1y ago

Ditching PaaS: Why I Went Back to Self-Hosting

shubhamjain.co Ditching PaaS: Why I Went Back to Self-Hosting

I had never been a fan of devops/server-admin work. The sheer number of headaches involved in setting up the services, configuring them, automating them, and ensuring their reliability were just annoying and time-consuming. PaaS offerings like Heroku, AWS—and later—Railway, and Render, were appeal...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10738584

In recent times, my opinion about self-hosting has changed. Instead of paying for multiple services, I am now renting a decently sized VPS on Scaleway, and hosting all my projects on them. It’s been three months, and it has been working out great for me.

4 comments

My journey has been similar yet distinctly different. I went from "put it all on one server" to running servers in AWS. But the cost was preventing me from doing much more than run a couple of compute nodes. I hated the feeling of "I could setup a server to do X but it's gonna cost another $x/month". So I've been shifting back to my own servers.
I do like devops and automation though. Automation is brilliant for creating easily reproducible and stable environments - especially for things you don't touch very often.. Proxmox was what let me start moving back "on prem" as it were. There are "good enough" terraform plugins for proxmox that let me provision standardized VMs from a centralized code-base. And I've got ansible handling most of the setup/configure beyond that. I've now got like 20 VMs whereas before I only had 2 EC2 nodes due to cost. So much happier...
- I'm just getting started on Proxmox and had no idea plugins like that were available. Anything in particular that works well for you? I'd like to try it out.
  
  The plugins are for terraform - not proxmox. There's two that I've found that have varying levels of "working":
  https://registry.terraform.io/providers/bpg/proxmox/latest/docs
  https://registry.terraform.io/providers/Telmate/proxmox/latest/docs
  The telmate one seems more popular but the bgp one worked better for me (I forget what wasn't working with the other one). They use the proxmox API to automate creating VMs for me.

Biggest problem with this us actually outages/availability. Aws has 3-nine or 4-nine availability regardless and has several people ensuring it.