A month of self-hosting

It has been a month since I last bought a cloud server from Hetzner for self-hosting my websites. It's eye-opening experience, and here I am sharing what I've learnt.

Some of these may be unrelated to self-hosting itself, but it's more about experience I gained during last month.

AI bots

They are real and annoying. When I read about them, I didn't fully understand how bad they are, until my server keeps getting traffic from them. I learnt the hard way that as soon as you publish your website to the web, you will see bots. Somehow. And it's hard to tell if there's any real people in that noise.

As far as I can see, these bots mass-scan for endpoints that I don't serve:

I don't use WordPress, nor any CMS. My website is served from a static folder generated by 11ty that is uploaded manually using rsync.

That's suck. These bots mass-scan for vulnerability. I think my server would get compromised very soon if I hadn't properly configured firewall and web server.

I'm not sure why I stopped trying to block them. Perhaps because I'm too tired.

Simplicity

At first, this website is deployed with Coolify. I thought it's a good idea since it provides ease of management, and also the team behind it has a promo-code for Hetzner.

I stopped using it soon after, since I prefer bare-metal experience, and I don't want to deal with the trouble of multi-layered abstraction.

I learnt how to configure Nginx and acme.sh. Although I need to jump around the web to read, it helps me understand.

And it's simpler.

Perhaps that's the point of doing these things manually yourself. It's about understanding and simplicity.

Disillusion

The more I dig deeper into tech, the more disillusioned I am.

Much of the points against AI are already written and I'm not going to repeat them here.

Scope-creep is a real concern. Anything that tries to do too much ends up not doing anything well (I'm looking at you, systemd). Sometimes I look at BSD solutions and I find them to be more sane. I'm even thinking about migrating to BSD for my server.

Obsession of money is the reason why tech has gone shit. Don't get me wrong, it's crucial to make money especially if you are running a business, but I wonder where the line between enough and greediness is.

I'm getting tired of these. Sometimes I wonder if I've chosen the wrong field.

Closing

Well, guess that's most of the experience I gained during last month of managing my own server.

I wonder how this month will go. Guess we'll see and adapt.

See you.