Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506766

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

I wrote about why I don't (want to) self-host services for others: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-se...

My homelab is my hobby. I maintain it for my pleasure and to learn new skills. We have an infra nerds club with a few colleagues and we're having a lot of fun comparing our approaches!

What I don't want though is a power outage putting my server offline while I'm on holidays, and not be able to access my services at all.

My ISP-provided router supports Wireguard, so I can use that to connect to my KVM and send the Wake on LAN packages.

I've heard that it might be difficult to get one in the US though.

https://jetkvm.com/

One of the most positive things I've done though is to generate "Comment by email" links at the end of each post. People who reach out directly and only to me behave much differently than people who do performative commenting on social media.

The overall rationale for not having comments on my blog is here https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/

For the first one, the main benefits of Astro over static html and css (for my use cases) are the ability to include components and enforce the properties that must be passed. A typical example would be [here][0] where I define a layout for the whole website, and then [on each page that uses it](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/...) I have to pass the right properties. Doable by hand, but it's great to have tooling that can yell at me if I forgot to do it.

Content Collections also let me grab content from e.g. markdown or json and build pages automatically from it. The [Content Collections docs][1] are fairly straightforward.

As for performance issues, I've spent quite a bit of time on the countryside where connectivity was an issue and every extra request was definitely noticeable, hence the value of inlining it (you load one html file that has the css embedded, instead of loading an html file that then tells your browser to load an extra css file). The same can be true in some malls where I live.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-conf-website/blob/main/... [1]: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/

I used it for my personal website, and recently used it when reimplementing the Matrix Conference website. It's really a no-fuss framework that is a joy to use.

Among the things I love about Astro:

- It's still html and css centric - Once built, it doesn't require js by default - You can still opt-into adding js for interactivity here and there - Content collections are neat and tidy - Astro massively optimizes for speed, and the maintainers know how to do it - It had a very helpful devbar to help you visually figure out what easy fix can make your website snappier (like lazily loading images if it detects them below the fold)

For the "optimize for speed" bit, an example is that the css minifier cleverly inlines some CSS to avoid additional queries. The Image component they provide will set the width and height attribute of an image to avoid content layout shifts. It will also generate responsive images for you.

Netcup offered VPS with 1 TB of storage for €30 / month back when I subscribed. The server has always been oversized for my needs, but that was the most financially interesting back then.

I recently switched to another ISP at home that gives me a fixed IP. I decided to move my services at home to shave off the VPS costs. Since I already had a Raspberry Pi 4, I only had to buy a SSD and an enclosure.

> I believe the USB controller still shares a bus with the NIC, which means maxing out the network connection will affect disk rw performance. You could confirm this by observing a concurrent iperf affecting fio results.

Thanks for the pointers, I didn't know about iperf! That's something I'll likely try at some point for the sake of completeness, although I have other projects competing for my attention.

> Well, that's specifically AES precompiles. Just like for kopia, you can benchmark and change LUKS algo for something more suitable for the platform like xchacha20: https://rr-developer.github.io/LUKS-on-Raspberry-Pi/

Absolutely, that disk was encrypted using xchacha20. I used the excellent sdm project (https://github.com/gitbls/sdm) to make my Raspi boot from an encrypted disk. They have great documentation pointing out that xchacha20 should be used on the Pi 4 and earlier (https://github.com/gitbls/sdm/blob/master/Docs/Disk-Encrypti...)

In particular, the Personal Time mode of iOS has been a game changer for me: https://ergaster.org/til/ask-smartphone-attention/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204755

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I could in theory self-host it but I'd rather use a service with a proper team to maintain it.

The free tier does everything I need. I'd be more than willing to pay ~€5/month for it to contribute to its sustainability, but there is no paying tier that makes sense to me as an individual an occasional contractor.