I don't understand the need to run home servers in 2022, at least not for most people and most problems.
This is coming from someone who has been running a home server for decades, hosted everything from websites and email, photos, music and movies, and various cloud services like Nextcloud, Gitea, etc.
As a learning experience, it's probably better than anything else, but for day to day work, it's simply not worth the trouble.
NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers, at least not if you have a "home budget" as well. We're talking redundant power, redundant internet, server grade hardware and spare parts, fire/flood protection, physical access control, dedicated security operations, and multi-geo redundancy means you get that across multiple data centers.
I've long since abandoned the chores that come with hosting anything from home, and instead moved everything to the cloud. If i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) handles end-to-end encryption. Most other services have been migrated to cloud offerings, which in many cases are free, like GitHub or Bitbucket, and my (static) website runs on Azure for free.
The best part is i'm actually saving money. Before i moved to the cloud, i was running a 4 bay NAS as well as a server running Proxmox, and power consumption was around 250W, and even with normal electricity prices here (€0.35/kwh normal, current around €0.75/kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 every month. That's without the hardware cost, which will easily cost as much over 5 years.
For comparison, a "Microsoft Family365" subscription can be had for about €75/year (€6.25/month), and offers the above advantages on 6 accounts each given 1TB of storage, so if i was using OneDrive for file storage, i would be saving about €2 every month on just electricity.
Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (€510 over 5 years), you could also get a VPS in the cloud, and still host websites and more, and still save money.
That being said, i do still have a small "home server", but it's main purpose is to act as a content cache for data stored in the cloud, to make it appear to be local when accessed from the LAN, as well as make backups (to another cloud) of my cloud data, but my firewall is now completely closed, and i sleep better at night :)
This philosophy can be applied for everything and unfortunately - for me - it's incredibly poisonous, I was very passionate about programming, coding, about this unique property of it that one can bring to life some abstract idea, concept that was only existing as thoughts
Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything, most ideas are dismissed easily.
Want to write some kind of software? Makes no sense, it's probably written already and if not then will be replicated in the blink of an eye by more resourceful entity if it's worth anything, probably even open-sourced
Want to write novel? Makes no sense, authors with the help of GPT3 will churn out 20 times more, etc. etc.
I agree that it's easy to dismiss a lot of ideas like this, and the fact that there's so many people out there working on all these ideas can seem a bit daunting.
What has helped me is knowing that I am doing all of this for myself, and because it's fun and interesting to _me_. Yeah, sure, other solutions exist, but then I'd be trading more money for less fun, and that's not... fun.
I hope that you can get your spark back. It all depends on external factors and life events as well and with those I cannot help, but don't lose hope.
> Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything
I'm sorry for your loss.
Personally i was spending 1-2 hours every day making sure servers were running fine, drives were good, backups ran OK, software updates, and checking logs. None of those tasks interested me the least bit. I've run servers professionally for close to 2 decades, so i get enough of that at work, and considering that i can actually save money by letting someone else do it, it means that for me it was simply not worth it.
Instead, I use my "additional free time" to dive deeper into areas that actually interest me.
Do you exclude NAS functionality? Because multiple TB of cloud storage are definitely not affordable.
Similarly, yeah you could store movies in the cloud, but streaming those all the time is a huge waste of bandwidth and for many home internet connections quite high load.
Oh, and I also want my smart home to continue working when there is no internet connection.
Not just that multi TB are not affordable, but also I can get >1Gbps throughout on my local network and essentially 0 latency - whilst my internet connection is max 1Gbps and effectively a little less, with more significant latency.
When using the file share for something like Lightroom it makes a significant difference.
If your needs are handling large amounts of photos/videos for work/hobbies, then a NAS probably makes sense, but if you're just hoarding a bunch of movies/tv-shows, does that really need RAID5/6 ? A single drive would probably be adequate, considering that you can probably "recreate" the contents.
Personally i use a content cache on my LAN that caches data for the cloud, meaning my data i available at LAN speeds on my LAN, but still stored in the cloud.
But my original comment was mostly about self hosting services.
I don't think that's enough to qualify as a privacy measure. Those encrypted files will still be on your account paid through your credit card and authenticated by phone. They know when you connect and how much data you have, download and send.
As for the rest of your comment, I pretty much like having my own stuff and I dislike giving money to hostile corporations like Microsoft and Google.
And about redundancy ? geographical redundancy ? With (major) cloud providers, your data is stored in multiple geographically separate data centers, meaning even if a data center burns down, your data is still available, and redundancy hastily being restored.
How about malware protection ? Most (major) cloud providers offer n days of x versions (OneDrive is 30 days worth of unlimited versions), so if your files end up as encrypted garbage, you can simply roll back to an earlier version. Unless your home server is airgapped, that could still apply to you.
You're probably also lacking in redundancy with power and internet (though if only available on the LAN that's not a problem), as well as fire protection/prevention as well as flood protection.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't hosting your own mail these days nigh impossible because if you're not one of the major whitelisted providers everything you ever send will get thrown into spam, for obvious reasons?
It is doable, but certainly not something i would recommend. I quit doing it a decade or so ago.
There are a bunch of hoops you need to run through to keep your server whitelisted, though having a static IP in a non-residential IP block helps a lot. Sadly, most people attempting to self host email will (static IP or not) have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get blacklisted fairly quick. I'd much rather leave that to someone who knows what they're doing.
I'm aware that people self host email for (supposed) privacy, but they somehow always seem to forget that most email threads have at least two parties, and despite all kinds of privacy measures, you cannot guarantee that your recipient is not using Google/Microsoft/Whatever, or they forward it to a person that is using one of those. In that light, your (clear text) emails are not really confidential.
Instead, if you must use email for confidential information, use encryption, or better yet, use one of the multitudes of newer "more better" platforms for sending your information. Most new platforms have encryption baked in, though in most cases you're trusting the service provider to handle your keys correctly.
(not sure who downvoted or why btw, even if I disagree on some points your comment is constructive and the conclusion, using something with more modern encryption, makes sense. If only people would comment when they downvote...)
> have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get blacklisted fairly quick.
That's not how that works. Either they block residential IPs or they don't. It's not that they only notice you're hosting residentially by the distinctly green smell of your email and only then ban you.
I've not had much trouble myself with this, only a handful of systems across more than a decade of use by multiple people. From a residential IP.
> hoops you need to run through to keep your server whitelisted
Aside from sending spam, how does it become un-whitelisted? (I'm assuming you're referring to "off blacklists" when you say whitelisted btw, as I've never seen a whitelist implementation).
Typical use of home server is to lower expenses when abroad or in the wilderness. Nobody here pirates movies (of course), but for example watching Joe Rogan 3 hour Youtube-sessions on phone in Finnmark was quite impossible. You ordered your server to download it with youtube-dl and to decode the audio at 32 kbits.
FYI that wattage is quite a lot, if you get it cheaper by hosting it on someone else's server (aka cloud) then they've either got a more efficient server or they don't factor externalities into the price (at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions).
> at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions
It's due to the countrys backup power being based on natural gas, which costs about €2/m3 currently due to the Ukraine/Russia war. During february it hit €1.14/kwh.
Prices are dropping though, with about 85% of our power currently coming from renewable sources.
Everybody makes mistakes. You just need to take a quick glance over on r/datarecovery to see that it's not only Cloud providers.
Just because you keep your data in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make backups. I make local backups as well as backups to another cloud, and data i really care about (mostly family photos) is archived on M-disc Blu-Ray media as well.
Plus: bigcorp mistakes/hacks affect a million customers. You might have a less fancy door lock than the data center next door, or might have a 1024-bit RSA public ssh key still, but how likely is someone going to get into your email by cracking your lock or key specifically?
This is coming from someone who has been running a home server for decades, hosted everything from websites and email, photos, music and movies, and various cloud services like Nextcloud, Gitea, etc. As a learning experience, it's probably better than anything else, but for day to day work, it's simply not worth the trouble.
NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers, at least not if you have a "home budget" as well. We're talking redundant power, redundant internet, server grade hardware and spare parts, fire/flood protection, physical access control, dedicated security operations, and multi-geo redundancy means you get that across multiple data centers.
I've long since abandoned the chores that come with hosting anything from home, and instead moved everything to the cloud. If i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) handles end-to-end encryption. Most other services have been migrated to cloud offerings, which in many cases are free, like GitHub or Bitbucket, and my (static) website runs on Azure for free.
The best part is i'm actually saving money. Before i moved to the cloud, i was running a 4 bay NAS as well as a server running Proxmox, and power consumption was around 250W, and even with normal electricity prices here (€0.35/kwh normal, current around €0.75/kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 every month. That's without the hardware cost, which will easily cost as much over 5 years.
For comparison, a "Microsoft Family365" subscription can be had for about €75/year (€6.25/month), and offers the above advantages on 6 accounts each given 1TB of storage, so if i was using OneDrive for file storage, i would be saving about €2 every month on just electricity.
Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (€510 over 5 years), you could also get a VPS in the cloud, and still host websites and more, and still save money.
That being said, i do still have a small "home server", but it's main purpose is to act as a content cache for data stored in the cloud, to make it appear to be local when accessed from the LAN, as well as make backups (to another cloud) of my cloud data, but my firewall is now completely closed, and i sleep better at night :)