming in. The drives report fine, I suspect the raid controller is screwed. But the data center team are pulling it down to take a look at it and see if we need to replace hardware. Looking at downtime being unavoidable. Never had to deal with this as a Dropbox customer, but this will likely be half of my day today, just saying.
Sometimes your money exceeds your time, and that's when you re-evaluate things that consume too much time.
Not your keys, not your email.
Is that like "not my pig, not my farm" 😂
You haven't been doing it long enough. Get back to me when you hit your first raid controller failure.
OP is self hosting apps, you know stuff like Plex, git, web server. Probably on cheap dedis
or VPSes.
This is very different from being SELF employed in hosting to have raid issues
Obviously when you fully self hosting, i.e. from rack to bare metal, nobody is going to fix
that raid for you. But when you rent the hardware, you pretty much can only fuck it up by
not making backups on time.
Is that the Russian version of "not my circus, not my monkeys"? 😆
Woof. Yeah I had a similar failure happen to me on a server I had colocated. That server was critical to my own personal infrastructure as I had a fair amount hosted on it. I ended up getting some help from our dear friends here via PM and such but man, I'd rather pay someone to deal with that and move my shit over to a different server so they had to deal with it versus me just sitting there for like hours talking with remote hand, reviewing documents, talking with colleagues here, ordering new hardware, etc. Back then I was saving money, which was great. But now at this point in my life I've already dealt through that before, I'd rather just pay someone a monthly premium to handle it for me so I don't have to deal with the headaches.
I've hosted my own email since 1992. But, TBH, it's mostly spite and dogged stubbornness that keeps me doing it thirty years later. If I didn't also have hosting customers, I might be tempted to go all weak and outsource it.
Can you elaborate what kind of experimenting you were doing and where did you spend your time?
When I got into self hosting, I started with a cheap dedi, and deployed as many things as I could, and there were hiccups with keeping everything updated, and rare hardware failures like HDD dying. One day I got tired of it, and deleted everything that I haven't used in last 4 weeks. Moved to a reputed VPS host, so that I'm very unlikely to ever run into hardware issues. Now, I have a very stable setup with around a dozen apps which I love and actually use, all containerized, self updating, with scheduled backups. I have not had any issues in over a year. I just need to ssh to install the kernel updates & reboot every couple of months.
I just subscribed to Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Prime Video, YouTube Premium to replace my previous Plex setup. It's more or less the same price of the dedi I was using with Hetzner LOL
I ran my Plex on buyvm's 512MB RAM. If there is a will, there is a way.
you have time to watch all those?
Why do you need an expensive dedi for Plex if you only use it for yourself, and maybe just few more friends?
That's maybe not as drastic a step as yours, but a long while ago I decided I don't wanna self-host my webhosting/WordPress websites anymore and opted for shared hosting for convenience. Wouldn't wanna go back.