Our data (photos, chats, tables, emails, notes, posts etc.) is scattered across multiple service providers (Google, Facebook, Substack, Whatsapp, Microsoft etc.), locked in proprietary formats with limited accessibility, abused for targeted advertisement. Self hosting is the concept of having your own server machine running awesome free software providing you the online services you need. A notable example to substitute most of your Google environment (photos, drive, docs) is Nextcloud bundled with Collabora Office.

A big drawback for self hosting is maintaining your own server. Even if you host a virtual machine, eliminating the hardware headache, you still need to take care of security and updates. I don’t include backups in this list, as application backup can be dealt elsewhere and server backup is not very different from installing it from scratch. Being an online service provider, the server is more exposed to attacks than your laptop on one side, and has immediate access to more (all) data on the other.

I propose the self-hosted community to keep pace with the industry and move from bare-metal or virtual servers to managed containers. A container is an abstraction layer between the operating system and the application software that is providing a virtual environment (disk, memory, network) isolated from other containers. Installing your self-hosted application, e.g. Nextcloud, on a managed container means you do not have to be an amateur system administrator anymore – security and updates are taken care by the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) provider.

Installing your application in a container is a bit different than installing it on a server. Everything is done with configuration files rather than with a command line. Actually, you do not normally have an SSH login into the container – take that, malicious hacker. Nextcloud is officially maintaining a configuration file called chart for Kubernetes, a popular containers manager. Charts are becoming increasingly available for various software. The very good thing about customizing your installation with charts is that migration from one CaaS provider to another should be quick and painless.

The devil is of course in the details. A virtual machine (VM, VPS, node) is available for ~$7/mo, for example at ssdnodes.com. A container can easily start from $70/mo, mostly because the services are enterprise oriented and they basically provide a dedicated always on on (high availability) virtual machine to deal with the incoming requests and scale performance as needed. This limitation can be overcome by configuring a “scale to zero” cluster, when you pay only for the time your application was actually working ~$0.1/hr. It seems that this is what DigitalOcean are doing with their $12/mo basic Kubernetes plan ($40/mo for high availability). To get that and much more for free you can register with Oracle Cloud (so far I did not find the catch for this 4core 24GB RAM 250GB SSD free cheese).

A complementary issue to online services is the storage of your data and applications backup. Storage does not have to reside together with your server, and it does not have to be super fast (you will always have a few fast GB on the server). IDrive have a nice deal now of 1TB of S3 bucket for $40/yr, first year 90% off. The biggest part of your archive should be immutable (you can add but not modify), to protect from ransomware. You can keep that online storage in sync with your laptop, and once in a while to sync it to an external HD. If you decide to move your online server to a new provider, you terminate the old server, install your applications with the new provider using the existent configuration charts, restore application data from your big storage and you are as good as new.

So, what is a Kubbutz? It is a Kubernetes Kibbutz of course! An ideological movement that increases the digital freedoms of the people by working the fields of devop. Configure various awesome self-hosted software on various CaaS providers, optimize prices, create and distribute instructables, support the newcomers. There is also a place for the new RedHat – a devops company to mediate the free software between the general public and the CaaS providers, a company to compete with Google, Facebook, Microsoft for the global market. But, as the Kibbutz song says – “Don’t say a day will come, bring the day!”