Best config for reliable yunohost experience

Discuss
1

Hello,

Me and my friends wants to make the switch and use self hosted services as much as we can.

We wants to use it for ours personal and professional task, so we want something reliable and fast.

any advice on a strong setup ?
Should I host it on my home or use a VPS ?
What is the best way to make backups ?
What app are reliable ? wich one are not ?

Thanks

2

Well uh that kinda depends on what you mean by strong setup :sweat_smile:

You might want to look at YunoHost • index which compares at home vs. on a VPS

Well, there’s the backup system in yunohost. The drawback at the moment being that it is not 100% trivial to extract the archive from the server … but see here for a solution using filezilla

Then the cool stuff, which is not yet integrated in Yunohost, but just as an app (or if you prefer, a module) is to use borg backup to store backups on a remote backup. This kind of backup is encrypted and deduplicated to optimize space. See [Borg & Borg Server] Deduplicated, encrypted and remote backups

We have a system to evaluate and test the quality of application. Apps obtain a quality score, or as we call it “level”. Currently the best level is 7, meaning the app supports installation, removal, upgrade, backup/restore, possibly integration with SSO/LDAP, respect packaging good practices and other stuff. You’ll see the corresponding number in the app list when you try to install one. Since YunoHost 3.4, if an app has questionable quality (level < 2), YunoHost will try to discourage you to install it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.

Basically if an app is at least level 3, it should be kinda okay to use it.

3

To elaborate a bit : I guess if what you’re looking for is reliability, one good thing to do would be to have a second server, as similar as you can to the first (not really in terms of hardware/perf, but in terms of configuration) and try to install / upgrades apps on this ‘test’ server before running stuff in actual production … I think this is close to what @genma does, maybe he has some experience to share on this.

4

Yes i’m scared if I host at home to lost data or uptime, just because my house is not as secure as a datacenter.

So a clumsy person/animal/fire/party can put the server down.

Is they any solutions to synchronize multiple server and redirect the service if one of the main server is down ?

But obviously hosting at home would be the best for privacy

5

Yes, there are some trick one can use like using the fallback application

But I would recommend to start with small steps, don’t take 10 years to build a castle just to discover after entering it that you are allergic to stones :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Also think about if you really need 99.999% availability …

Yes, something can happen that gets your server down, but usually you can leave with your services being down for a few hours or a few days (mainly the critical thing would be email, where if you server is down for more than 5 days, emails being sent will be dropped by relays - but then again, 5 days is a lot). As long as you pay attention to do backup regularly and keep your server up to date (e.g. run upgrades once per months maybe) it’s kinda okay ?

6

Well, I would agree if its was only for me.

I want to invite my family, friends and non-tech people to use my services. The goal is to convince them to join the self hosted / free software movement.

I think software like nextcloud are well design and offer a great alternative, but my only fear the uptime and speed of the server.

7

Well let’s not have too much illusions here : self-hosted services won’t be as good quality as the centralized services like the google empire.

  • The tech giant have armies of engineers and sysadmin which are paid with madness salaries and as a whole they don’t care about ethics.
  • The FOSS community are mainly volunteers and a few of them have the chance to get paid - yet they try to care about ethics. In that context, the quality is obviously less good, because based on mostly free ressources / donations, and because ethics sometimes causes the UX to be more complicated
  • Self-hosting is not a practice that is made easier by ISP or tech entities in general (e.g. hotmail might say "fuck you i’ll flag your emails as spam for no good reason)
  • There will be quacks here and there because you have other things to do in your life than checking 24/7 that everything is running smoothly

If your server is down for 2h or even 12 or 24h hours and your family and friends are not happy with this, they should chill and relax and think about how technology makes them so angry about stupid stuff :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Of course, if this happens over and over, that’s a real issue. But of course we work to try to make this not happen.

So your expectation should just be to get someting “decent” here and that if, for example, hotmail politic is shit and you users’ mail fall into spam, they’ll have to consider saying goodbye to hotmail. (Maybe you don’t want to self-host email, but that’s just an example of compromises that can be required).

In my example, you see that it’s not just about keeping your server running and running fast, and having backup, but there are various small quacks that can happen.

Think of self-hosting as managing your own garden and vegetables : you don’t do this because the vegetables will be better or cheaper or you’ll have more quantity. You do it for the ethics and you should be able to compromise that it won’t be “as good” and “as comfortable”.

So my point is that if you put too much pressure on “it should be perfect because it’s not just for me and i want people to be convinced” then it will fail. It will simply not be as fancy and smooth as mainstream evil services. In a perfect society, people would be able to get paid to work for free and ethical technology, but that’s not the case. Instead, you and your users should realize that tech giant and society a whole has taught us to be looking for the perfect, fancy, round, red and smooth tomatoes. And if it’s not perfectly round you should throw them to the trash and impatiently run to another shop! Which is the root of the crazy consumerist society we live in where everything is a waste if it’s not perfect :wink:. But with patience and tolerance, you may realize that not-so-perfect vegetables are yummy anyway. But I digress :stuck_out_tongue:

Just take a few steps at a time, don’t invite all your friends and family to switch all their services from one day to the next. Migrate your stuff and habits incrementally, learn along the way, tweak stuff where need, and it shall be fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.