Self-Hosting Should be Taught and Embraced, Outsourcing Creates More Problems (or Risks) Than It Solves
YESTERDAY we published 30 new pages/articles despite the first party (more to come!) and today we can better focus on issues that matter to us. We've just mentioned issues in NotABug.org and recently we heard of issues at SourceHut, which had been subjected to DDoS attacks that caused days-long outages, eroding trust in the platform. Exactly one week ago SourceHut said: "As you know, during the DDoS we suffered a total network outage on our primary datacenter and had to perform an emergency overnight migration of all of our infrastructure to our research installation in our datacenter lease in Amsterdam. Our infrastructure became stable following this intervention, but we have been operating at a reduced capacity since – we are running SourceHut on infrastructure provisioned for research, not production. Currently we are supplementing our owned-hardware compute with a lease from OVH for build server cycles."
Then there is the financial aspect: "Moreover, we are facing some financial issues. The loss of this equipment represented a significant lost investment, and the shipping costs were substantial. Additionally, we are working with a tax issue in which we were over-taxed by about $20,000; we filed an appeal months ago but that money is tied up for the time being and the tax authorities have sent us timely notices every 60 days informing us that they require an additional 60 days to process the issue. We still have an entirely sustainable financial situation, but we lack access to the capital we would ideally be using to build out our infrastructure and address other needs for growth."
Running a gitforge isn't easy, especially at a large scale (many users). One needs to do backups, offer support, etc. It's a lot of work and then there are unforeseen external factors like DDoS attacks (GitHub also had this issue; the Chinese government attacked its entire infrastructure nearly a decade ago).
The lesson of the NotABug.org story, plus the experiences of SourceHut and GitHub (before Microsoft took over), ought to be that self-hosting Git - albeit it requires some extra/new skills - can pay off. One can control one's destiny...
We're not as vast as SourceHut, we're just a site run by volunteers. But yesterday we served 531,731 requests for techrights.org (over HTTP/S) and we're coping OK with backups, costs, and legal aspects. We've not had to deal with hosting-level issues for a very long time (attempts to that effect have repeatedly failed). All we need is a virtual machine, whereupon we can handle the rest, including Git.
Sadly, owing to this SaaS hype, many people lost the skills or never acquired the skills of deploying one's own tools. That leaves them dependent on useless crap such as WhatsApp and Google Drive - as if hosting some file server or installing Mumble/Murmur is difficult (it's not!). The cultural attitudes ought to change. Self-hosting ought not be some insane "geeky" thing but more of the norm(al). We need to teach such skills at schools, with SBCs as the training platform that is both affordable for schools (on shoestring budget) and affordable to those who later wish to deploy the same for themselves rather than buy "clown computing credits". █
