Thursday, April 12. 2012No more self-hosting
A few years ago I started to run my own server. This was an interesting challenge back then but today I only consider it a waste of time and money. Therefore I'm searching for (a) service provider(s) to substitute my self hosted applications:
However I'm a bit insane about privacy, security and reliability. I simply want to be able to TRUST. This rules out IMHO: Google, Github, Yahoo. On the other hand I'd probably be prepared to pay an insane monthly fee for a provider that just keeps me happy. I'd love to here your recommendations! I'm especially interested in providers that are organized as cooperatives and care about environmental issues. Do I need to mention free software? An extra plus would be a healthy distaste for PHP. some cooperative-style provider initiatives that I still need to evaluate: Trackbacks
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Hi,
For the photo gallery, you can try piwigo.com. It fits FOSS requirement but fails PHP distate.
For blogs and wikis, I'd like to recommend my own hosting service, Branchable.com. It's all free software, you can clone all your data using git. Our monthly fees aren't insane, but they are a feature; we have customers, not users-as-product.
More generally, I doubt you'll find everything in one provider, unless you simply find a VPS provider.  Personally, I feel that it's important to have a VPS, or at least the ability to spin one up on demand; this makes you a sovereign entity on the net, or at least as close to one as is currently practical, and it's important for the longterm good of the net that as many people as possible have that sovereignty. It's not good to have the net split into consumers and eyeball owners. However, having your own server doesn't mean you have to manually run every service you need there either, and it's also important to build and support services that help users move out of the "just a user" trap. At least that's how I justify running Branchable to myself..PS: I wish I could say that Branchable runs in a carbon-neutral facility, but practicalities mean we run as a VPS on Linode currently. But, my development machines here at home run on Solar power.
I highly recommend gandi.net; when you host your domain with them, they provide you with email too, so you don't need to run your own mail server.
Just curious --- you don't trust GitHub to keep your private (paid) repositories private? I personally trust GitHub so I am interested if there was something that made you stop trusting them.
I'm very satified with in-berlin.de. They are organized as corporative, use und prefer free software, gives you mail, web, git and shell access to debian machines. Per request they install software at the shell server.
For more demands feel free to ask them. HTH Frank
Hi Thomas. I'm in the spot where you were a few years ago - eager to start my own serwer. Could you share some more thoughts why it is a waste of time and money?
Hi dom,
it's a very interesting and important learning experience to setup your own server and I wouldn't miss it. However after some time you'll learn that you don't have enough time and expertise to maintain the services properly. The most complicate thing IMHO is to properly maintain a mail server. If you really want to make it correct, then it's a full time job. And it's a waste of money, because I'm doing all this work only for me and my wife. But a specialised administrator could support hundreds of users in the same time and on the same underused server.
Thanks Thomas! If maintaining a (simple - family and possibly some close friends) email server requires investing ever increasing amount of time, then it's a bad news. I hoped for heading towards a step slope, but then reaching a plateau and staying there for some time. I might still give it a try for experiance though and hopefully in a few years I won't regreat it either.
I tried to stop managing my mail/web/etc a little while ago but got frustrated with being unable to do things such as look at logs or spin up a new service at no notice that I have gone back to a couple of VPS's hosting my stuff.
I will be interest to hear what you find. -A
I host my stuff at https://www.hostsharing.net – it's a cooperative, like car sharing for web hosting, founded in 2001 in Hamburg. The coop currently has about 200 members. Technically it's a bunch of Debian machines physically located in Berlin and Frankfurt. KVM is used for virtualization. There's at least one Debian Developer on the admin team (Noël Köthe of Credativ).
Some links: https://lists.hostsharing.net/ – mailing list archive http://status.hostsharing.net/ – availability of services http://status.hostsharing.net/actions.html – past and upcoming outages Drop me a note if you have specific questions.
I think it would be reasonably widely appreciated if you can publish some information as to the results that you get.
I'm not quite as paranoid as you are, but I certainly do make sure that my "cloudy" things get backed up so that it wouldn't be too ludicrous a disaster if some of the services dropped.
Oops, sorry about multicomments. Something odd blew up on me
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Hi. Nice list. It might be worth mentioning here even though it's not a cooperative : https://uberspace.de/
I can recommend immerda.ch for mail hosting. They are cooperatively run and very privacy aware. I also know the main admin personally and would fully trust him.
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