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0 pointskelnos2y ago0 comments

I think it's weird when people suggest that a self-hosted on-prem solution requires no maintenance and has so little downtime such that the time spent fixing issues doesn't matter.

I run a bunch of local services on RPis and a decade-old Mac Mini. I love having the control over things, but I don't pretend I don't spend a decent amount of time maintaining it. I only run things that don't need to be highly available, so something like Pi-Hole is off the table. The last thing I want is for our DNS to go out while I'm sleeping, and my partner has to wake me up because she has work to do.

You mention SD card corruption as the only reason why a RPi-based service might fail, but there are plenty of others: botched updates, random hardware failures, power supply issues, and likely other things I'm not thinking of.

And even if a Pi-Hole can keep three nines of uptime (I'm skeptical of this claim), many people will find significant value in giving someone else money so they don't even have to think about digging into fix a problem for the rare occasion it happens. Suggesting that a particular home-hosted solution is "unbeatable" is meaningless; "unbeatable" in this case is a subjective measure, and other people will value different things than you do.

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sangnoir2y ago

> I love having the control over things, but I don't pretend I don't spend a decent amount of time maintaining it.

I don't know the nature of your maintenance, but I've had unattended security updates working for years, I automated a bunch of stuff and use etc-keeper.

> I only run things that don't need to be highly available

Redundancy helps. 2 (more!) RPis cam be primary/secondary/tertiary DNS servers to match paranoia levels. Even if you have a single PiHole, keeping a pristine copy of the PiHole on a $3 sd card will get one up and running instantly.

> Suggesting that a particular home-hosted solution is "unbeatable" is meaningless

What site am I on, Subscription-Services-News? (:

luckman2122y ago

Oddly I found myself upvoting this comment AND the parent. Neither are wrong. There is no right or wrong on this subject.

$20 a year spent on a hand-rolled RPi that you have full control over and enjoy tinkering with—amazing value!

$20 a year for something like NextDNS so you can spend your time worrying about more important (to YOU) things, amazing value!

It's wondrous the choices we have today. 30 years ago it would have taken a rack full of noisy servers and a few thick books to keep a DNS service up and running at anything even close to 99%.

KolenCh2y ago

Not addressing Pihole directly, as I don’t have much experience there. But have you maintained a router? Running open source firmware or not, router does require a certain level of maintenance, open source ones arguably more. But that doesn’t make it problematic enough to have a lot of downtime. Given some people runs pihole-like software directly on a router, I’m skeptical the down time there is significant enough to stay away from. I mean having high availability internet at home is hard, but I expect the rate of failure of a router to be similar of magnitude comparing to pihole. If you can’t tolerate the latter, I wonder how you solve the availability issue of the former?

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