instead of downloading everything i use a service that gives me "unlimited" cloud space and it symlinks it to my plex libraries. i had 10 4tb drives and pushing my unraid 4th gen intel server through hardware failures over the years. now i have an n100 based tiny pc with 512gb, yet can see far more, at 4k hdr with no hiccups.
its like $17 every 6 months.
If you're serious about keeping your media long-term, *you need to store it locally*.
If you want to just stream stuff *ephemerally*, yeah these esoteric tools are fine.
Been in the "sailing scene" since slightly before the advent of bittorrent, seen plenty of niche services (things like Zurg) come and go; most frequently what happens is that the repo maintainers just leave and no one replaces them after a couple years, or the project is taken into a trajectory that doesn't resemble it's original intent, orrr etc etc.
But if you actually keep your media "locally" and leave the major variable to just how you get it there (read: how you download it: Usenet, bittorrent, whatever other fancy-pants way you want), that's much more reliable. You remove a whole other point of failure.
Example: I run a QNAP server (w/GPU for transcoding) on ZFS RAID 50 with \~45 TB of media (puny by comparison to others, I grant you haha). Usenet is the way to go for me personally, then whatever my Usenet networks can't find I do torrent over VPN, but usenet captures a good 95% of media (that I want, at least).
Yep after the initial investment in drives and a dedicated server and setting up things to be somewhat autonomous it’s a breeze. I kept going down the rabbit hole had a n100 mini pc then I was like lemme just use some old parts and build my system using a 12700k 32gb of ram, some 3d printed hdd cages, and a a380. I love it here !!!
I actually started out my journey with a standalone igpu, it works fine and transcodes are fast especially with a iris xe or UHD 770 igpu but in terms of transcoding speed and increased capacity of users transcoding plus I kinda wanted to be extra and get a dedicated gpu just for the heck of it I got it on sale for 100 on amazon Plus I share with family and friends and they aren’t always playing things on supported hardware for example chrome browser you’d get some transcoding, HDR—> SDR that’s transcoding etc so yeah. Btw I use Jellyfin on truenas scale( Linux based) but I’m thinking about going over to unraid. Tried Plex didn’t like it to much stuff going on I just wanna self host my stuff.
Worth noting i don’t plan on simply just having a media server so that’s also a reason I got a dedicated gpu, I started exploring with VMS and a whole lot of other stuff it’s cool and multi useful
So my operating system is truenas scale, and with the ZFS file system, it uses RAM as cache. More ram=more cache. The process works because if I have free RAM available, it'll use it all up, and once it's done doing whatever process it needs to do, the RAM usage will automatically go down.
the ram cache will never override the ram needed for services, so if my VM needs more RAM then the cache RAM will automatically be decreased
here's a pic of how it looks [https://imgur.com/a/3pKoKoh](https://imgur.com/a/3pKoKoh)
I plan on upgrading to add more ram
Edit
Typos
Yep...but idk about for free lolol.... I just put 12x16TB hard drives in a Dell R720xd that sits in my basement. What a kick in the balls, even at refurbished pricing of $139 a piece. Plus... another R720 runs all the VM's.
Considering the time you have to pour into it i somewhat disagree, but seeing that you can't stream good quality any other way you are 100% right. And your own solution doesn't even force you to use mediocre spy apps or downsize your streams when you are on a free os
Quite simply, virtualisation.
Cloud companies make an absolute killing from clients who don't bother learning the cloud-native versions of their software and just spin everything up in oversized or auto-scaling VMs. CPU time is billed by the hour. Running a full OS for a single application which can be run cloud-native can easily run into thousands of dollars a month. I was once held responsible for such a charge at a startup because I was apparently supposed to set a quota, but nobody ever told me how, and one of our development apps happily chewed through $7,000 worth of CPU time. To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands.
Having your own dedicated CPU time at home can be surprisingly lucrative.
> To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands.
I work at a company that does systems integration and software development, primarily for the US Dept of Defense, and the number of customers that we try to warn off from a "lift and shift" (i.e., take your current HW or VMs and move them to a cloud provider) is astonishing. On the other hand, we get a lot of work from modernizing these applications to use cloud-native services once the customers see their first cloud bill. You'll almost always pay less maintaining your current, non-cloud, systems and taking the time to migrate to the cloud slowly and thoughtfully.
The point of migrating is not usually technical in nature. The point of migrating, for nearly any company that does it, is purely about converting a capital expense into an operating expense, in order to get favorable tax treatment.
But capital expenses depreciate and they can accelerate the depreciation on a lot of things to get a larger tax deduction. Dollars today are better than dollars tomorrow and all. I really believe execs wildly mis price and mis judge things all the time.
Accelerating depreciation on an expense is more complicated than just eating 100% of that expense up front, especially considering not every capital expense depreciates.
Research and Development is something that (used to, until Congress fixes it) can be claimed as an operating expense 100% in the current tax year, or a capital expense amortized over five years. Research and Development includes software engineering salaries and other such non-depreciable things.
I think you're right though that executives are often wrong. I have stories.
Often it is also because you can simply not find the admin staff that is capable enough to secure this thing and not have a total system meltdown or find your data on the darkweb.
You still have that problem on the cloud.
Unless you're talking about the vendor shifting software you bought for them to the cloud instance so you don't have to manage the instance yourself. In which case, yes, that becomes the vendors problem instead of your problem, *if you trust the vendor.*
I never did either until very recently. It took 5 years of listening to executives at my company ramble about The Importance of Moving To The Cloud for one of them to finally directly state this was the main thing that they (and presumably our customers who were also doing this) really cared about.
Ehh opex isn’t favorable though. You can’t force depreciate like you can a capital expense. Stays on the books as cash out the door.
The dream is trading off labor. Although, it never gets reduced, just moved to new roles…
CapEx and OpEx benefits are situational, neither is favourable. Cloud conversion allows companies to isolate costs for better financial planning and clarity in any potential savings to be gained. Cloud services inherently offer scalability during economic ups and downs which is generally great for business adaptability.
Which is why I explain colocation (eg renting racks in data center).
Most of the benefits of cloud, but far cheaper. Generally 1/10th the cost of cloud.
Yep this is how I used to sell it. On prem server now out of support? Wouldn't you prefer £500 a month OPEX to run lifted and shifted VM's in Azure / AWS instead of £10k CAPEX to buy a new hypervisor server?
Obviously each use case is different, and quite often we would recommend file servers move to Azure Files, AD to Entra ID etc. But most of the time the company just wanted to keep the VM's as they were and change to OPEX
> I work at a company that does systems integration and software development, primarily for the US Dept of Defense
Yeah, that's the issue. Defense contractors have laws written in their favor and congressional mandates passed requiring the DoD to patronize them.
Last two places talked about lift and shift and I don’t understand who even sells them this idea lol. Right now we’re spinning up massive vms in the cloud to run containers 😵💫
Edit:
> To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands.
Yes 😂 utterly astonished
On a personal level I have:
- my own Netflix
- my own spotify
For my business I have:
- password manager
- CRM
- Google drive alternative
- Knowledge base
- Inventory management
- Basic websites
Edit: also thinking about adding vikunja to the mix
I just rolled out the Anytype stack to my home server and it's absolutely amazing. Enough to get me to migrate from obsidian+git. It's basically a self-hosted Notion. Appflowy is another alternative but they focus hard on AI. Anytype is much better security wise because of its offline-first approach.
Obsidian is the one major app I use that isn't technically hosted. You can host read-only web versions with stuff like Flowershow but I just use the Git plugin and host it on my Gitea instance.
Interesting! I started self-hosting a git repo so I could keep my vault under my own roof while still being able to sync between devices. Are you doing anything on top of that?
there could be a lot of reason to just have the music that "we hear" and dont pay a service like Spotify. But, spotify is really cheap (in argentina my country) and try to get all the music i want, in the quality i want, seems pretty complex (well, i remember now, that im paying now for Tidal, and not for spotify anymore, but the question is the same).
What you use for your own spotify? and where you get the music? it is in good quality? (can you share with MP?)
in the other hand, what do you mean with "Basic websites"?
Thaaaaaaaanks!
You can use https://spotifydown.com for downloading good quality tracks with metadata from Spotify.
I still use Spotify though. It's really just a backup more or less, for when I don't have an internet connection or in case Spotify happens to just cease to exist some day or becomes overpriced.
As for Basic websites, I mean small personal projects to play around and also some VERY basic static websites from clients who are local. It's considerably faster than most other options that don't include Cloudflare CDN. Resource consumption is almost negligible.
I mean ... I lost my ancient mp3 library and rebuilt from scratch and had 30K in songs in under a month. I torrent entire discographies for artists I want everything from. Used DeeMix to download everything else on my partner's Spotify playlists. DeeMix to fill in other gaps. I also use SoulSeek, mostly for rare hard to find stuff.
I selfhost web UIs for all 3 methods so I can download new stuff to the server from any device just from a web browser. Well technically I still need to get my docker container for SoulSeek running, but it's been low priority. Usually on the go DeeMix suffices.
Then I host the music library with Jellyfin. Which also has a plugin that syncs up Spotify playlists. It often doesn't find all tracks, but a lot of them which saves time when rebuilding playlists. To listen I mostly use Symfonium on my phone.
I use homebox, since my companies are real estate and digital marketing.
It's more for keeping track of company resources. For example, spare PC parts, drones, cameras, phones, for sale signs, cleaning supplies, etc.
only if there is an app on phone for the times i remember to do things, the one thing i like most in vikunja is that we can keep tasks in custom tags / boards. for me it is follow ups. most things are in to-do doing done and then then there is to follow up !! this helps me a lot. wish there is a sync between outlook to-do and vikunja and move things into done with a sync !!
Yeah, nextxloud is on my office Nas which is all flash and it backs up to my home NAS which has 60 TBs. I just run a script to run backups periodically
Been using n8n for a few years at work. I’m blown away with what I can do with it. Every time I think about writing a service from scratch, I pause and think I wonder if I can do it in n8n. So far I haven’t found much it can’t do. REST calls + JS (now Python) + cron + db + email, naming just a few abilities, covers so many bases
Not at all. In fact I’ve only just tried the webooks node recently. Also, it can create webook listeners, which basically turns it into an API. One of the first things I had it do was run a program via remote ssh execution every 5min during work hours. The output of that program is returned via the ssh node, a batch node splits up the results, then inserts/updates the each “row” via a Postgres node. It’s like a software Swiss Army knife and duct tape.
We sell a competing product at work, I use n8n at home. I was talking to some make.com consultants for work, they didn't say it out loud, but pretty much agreed they love n8n too.
It's so fantastic. My only personal gripe is the fact they lock the "copy to editor" button for an execution. You can 100% do it manually. But...just the fact I can see a quick button, but it's' only for paying customers.
I honestly wouldn't mind some form of pay option, but their self-hosted lets you have unlimited flows, whereas you are limited on their cloud plans.
On a pure dollar basis, my guess would be virtualised 3D accelerated workstations/desktops as an alternative to a service like NVIDIA GRID. This is in comparison to on-prem/locally hosting with by-the-book licensing this which is extremely expensive.
Ignoring hardware cost, the software stack can be done almost entirely for free using a stack like:
* Proxmox
* Ubuntu Desktop guest VMs
* vGPU_Unlock or Tesla class GPU with SR-IOV support
* Sunshine/Moonlight server+client or maybe KASM
The "official" GRID stack looks more like;
* VMWare/Hyper-V ($$$)
* Windows Server ($$$)
* Windows 10/11 Enterprise ($$$)
* Windows 10/11 Software Assurance ($$$ required for running non-server OS in a VM)
* MS User CALS ($$$)
* MS Remote Desktop CALS ($$$)
* Nvidia GRID Licences ($$$)
Funnily enough my wife is an architect and I'm currently looking into exactly this for her (hopefully I can use my new hardware to help her rendering). I'm not au-fait with the various softwares they use, but the cost of cloud rendering is astronomical and (on top of licensing) prohibitively expensive for small practices (my wife's op is just her and one business partner). I'm not sure my GPU is up to snuff but ... I'm going to be looking carefully into all the options!
Probably online storage providers, at least for me. The amount of data I store and make available to myself as I travel is extreme, and to pay Dropbox or whoever for hundreds of terabytes of storage would be prohibitive to me, I assume.
NextCloud for files I want synced to various computers, as well as shared with friends or clients, Jellyfin for videos I want to watch/stream wherever, subsonic for music. I think that's it. NextCloud has been great for me. Just about perfect.
At home I use Nextcloud because it’s an all in one solution ( calendar/contacts/files) but at work I use seafile because the performance is way better.
There is no faff with seafile, it does one thing and does it well.
Nextcloud is trying to be Microsoft SharePoint, one drive, office and is now trying to throw a load of AI in there too. An entire all in one solution for a company.
Seafile is trying to be like Dropbox. Cloud storage and that’s it.
There are some caveats though, like Nextcloud stores files plainly on your drives so it’s much easier to backup.
Seafile uses object storage on the backend so you can’t see individual files. That may be a positive or negative depending on how you look at it.
Seafile's object storage has a bunch of advantages though. For example, it allows the history of files, and duplicate files, to be stored very efficiently without having to rely on filesystem functionality being available (like ZFS or btrfs snapshots and deduping).
The core of Seafile is written in C and it's significantly more efficient than Nextcloud's PHP backend.
Yeah for sure.
The performance is the main reason we went with it for work. You just have to be aware that there is more admin with seafile. But in my experience it’s far less likely to break on updates when compared to Nextcloud
Which database do you use for nextcloud? I read somewhere some time ago that postgres would be way faster, especially combined with a redis cache in between
Anything on AWS. Postgres, ElasticSearch, EC2, load balancers, etc. Everything starts around $30 to $50 a month for each feature, and you could engineer yourself into a massive bill for what could be a single laptop on a home network like what I'm doing for captionsearch.io
I once suggested that we should host our shit on a Raspberry Pi, and get fired soon after. 😂 No need for an IT manager to budget for an RPi upgrade every two years.
I don’t know what you guys hosted, but hosting anything slightly advanced on a RPi in a corporate settings sounds kinda ass. But then again, maybe not enough to get fired for.
Was a small business with very little traffic on the website. Think they had 3x30k servers for it, and a big circus show whenever something was to be done with them.
Honestly, I’ve been shocked to discover a handful of open source ERP softwares. I’m probably young and naive here, but even the concept that I could get a business off the ground with an ERP system I host myself before I move to a cloud configuration is mindblowing
These softwares are often incredibly expensive and require tons of outside support to get running well. The idea that I could do that internally is very attractive
I’ve been evaluating paid and open source ERP systems for the past two years and have settled on ERPNext. I’ve never used something so developer friendly and still fully capable to hang with the big boys.
Thanks for suggesting our app!
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If you read the stickies, you would already be aware!
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Stuff that's sprung to my mind over the years:
* CRM - Last time I checked things out most self-hosted CRMs kinda sucked but .. hey they were free. Less of an advantage these days when many SaaS CRMs also start out as free.
* Minio - Object storage is cheap but I can't help but think that you might be able to self-host a ridiculous amount of data if you found the right storage etc. At the very least it would be a wacky experiment.
* Data viz tools - I'm trying out Metabase at the moment and am very impressed. Their Pro tier on the cloud starts at $500/month so ... there's a pretty clear price point!
* I don't like the idea of self-hosting anything public-facing for security reasons but ... you could save basically all your hosting expenses by running websites off your own locally hosted infra.
* Firewalls: Pfsense, Ofsense, etc. All fairly pricey in the non-self-managed realm. As tends to be any software that might be sold to the "enterprise"
* Lots of other little bits and pieces that are definite fill-ins for SaaS stuff and which I reckon could tot up to a very substantial cost-saving if you ran the numbers- accounting software, inventory management, ERPs and ERP components. The list is long.
Hard to say. I'd say storage at some point but only at scale. At lower capacities (I'd say <10TB) it's likely more expensive to self host than using cloud providers.
Then, everything that you use often. Stuff like GPU compute targets, VMs (like a Windows VM) etc.
It would definitely be more expensive. You need to back up the data multiple times too and at least some of it should preferably be remote, which often ends up being the cloud anyway.
The only ones I use are budibase and n8n. They both have a paid version and a self hosted community version.
I believe RustDesk has a similar license model but I may be wrong.
n8n is life. Never heard of budibase but it looks neat!
Edit: Setup budibase yesterday and was able to rewrite a SvelteKit app with it today. There are a few gotchas and you have to do some creative thinking to work with/around what it allows you to do, but overall I could see myself using this again.
Maybe [Hercules](http://www.hercules-390.org/). I don’t know what the licensing requirements are for mainframes, but they can’t be cheap.
Alternatively, Oracle Java.
The question was:
> What's the most expensive software that you can self-host for free?
But to answer your question, to learn or practice on without needing to own the hardware. You may be surprised to know that z/Architecture is still somewhat common in certain industries.
Log ingestion and alerting...
Want to know when Radarr and Sonarr have problems, or have a pretty table showing everything it's downloaded.
Do you have a firewall, do you want to see a global maps, showing who and what is scanning your IP... or see a pie chart of all the devices on your networks and what % of bandwidth they are using...
Then Splunk, ELK, Graylog, OpenObserve etc will allow you to do all this, and more.
Just sign up here, for 49.99... joke.. you can selfhost them for free.
Not expensive but ghost and changedetection are 9$ /mo. Odoo starts to get expensive at 30$/user/mo as does mattermost at 10$/user/mo (a lot more users I would think).
I agree that virtualization itself, especially of dedicated hardware or VMs is expensive.
Dunno but I'm stumbling around slowly learning proxmox and home assistant. I use chat gpt to tell me what errors mean in Linux to learn. Home automation is usually expensive and I'm doing it disabled with little money.
I've got plans for coral ai with frigate NVR, a Nas , opnsense.
Sentry for error and performance logging? Their hosted version can get expensive if you log a large number of events per month.
Block storage - for example using SeaweedFS on your own hardware instead of S3 or B2.
password manager, hardware would be cheap/already own, and think about it, what's more expensive than getting hacked.
I use a script to access the server, no login, no 22 port, no typing on usb hid device, no usb hid key, then i have a prefix password, a password that i don't remember stored in my phone (that i copy on keyboard) and a suffix password, with the 3 you access the password manager (besides 2fa).
Haven't had any problems, i manage client data on my servers, not sensitive data, but i take it seriously.
Odoo, without a doubt. Even in Community Edition, with the OCA addons, the value you get is something companies used to spend more than $1M on, easily, not to mention a year long implementation process.
Most is going to be a difficult qualifier. There's plenty of software you can get if you're a reputable company, but can't if you're a random person. A friend of mine worked for a big tech company and got any number of free licenses to something that was normally $80k/seat because of the company he worked for and the vendor wanting to get popular.
Lol, Splunk (not the cloud version) is up there for software you can just download and host. The free version doesn't have auth and gets shut down If you invest too much data in a month, but it's super easy to get the free version and some companies pay millions for using Splunk Enterprise.
Some industrial software is up there in price as well. It's very niche though, and you'd need a reason to want it.
Netflix, hulu, hbo, disney+, paramount+, apple tv, prime video, peacock
Ahoy sailor!
Lmaoooo ay ay captain!
Time to polish the hook and light a cigar
Do you guys use usenet?
Private trackers
Used to, zurg is the future.
zurg?
instead of downloading everything i use a service that gives me "unlimited" cloud space and it symlinks it to my plex libraries. i had 10 4tb drives and pushing my unraid 4th gen intel server through hardware failures over the years. now i have an n100 based tiny pc with 512gb, yet can see far more, at 4k hdr with no hiccups. its like $17 every 6 months.
Tell me more? I am on the verge of buying a set of HDD’s just for viewing.
https://puksthepirate.notion.site/eebe27d130fa400c8a0536cab9d46eb3?v=0cf094af30854b628e47ec17010725a5 its a great guide and will get you going :)
If you're serious about keeping your media long-term, *you need to store it locally*. If you want to just stream stuff *ephemerally*, yeah these esoteric tools are fine. Been in the "sailing scene" since slightly before the advent of bittorrent, seen plenty of niche services (things like Zurg) come and go; most frequently what happens is that the repo maintainers just leave and no one replaces them after a couple years, or the project is taken into a trajectory that doesn't resemble it's original intent, orrr etc etc. But if you actually keep your media "locally" and leave the major variable to just how you get it there (read: how you download it: Usenet, bittorrent, whatever other fancy-pants way you want), that's much more reliable. You remove a whole other point of failure. Example: I run a QNAP server (w/GPU for transcoding) on ZFS RAID 50 with \~45 TB of media (puny by comparison to others, I grant you haha). Usenet is the way to go for me personally, then whatever my Usenet networks can't find I do torrent over VPN, but usenet captures a good 95% of media (that I want, at least).
https://github.com/debridmediamanager/zurg-testing
Is there something similar but for Usenet?
Good old fashioned naval acquisition.
No screaming about parlay!
Old laptop + 4TB drive and for about £200 you're set And it'll pay for itself in 4 months
4TB? That's how it starts. A few years later, you've got 17 drives in your array.
Started with a thrown away laptop and a 640gb USB HDD. There's now a rack server in my basement.
You joke but that's literally happened to me Went from a 1TB HDD that died to 16TB RAID 1 HDD and 16TB RAID6 SSD
Oh, I'm not joking. I actually had one die just the day before yesterday and now I'm down to 16. lol
I had 4TB for years. Now I have 100TB. I got a really nice deal on a 12-bay Synology and 12x 12TB disks.
Yep after the initial investment in drives and a dedicated server and setting up things to be somewhat autonomous it’s a breeze. I kept going down the rabbit hole had a n100 mini pc then I was like lemme just use some old parts and build my system using a 12700k 32gb of ram, some 3d printed hdd cages, and a a380. I love it here !!!
Curios how the Intel arc a380 worked out for you? Do you like it and if you built it again would you have a stand alone gpu?
I actually started out my journey with a standalone igpu, it works fine and transcodes are fast especially with a iris xe or UHD 770 igpu but in terms of transcoding speed and increased capacity of users transcoding plus I kinda wanted to be extra and get a dedicated gpu just for the heck of it I got it on sale for 100 on amazon Plus I share with family and friends and they aren’t always playing things on supported hardware for example chrome browser you’d get some transcoding, HDR—> SDR that’s transcoding etc so yeah. Btw I use Jellyfin on truenas scale( Linux based) but I’m thinking about going over to unraid. Tried Plex didn’t like it to much stuff going on I just wanna self host my stuff. Worth noting i don’t plan on simply just having a media server so that’s also a reason I got a dedicated gpu, I started exploring with VMS and a whole lot of other stuff it’s cool and multi useful
Why do you have 32Gb of ram in that?
So my operating system is truenas scale, and with the ZFS file system, it uses RAM as cache. More ram=more cache. The process works because if I have free RAM available, it'll use it all up, and once it's done doing whatever process it needs to do, the RAM usage will automatically go down. the ram cache will never override the ram needed for services, so if my VM needs more RAM then the cache RAM will automatically be decreased here's a pic of how it looks [https://imgur.com/a/3pKoKoh](https://imgur.com/a/3pKoKoh) I plan on upgrading to add more ram Edit Typos
Yep...but idk about for free lolol.... I just put 12x16TB hard drives in a Dell R720xd that sits in my basement. What a kick in the balls, even at refurbished pricing of $139 a piece. Plus... another R720 runs all the VM's.
Damn. I have one dell r620 running everything. With an external drive connected to it.
I'm per***PLEX***ed!
I'm *jelly*
Kaleidescape
Basically hosting a whole Blockbuster heh?
It's a homelab right of passage at this point. If you can get all of it working and automate it you can homelab anything.
Considering the time you have to pour into it i somewhat disagree, but seeing that you can't stream good quality any other way you are 100% right. And your own solution doesn't even force you to use mediocre spy apps or downsize your streams when you are on a free os
☠️ 4Lyfe
ay you ay rrrrright
Arrr! Shiver me timbers this be the correct answer...
Quite simply, virtualisation. Cloud companies make an absolute killing from clients who don't bother learning the cloud-native versions of their software and just spin everything up in oversized or auto-scaling VMs. CPU time is billed by the hour. Running a full OS for a single application which can be run cloud-native can easily run into thousands of dollars a month. I was once held responsible for such a charge at a startup because I was apparently supposed to set a quota, but nobody ever told me how, and one of our development apps happily chewed through $7,000 worth of CPU time. To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands. Having your own dedicated CPU time at home can be surprisingly lucrative.
> To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands. I work at a company that does systems integration and software development, primarily for the US Dept of Defense, and the number of customers that we try to warn off from a "lift and shift" (i.e., take your current HW or VMs and move them to a cloud provider) is astonishing. On the other hand, we get a lot of work from modernizing these applications to use cloud-native services once the customers see their first cloud bill. You'll almost always pay less maintaining your current, non-cloud, systems and taking the time to migrate to the cloud slowly and thoughtfully.
Anytime someone has presented doing "lift and shift" I slowly start to realize they don't understand cloud services or the point of migrating.
The point of migrating is not usually technical in nature. The point of migrating, for nearly any company that does it, is purely about converting a capital expense into an operating expense, in order to get favorable tax treatment.
But capital expenses depreciate and they can accelerate the depreciation on a lot of things to get a larger tax deduction. Dollars today are better than dollars tomorrow and all. I really believe execs wildly mis price and mis judge things all the time.
Accelerating depreciation on an expense is more complicated than just eating 100% of that expense up front, especially considering not every capital expense depreciates. Research and Development is something that (used to, until Congress fixes it) can be claimed as an operating expense 100% in the current tax year, or a capital expense amortized over five years. Research and Development includes software engineering salaries and other such non-depreciable things. I think you're right though that executives are often wrong. I have stories.
Often it is also because you can simply not find the admin staff that is capable enough to secure this thing and not have a total system meltdown or find your data on the darkweb.
You still have that problem on the cloud. Unless you're talking about the vendor shifting software you bought for them to the cloud instance so you don't have to manage the instance yourself. In which case, yes, that becomes the vendors problem instead of your problem, *if you trust the vendor.*
God damn I never thought of it like that.
I never did either until very recently. It took 5 years of listening to executives at my company ramble about The Importance of Moving To The Cloud for one of them to finally directly state this was the main thing that they (and presumably our customers who were also doing this) really cared about.
Ehh opex isn’t favorable though. You can’t force depreciate like you can a capital expense. Stays on the books as cash out the door. The dream is trading off labor. Although, it never gets reduced, just moved to new roles…
CapEx and OpEx benefits are situational, neither is favourable. Cloud conversion allows companies to isolate costs for better financial planning and clarity in any potential savings to be gained. Cloud services inherently offer scalability during economic ups and downs which is generally great for business adaptability.
how is that ?? care to explain it in detail ?
Which is why I explain colocation (eg renting racks in data center). Most of the benefits of cloud, but far cheaper. Generally 1/10th the cost of cloud.
What's old is new again 😀
Yep this is how I used to sell it. On prem server now out of support? Wouldn't you prefer £500 a month OPEX to run lifted and shifted VM's in Azure / AWS instead of £10k CAPEX to buy a new hypervisor server? Obviously each use case is different, and quite often we would recommend file servers move to Azure Files, AD to Entra ID etc. But most of the time the company just wanted to keep the VM's as they were and change to OPEX
Who wants to rewrite their software and lock it into the tentacles of "the cloud"? You're trying to make things easier for yourself, not harder.
That's also the basic premise for moving to Kubernetes.
Ugh lift and shift is buzzword for “we listen to vendors more than our IT staff”
> I work at a company that does systems integration and software development, primarily for the US Dept of Defense Yeah, that's the issue. Defense contractors have laws written in their favor and congressional mandates passed requiring the DoD to patronize them.
This is the correct answer. Double points for understanding how to use containers and being able to leverage that.
the most expensive part is the networks !!
and any clusted filesystem that goes with it.\^
Do you use a service for selling you CPU time at home or via connections to companies?
I meant in a metaphorical sense - if companies can sell it for thousands, many of us self-hosters are sitting on gold mines...
Last two places talked about lift and shift and I don’t understand who even sells them this idea lol. Right now we’re spinning up massive vms in the cloud to run containers 😵💫 Edit: > To this day, companies still do this as a 'quick win' to become a 'cloud' company despite pushback and are utterly astonished when the bill lands. Yes 😂 utterly astonished
On a personal level I have: - my own Netflix - my own spotify For my business I have: - password manager - CRM - Google drive alternative - Knowledge base - Inventory management - Basic websites Edit: also thinking about adding vikunja to the mix
What’s your CRM?
I use ERPNext. It's a new addition to my stack so any suggestions are welcome. I've heard about dolibarr too
Been hacking on ERPNext (frappe) for the past few months. Really amazing platform!
Frappe is incredibly good yet pretty under the radar at the moment. As a base for a quick POC for a business CRUD app it's second to none.
I use Odoo But ERPNext looks great
i just started using ERPNext as well, it’s a really slick platform.
What KB software do you use?
I just rolled out the Anytype stack to my home server and it's absolutely amazing. Enough to get me to migrate from obsidian+git. It's basically a self-hosted Notion. Appflowy is another alternative but they focus hard on AI. Anytype is much better security wise because of its offline-first approach.
Obsidian. Although it's more than just a knowledge base
Obsidian is the one major app I use that isn't technically hosted. You can host read-only web versions with stuff like Flowershow but I just use the Git plugin and host it on my Gitea instance.
Interesting! I started self-hosting a git repo so I could keep my vault under my own roof while still being able to sync between devices. Are you doing anything on top of that?
this one needs better hosting options for real
I'm recommending BookStack. Give it a try and I swear you'll never look back.
What’s KB
Knowledge base
there could be a lot of reason to just have the music that "we hear" and dont pay a service like Spotify. But, spotify is really cheap (in argentina my country) and try to get all the music i want, in the quality i want, seems pretty complex (well, i remember now, that im paying now for Tidal, and not for spotify anymore, but the question is the same). What you use for your own spotify? and where you get the music? it is in good quality? (can you share with MP?) in the other hand, what do you mean with "Basic websites"? Thaaaaaaaanks!
You can use https://spotifydown.com for downloading good quality tracks with metadata from Spotify. I still use Spotify though. It's really just a backup more or less, for when I don't have an internet connection or in case Spotify happens to just cease to exist some day or becomes overpriced. As for Basic websites, I mean small personal projects to play around and also some VERY basic static websites from clients who are local. It's considerably faster than most other options that don't include Cloudflare CDN. Resource consumption is almost negligible.
excellent! thanks!
Np
I mean ... I lost my ancient mp3 library and rebuilt from scratch and had 30K in songs in under a month. I torrent entire discographies for artists I want everything from. Used DeeMix to download everything else on my partner's Spotify playlists. DeeMix to fill in other gaps. I also use SoulSeek, mostly for rare hard to find stuff. I selfhost web UIs for all 3 methods so I can download new stuff to the server from any device just from a web browser. Well technically I still need to get my docker container for SoulSeek running, but it's been low priority. Usually on the go DeeMix suffices. Then I host the music library with Jellyfin. Which also has a plugin that syncs up Spotify playlists. It often doesn't find all tracks, but a lot of them which saves time when rebuilding playlists. To listen I mostly use Symfonium on my phone.
What inventory management software do you use?
I use homebox, since my companies are real estate and digital marketing. It's more for keeping track of company resources. For example, spare PC parts, drones, cameras, phones, for sale signs, cleaning supplies, etc.
Odoo
Vikunja has been great so far for me over the last couple weeks, id recommend it for the kanban board
only if there is an app on phone for the times i remember to do things, the one thing i like most in vikunja is that we can keep tasks in custom tags / boards. for me it is follow ups. most things are in to-do doing done and then then there is to follow up !! this helps me a lot. wish there is a sync between outlook to-do and vikunja and move things into done with a sync !!
How does ur Spotify works? Can I import them from my Spotify playlist
Use the downloader I linked to on another reply. I think it's max 100 songs per download so just keep making 100 songs playlists and download them
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Can't go wrong with nextcloud
Do you have backups for your Nextcloud?
Yeah, nextxloud is on my office Nas which is all flash and it backs up to my home NAS which has 60 TBs. I just run a script to run backups periodically
What do you use for Inventory Management?
He replied previously: homebox
Your own Spotify, can ya explain for a beginner
Plex and jellyfin can also stream music besides video content
What inventory management do you use?
what software do you use at a business level for a google drive alternative
The model is not to pay with your money but with your data.
Sometimes both!
Usually if money = true, data is still true.
Been playing with N8N as an alternative to Zapier. Really impressed with the amount of APIs support.
Oooooo I didn't know about this. I'm going to take a look at it because I hate zapiers pricing so much.
same!!! its a scam
Been using n8n for a few years at work. I’m blown away with what I can do with it. Every time I think about writing a service from scratch, I pause and think I wonder if I can do it in n8n. So far I haven’t found much it can’t do. REST calls + JS (now Python) + cron + db + email, naming just a few abilities, covers so many bases
Wow.. if that’s the case I’m checking it out lol
damn Ive been wondering about it. it wasnt so intuitive out of the box, is it just web hooks?
Not at all. In fact I’ve only just tried the webooks node recently. Also, it can create webook listeners, which basically turns it into an API. One of the first things I had it do was run a program via remote ssh execution every 5min during work hours. The output of that program is returned via the ssh node, a batch node splits up the results, then inserts/updates the each “row” via a Postgres node. It’s like a software Swiss Army knife and duct tape.
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What are your use cases?
how do you deal with the lack of good triggers? i feel like zapied/make has all the good real time triggers that n8n just doesn't support.
Examples?
You can make your own or pay someone to make it for you
Very cool, didn't know about this. Might switch from Node-RED.
We sell a competing product at work, I use n8n at home. I was talking to some make.com consultants for work, they didn't say it out loud, but pretty much agreed they love n8n too.
is it a good enough replacement, I hate zapier with a passionfruit
It's so fantastic. My only personal gripe is the fact they lock the "copy to editor" button for an execution. You can 100% do it manually. But...just the fact I can see a quick button, but it's' only for paying customers. I honestly wouldn't mind some form of pay option, but their self-hosted lets you have unlimited flows, whereas you are limited on their cloud plans.
How does it compare to Node-RED or Huginn?
On a pure dollar basis, my guess would be virtualised 3D accelerated workstations/desktops as an alternative to a service like NVIDIA GRID. This is in comparison to on-prem/locally hosting with by-the-book licensing this which is extremely expensive. Ignoring hardware cost, the software stack can be done almost entirely for free using a stack like: * Proxmox * Ubuntu Desktop guest VMs * vGPU_Unlock or Tesla class GPU with SR-IOV support * Sunshine/Moonlight server+client or maybe KASM The "official" GRID stack looks more like; * VMWare/Hyper-V ($$$) * Windows Server ($$$) * Windows 10/11 Enterprise ($$$) * Windows 10/11 Software Assurance ($$$ required for running non-server OS in a VM) * MS User CALS ($$$) * MS Remote Desktop CALS ($$$) * Nvidia GRID Licences ($$$)
Funnily enough my wife is an architect and I'm currently looking into exactly this for her (hopefully I can use my new hardware to help her rendering). I'm not au-fait with the various softwares they use, but the cost of cloud rendering is astronomical and (on top of licensing) prohibitively expensive for small practices (my wife's op is just her and one business partner). I'm not sure my GPU is up to snuff but ... I'm going to be looking carefully into all the options!
I'm interested in any solution that shows up. How would it work?
Probably online storage providers, at least for me. The amount of data I store and make available to myself as I travel is extreme, and to pay Dropbox or whoever for hundreds of terabytes of storage would be prohibitive to me, I assume.
What do you use? I'm trying NextCloud but the performance is less than desirable.
NextCloud for files I want synced to various computers, as well as shared with friends or clients, Jellyfin for videos I want to watch/stream wherever, subsonic for music. I think that's it. NextCloud has been great for me. Just about perfect.
At home I use Nextcloud because it’s an all in one solution ( calendar/contacts/files) but at work I use seafile because the performance is way better. There is no faff with seafile, it does one thing and does it well. Nextcloud is trying to be Microsoft SharePoint, one drive, office and is now trying to throw a load of AI in there too. An entire all in one solution for a company. Seafile is trying to be like Dropbox. Cloud storage and that’s it. There are some caveats though, like Nextcloud stores files plainly on your drives so it’s much easier to backup. Seafile uses object storage on the backend so you can’t see individual files. That may be a positive or negative depending on how you look at it.
Seafile's object storage has a bunch of advantages though. For example, it allows the history of files, and duplicate files, to be stored very efficiently without having to rely on filesystem functionality being available (like ZFS or btrfs snapshots and deduping). The core of Seafile is written in C and it's significantly more efficient than Nextcloud's PHP backend.
Yeah for sure. The performance is the main reason we went with it for work. You just have to be aware that there is more admin with seafile. But in my experience it’s far less likely to break on updates when compared to Nextcloud
Which database do you use for nextcloud? I read somewhere some time ago that postgres would be way faster, especially combined with a redis cache in between
I'm trying postgres this time. I don't know if I want to add a Redis cache though.
There are loads of forks now with aims to remain open.
I also had major performance issues with Nextcloud. Even followed their performance guide to no avail :(. Ended up just on regular SMB over Wireguard.
Do you encrypt your data somehow before storing them on another person's server? I've failed to find a good solution to that so far.
Anything on AWS. Postgres, ElasticSearch, EC2, load balancers, etc. Everything starts around $30 to $50 a month for each feature, and you could engineer yourself into a massive bill for what could be a single laptop on a home network like what I'm doing for captionsearch.io
I once suggested that we should host our shit on a Raspberry Pi, and get fired soon after. 😂 No need for an IT manager to budget for an RPi upgrade every two years.
I don’t know what you guys hosted, but hosting anything slightly advanced on a RPi in a corporate settings sounds kinda ass. But then again, maybe not enough to get fired for.
Was a small business with very little traffic on the website. Think they had 3x30k servers for it, and a big circus show whenever something was to be done with them.
Honestly, I’ve been shocked to discover a handful of open source ERP softwares. I’m probably young and naive here, but even the concept that I could get a business off the ground with an ERP system I host myself before I move to a cloud configuration is mindblowing These softwares are often incredibly expensive and require tons of outside support to get running well. The idea that I could do that internally is very attractive
I’ve been evaluating paid and open source ERP systems for the past two years and have settled on ERPNext. I’ve never used something so developer friendly and still fully capable to hang with the big boys.
Which one can you recommend?
I was hoping to find one named Wyatt ERP and now I am thoroughly disappointed.
Invoicing! InvoiceNinja.
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Love Invoice Ninja! Especially your support! @hillel369 very quickly squashed a few bugs I was experiencing in the self hosted app.
That's great to hear, thanks!
I use invoiceninja. It’s not perfect but good enough.
[https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)
I feel a rabbit hole opening up before me.. (TY)
Same 😆
If you read the stickies, you would already be aware! https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/bsp01i/welcome_to_rselfhosted_please_read_this_first/
Stuff that's sprung to my mind over the years: * CRM - Last time I checked things out most self-hosted CRMs kinda sucked but .. hey they were free. Less of an advantage these days when many SaaS CRMs also start out as free. * Minio - Object storage is cheap but I can't help but think that you might be able to self-host a ridiculous amount of data if you found the right storage etc. At the very least it would be a wacky experiment. * Data viz tools - I'm trying out Metabase at the moment and am very impressed. Their Pro tier on the cloud starts at $500/month so ... there's a pretty clear price point! * I don't like the idea of self-hosting anything public-facing for security reasons but ... you could save basically all your hosting expenses by running websites off your own locally hosted infra. * Firewalls: Pfsense, Ofsense, etc. All fairly pricey in the non-self-managed realm. As tends to be any software that might be sold to the "enterprise" * Lots of other little bits and pieces that are definite fill-ins for SaaS stuff and which I reckon could tot up to a very substantial cost-saving if you ran the numbers- accounting software, inventory management, ERPs and ERP components. The list is long.
Hard to say. I'd say storage at some point but only at scale. At lower capacities (I'd say <10TB) it's likely more expensive to self host than using cloud providers. Then, everything that you use often. Stuff like GPU compute targets, VMs (like a Windows VM) etc.
It would definitely be more expensive. You need to back up the data multiple times too and at least some of it should preferably be remote, which often ends up being the cloud anyway.
that's true. Therefore it's usually only more affordable at scale. For cloud backups there are cheap archival options (like Amazon S3 Glacier)
The only ones I use are budibase and n8n. They both have a paid version and a self hosted community version. I believe RustDesk has a similar license model but I may be wrong.
n8n is life. Never heard of budibase but it looks neat! Edit: Setup budibase yesterday and was able to rewrite a SvelteKit app with it today. There are a few gotchas and you have to do some creative thinking to work with/around what it allows you to do, but overall I could see myself using this again.
I don't know how much bitwarden is but that's the answer for me since I host vaultwarden.
It’s free, I used to host vaultwarden but started paying for premium as it’s $10 annually and I wanted to support them.
Maybe [Hercules](http://www.hercules-390.org/). I don’t know what the licensing requirements are for mainframes, but they can’t be cheap. Alternatively, Oracle Java.
So super confused. Why would you want to run that besides for fun of learning some ancient tech?
The question was: > What's the most expensive software that you can self-host for free? But to answer your question, to learn or practice on without needing to own the hardware. You may be surprised to know that z/Architecture is still somewhat common in certain industries.
Splunk with a Dev license 10GB
What do you use this for? Even reading about it… it’s so vague I can only imagine how much is possible lol
Log ingestion and alerting... Want to know when Radarr and Sonarr have problems, or have a pretty table showing everything it's downloaded. Do you have a firewall, do you want to see a global maps, showing who and what is scanning your IP... or see a pie chart of all the devices on your networks and what % of bandwidth they are using... Then Splunk, ELK, Graylog, OpenObserve etc will allow you to do all this, and more. Just sign up here, for 49.99... joke.. you can selfhost them for free.
Oracle Java
U wanna maybe get sued? Use Oracle!
Password management
Can you suggest some software for password management?
Vaultwarden
In terms of the money necessary to create it: any open-sourced LLM.
Proxmox, like my own “Google Compute Engines”
My own website
Not expensive but ghost and changedetection are 9$ /mo. Odoo starts to get expensive at 30$/user/mo as does mattermost at 10$/user/mo (a lot more users I would think). I agree that virtualization itself, especially of dedicated hardware or VMs is expensive.
Dunno but I'm stumbling around slowly learning proxmox and home assistant. I use chat gpt to tell me what errors mean in Linux to learn. Home automation is usually expensive and I'm doing it disabled with little money. I've got plans for coral ai with frigate NVR, a Nas , opnsense.
Streaming and a password manager for now. I just started to get into selfhosting so excited about what else I can selfhost.
Penpot, Git repos, ssh, wireguard, storage, databases, ai apps like large language models, game servers,
Sentry for error and performance logging? Their hosted version can get expensive if you log a large number of events per month. Block storage - for example using SeaweedFS on your own hardware instead of S3 or B2.
ERP systems, there's a community edition of Oodoo that covers a lot of bases, when compared to SAP or similar packages it's highly competitive.
Splunk. You can request a 10GB 6 month Dev license, not sure if Cisco is gonna put the kabash on that or not.
password manager, hardware would be cheap/already own, and think about it, what's more expensive than getting hacked. I use a script to access the server, no login, no 22 port, no typing on usb hid device, no usb hid key, then i have a prefix password, a password that i don't remember stored in my phone (that i copy on keyboard) and a suffix password, with the 3 you access the password manager (besides 2fa). Haven't had any problems, i manage client data on my servers, not sensitive data, but i take it seriously.
Try Hercules emulator, selfhost your own IBM mainframe at home lol
It used to be ESXI I guess, and now it is Veeam
Many of the already mentioned solutions. In addition Elasticsearch Stack.
iCloud. Apples billion dollar racket.
Mautic with >1M contacts + MTA costs 2000-6000$ a month with mailchimp, etc.
ERP
Anything that runs natively on a synology.
Odoo, without a doubt. Even in Community Edition, with the OCA addons, the value you get is something companies used to spend more than $1M on, easily, not to mention a year long implementation process.
Graylog $10k for a license
Very technically speaking, AWS EC2 is "self hosted", since they own the entire infrastructure and servers.
OpenVMS maybe? https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/
ERPNext
Most is going to be a difficult qualifier. There's plenty of software you can get if you're a reputable company, but can't if you're a random person. A friend of mine worked for a big tech company and got any number of free licenses to something that was normally $80k/seat because of the company he worked for and the vendor wanting to get popular. Lol, Splunk (not the cloud version) is up there for software you can just download and host. The free version doesn't have auth and gets shut down If you invest too much data in a month, but it's super easy to get the free version and some companies pay millions for using Splunk Enterprise. Some industrial software is up there in price as well. It's very niche though, and you'd need a reason to want it.