What's with the overkill hardware setups?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24850430
EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think
EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans
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Many selfhosters are also homelabbers
Homelab = I have a bunch of computers I experiment and learn with, often breaking stuff and starting from scratch
Self-host = I have a bunch of computers where I run my own email service, I replaced Netflix with plex/jellyfin, I have a Minecraft server for my friend group, etc
Thanks! I am still pretty inexperienced so I'm inadvertently doing both at the same time with the same few machines haha
That's the thing, it's pretty typical to have both and do both at the same time! You just have some machines more stable so you don't wipe your photos when you break k8s.
The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.
I'm hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don't have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don't mess with the formula I have.
IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you're home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you're self-hosting.
tl;dr - experimentation vs utility
I don't know if I can completely explain the difference, but I would classify myself as a home labber not a self-hoster.
I use Proton for email and don't have any YouTube/Twitter/etc alt front ends. The majority of my lab (below) is storage and compute for playing around with stuff like Kubernetes and Ansible to help me with my day job skills. Very little is exposed to the Internet (mostly just a VPN endpoint for remote lab work).
I view self-hosting as more of a, "let me put this stuff on the internet instead of of using a corporation's gear" effort. I know folks who host their own Mastodon instance, have their own alt front ends for various social media, their own self-hoster search engines.
love the laboratory setup!
Thanks this makes sense!
I think I'm somewhere in between the two. I'm still pretty inexperienced so I might say I'm self hosting through my homelab as I expect to screw something up any day now haha. So far so good though
