How much maintenance do you find your self-hosting involves?
I recognize this will vary depending on how much you self-host, so I’m curious about the range of experiences from the few self-hosted things to the many self-hosted things.
Also how might you compare it to other maintenance of your other online systems (e.g. personal computer/phone/etc.)?
Very little. I have enough redundancy through regular snapshots and offsite backups that I’m confident enough to let Watchtower auto-update most of my containers once a week - the exceptions being pihole and Home Assistant. Pihole gets very few updates anyway, and I tend to skip the mid-month Home Assistant updates so that’s just a once a month thing to check for breaking changes before pushing the button.
Meanwhile my servers’ host OSes are stable LTS distros that require very little maintenance in and of themselves.
Ultimately I like to tinker, but once I’m done tinkering I want things to just work with very little input from me.
Mostly nothing, except for Home Assistant, which seems to shit the bed every few months. My other services are Docker containers or Proxmox LXCs that just work.
It’s as much or as little as you want to. If you don’t want to change anything, you can use something like debian and only maintain once every 5 years (and you could even skip that).
I personally spend a little more, by choice, because I use gentoo. But if I’m busy, I can avoid maintenance by only running routine updates every couple of weeks or so.
For my local media server? Practically none. Maybe restart the system once a month if it starts getting slow. Clear the cache, etc.
When I hosted game servers: Depending on the game, you may have to fix something every few hours. Arma 3 is, by far, the worst. Which really sucks because the games can last really long, and it can be annoying to save and load with the GM tool thing.
When I hosted game servers: Depending on the game, you may have to fix something every few hours. Arma 3 is, by far, the worst. Which really sucks because the games can last really long, and it can be annoying to save and load with the GM tool thing.
Was that a mix of games being more involved and the way their server software was set up, from what you could tell, or…?
A bit of both. It really depends on the game. Some games are super simple, just launch an executable and hand out the IP. Others are needlessly complicated or just horribly coded. My example game is just an absolute mess all around even just as a player; running a server is no different. And since the actual game is all user-made, sometimes the problem is the server software, and sometimes it’s how the mission you’re running was coded. Sometimes it’s both.
Depends what are you doing. Something like keep base os patched is pretty much nil efforts. Some apps more problematic than others. Home Assistant is always a pain to upgrade and something like postfix is requires nearly 0 maintenance.
Sometimes its real easy and I‘m taking a month off and nothing breaks. Then I have times where I want to add new services or optimize stuff. This can take forever. Right now I‘m building object storage behind a vpn.
I spend a huge amount of time configuring and setting up stuff as it’s my biggest hobby. But I got good enough that when I set something up it can stay for months without any mainainence. Most I do for keeping it up is adding more storage if it turn out to be used more than planned.
Thinks like my opnsense router are best updated when no one else is using the network.
The docker containers I like to update manually after checking the release logs. Doesn’t take long and I often find out about cool new features perusing the release notes.
Projects will sometimes have major updates that break things and I strongly prefer having everything super stable until I have time to sit down and update.
11 stacks, 30+ containers. Borg backups runs automatically to various repositories. Zfs auto snap snot also runs automatically to create rapid backups.
I use unraid as a nas and proxmox for dockers and VMs.
Maybe 1-2 hours a week for ~23 docker containers, 3 LXCs and proxmox, so not much. Most of that time is spend SSH-ing doing minor updates. Running Debian on everything has been amazing. Stability is just phenomenal.
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