I've been sucked into the rabbit hole of self hosting.
I got a start9 because it pulled on my heart strings right when I was looking for a solution to store all my family pictures that were starting to build up.
After installing it and seeing everything that I can do with self hosting I've finally pulled the wool from over my eyes and realized that, in this digital age, I own very little of what I've paid for.
The big tech companies want you to spend money and own nothing. Everything lives in their "ecosystems".
The masses are lured by convenience and stay because of the difficulty of changing their ways.
The nature of data today is that it is ever growing.
I buy a book on Amazon, it lives in Amazon Kindle, on amazon's server. I paid for the right to look at the words on the pages but I don't own the book.
I buy a movie, its hosted by whichever company I just bought it from. I paid to watch the pictures on the screen but I don't own the movie. My own pictures and words and business intelligence, those start free until I have enough of a hoard of data that I'd PAY for someone to ensure it was secure.
The dystopia is here, its already happening and no one is paying attention.
It's crazy that it took me until just now to realize this.
Replies (6)
I’m considering going down this rabbit hole soon too but afraid I do I won’t be satisfied until I’m completely free from Big Tech.
There are so many great options available now with umbrel, start9, citadel, plus os load able nas, even standard servers all help meet you where your budget is.
I went down this path because I currently have about 1TB of data in just photos of my family and kids. Thats only going to grow and ive noticed Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have raised their prices and lowered their data limits for their tired offerings. I mean practically speaking I saw the writing on the wall.
Do you feel that your servers are as safe as paid cloud services in case of natural disaster or fire? How do the backups work in that case?
That's one of the "selling points" made by the big corporations when encountering people thinking of self-hosting. Not everyone wants to deal with the hassle of self-hosting, but I strongly believe this "hassle-free" approach is causing people never to question who truly owns their data.
The beauty of self-hosting is that you decide the level of security and redundancy. Depending on your comfort level, budget, and the risk factors in your geographical location, you can select the setup that makes the most sense for you.
In my case, I live in Florida, so the likelihood of a hurricane is high (potential for water and wind damage). However, Florida is large and my parents live in a different town about 3 hours away, so I can have a NAS at my parents and my server at my place.
You can have local backups like in a RAID set up for your drives (in case the physical drive goes bad) and then have a redundant NAS located at someone else's house in your family (parents/kids/best friend).
If I wanted to be extremely secure, I could set up a NAS at my brother's house in Seattle across the country.
Ultimately, what you start realizing when you self-host is just how much of what you think is digitally "yours" actually isn't.
Great point. I definitely understand the aspect of “my data” not being owned by me using the cloud services. I have to learn more about networking to understand but the NAS is basically a replica of the data copied to another set of drives? I could totally see this being ample protection if you can run a few copies like this in various locations. I’m going to dig further into this for sure.
Good luck on your learning journey. Its worth it, you'll gain skills that will serve you for life.
Im no pro either and have a ton to learn. Start9 is a cool starter option but outside of bitcoin related hosting services you miss out on services available to other server operating systems.... but with those come more expensive paths as well.
