Comment by bob1029
4 hours ago
There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting.
It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it.
It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does.
You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.
Yep, even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast. I do get the appeal of handling everything on your own, but it also brings any of the downside of handling everything by myself. I just need a working cloud storage with sync, redundancy, and availability. Can I get it up to spec? Definitely but it will cost more both in time and money than getting OOTB solution.
I gave up sync and availability for sensitive data to at-rest encryption. Mundane photos/documents can stay on Google Drive, for now. I wish there's a better solution.
> even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast
I haven't touched my nextcloud installation in maybe 9 months and I've been running it for about 1.5 years.
When there is a problem it's now very easy to fix, I just point an agent at it. It syncs to my phone, my laptop, and several other people's as we use it for a small business.
It's not perfect but neither were any of the commercial things we'd tried before either.
Yeah but I thought we have AGI now and you can just vibe code your own custom roll up of anything in an hour, no expertise required... Right... Right?
> if you can actually afford to use the cloud.
If you are an individual and you want to store a media library, you'll go broke instantly.
I have roughly 200TB of storage capacity, 100TB used, in my NAS. That would be $2300/mo on S3 before even getting to access fees and network egress.
How are you backing up 100TB of data? Have you factored the consequences of catastrophic data loss into the economics? How much value would you lose if all your data was gone?
There's no way you are consuming this much content actively. You could store all of it in S3 deep archive for $200/m (100TB) and maintain a tiny fraction in the standard resource pool.