- Don't depend on other people's software services.
- Buy a domain and host your own website.
- Don't pick a sketchy TLD or registrar.
- Mailing lists beat social media accounts.
- It's okay to depend on a cloud.
I had the belief that the article was going to say the exact opposite wrt. cloud hosting. You're literally renting space, and if your stuff gets any heat, your cloud provider may simply shut you down without a trial.
Even if you host your own server on your own legal property, most people don't have AS-numbers and peering agreements, so ultimately on the internet most people rent something.
My interpretation of their words on the cloud front was more like, don't depend on or become locked into any specific service. If you're using Azure to host a VPS, you could easily move it to AWS or, Hetzner, etc.
Likewise, if you're using Cloudflare as a CDN (and only as a CDN!) there are other CDN providers available that you could switch to with relative ease.
> - Don't depend on other people's software services.
> - Buy a domain and host your own website.
I had the exact chain of thought, only to find that traffic of the site I built is at the mercy of how Google decided to rank webpages, and putting AI > youtube > Reddit in front of everything else.
> - Mailing lists beat social media accounts.
Similarly, Google set the metric for what counts as spams. Your emails can all go to the spam folder if their AI decides it should.
On (1), yes that is true to an extent - the domain discoverability is indeed mostly at the mercy of Google, and the whole "AI overview" is a garbage experience. However, looking at my own search console data (both Google and Bing), there are still quite a few folks landing on my pages through search, often for some obscure terms that I somehow documented, so it's still possible to get traffic that way. But again - the goal is less about "drive traffic ASAP" but rather point people from other networks to something you personally own.
On (2), they can, but if you use a more established provider like Buttondown or Mailchimp, and you are not actually sending spam, a lot of folks have quite a bit of success building an audience that way. I've used Buttondown (not affiliated with them in any capacity) personally before and haven't had subscribers complain about deliverability. I am planning on rebooting that this year to see how it goes. I've heard most deliverability issues arise when folks trying to roll out their own email server.
Ultimately you're on the Internet and you don't own the Internet. At that point, you're making decisions about the level of control you want to have and the types of events you may be subject to and the answer is almost certainly "it depends."
Exactly this. At some point, you need to delegate. Make it portable, don't get locked into a proprietary architecture, and you'll be good. Not everyone will be able (or has any desire) to run their own rack.
A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog,DNS, mail. I have 3 Lenovo ThinkCentre Mini PCs running Proxmox VE in HA mode off my basement. Picture at https://devops.science/
You are. I'm tunneling a /23 which I let Vultr announce via BGP over WireGuard to a local router VM. I have a nftables firewall in place before routing the traffic through the tunnel. I block everything except for exposed IPs and ports/protocols just to keep my limited bandwidth free of noise.
You do. That's why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they absolutely know what they're doing. Can't tell you how many friends I had to have a talk with who had plain vanilla port forwarding done on their home router, exposing their entire home network to the web.
Nowadays, I recommend them use Tailscale as an out-of-the-box Wireguard-based VPN to safely connect to their home servers from remote locations.
To be honest, as an IT professional you should have basic knowledge about firewalls. nft/nftables is a big improvement in firewall usability for Linux, I also know many homelab people using OPNSense or even DD-WRT for that job. I prefer plain Linux (distro of your choice, I don't judge) and nft.
TL;DR
One should know firewall fundamentals, nft/nftables as successor of iptables is very convenient to use, a single config document instead of interactiving with 100 cli commands which have to be in a specific order.
Even if you host your own server on your own legal property, most people don't have AS-numbers and peering agreements, so ultimately on the internet most people rent something.