Flash drives and periodic transfers.

I have an old mac mini that was a server for a good 4-ish years.

The good:

1. They are pretty good at sticking in a closet and forgetting about them.
2. Specs are always on the decent side and some of the older models are easy to upgrade.
3. Power is ok. It sips power
4. It can run for years without issues. I still have two mac minis I used for CI/CD jobs, thin clients, etc…
5. Its a cheap mac. If you need mac for something, like building custom mac specific applications, then its a decent little machine.

The bad:

1. CPU is usually lacking compared to any computer of the same price range.
2. MAC OS. Its good at desktop but as a server, it just doesn’t have the same options/ease of use as a good linux box. You can get around that by dual booting, but its just another headache. Docker/VMs are also an option, but the RAM/CPU usage would take a hit.
3. The newer the model, the harder it is to upgrade.

I would use it as a specialty server if you have something you do automatically only macs can do. Or as a thin client/vm box.

I used to use it as a CI/CD box before github actions was a thing. If you happen to have one, sure set it up for fun. If you dont and are looking at buying one, I would suggest a cheap dell desktop or (depending on what you want to host) a pi 5 or thin client and throw linux on it.

Quick q what are you using to host your podcast site? I went and followed on Mastodon, since that works best for personal lists for me.

I like Linux and I like the idea of prepping (or sometimes making fun of it) so I think this should be good.

Some services Ive been looking at:

• Cheapest seems to be namecheaps own offerings: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/
• Proton mail seems to be good, but I would have to pay extra for the Thunderbird integration by the look of things.

I have one running on the equivalent of a pi. It works no problem. The biggest issue is the constant io and network traffic but it’s not terrible.

I wish there was a only poll once every x amount of time instead of the constant polling, but it’s a good solution. I use lemmy.world as the main account and the other account when I need to post under my real name with some projects I run. Plus it makes for a good development instance since I work on lemmy from time to time

For me my self hosted version stopped working. From what the GitHub issues are saying, Google is starting to block instances if they get flagged.

It sucks…and seems to be catching on. Ive seen a quite a few on GitHub that are now referencing using it instead of the issue tracker.

Same with me. I played around with the setup a few times on my local machines. It took quite a bit to get it set up, then I saw an error after a couple of days and gave up. Its easier to just pull down the file and run it locally than use collabora.

More recently its go to discord for the env…no joke.

Nice. I’m all about new providers

Welp I’m an anonymous person on the Internet so you can believe what you want. I could say that my job is literally mass deploying servers (devops) but if you don’t believe me that I said that I read it then I’m not sure what we can agree on.

Let’s just stop while we are both ahead. It’s a Thursday, good day for coffee yeah? Hope you have a good day.

How is Hetzner?

Just about but it’s more experimental.

It appears after the controversy they removed the parts https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/after-overreaching-tos-angers-users-cloud-provider-vultr-backs-off/

But when I read the tos, it was pretty clear it was not limited.

You also had to agree without an opt out which was scammy. There are better providers out there.

Nope. It’s the content.

I had customer data as well as some personal stuff on a couple of servers. It was low hanging fruit so I just started self hosting. It’s silly how much rights they suddenly wanted. Not worth the hassle, they just provide basic boxes to begin with.

They also would not let you login without accepting those new rights now were you able to opt out. So I just threw my infa on some local systems, deleted everything and then had to say yes to their TOS. Again silly and great way to lose business.

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1boz5ne/vultr_new_tos_claims_all_commercial_rights_to/ " You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you."

And you could not opt out. You had to click agree in order to login. That’s the biggest one.

It was later removed after the fact but there were other changes that sucked.

I just moved everything from vultr to self host because of their latest changes.

I like that I don’t have to fiddle with it so much. I’ve maintained AWS for my day job, I just want something that does everything. I’m tired when I get home.

I use it all the time. Works pretty good.