I’m trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it’s better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?
Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.
To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.
Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.
Listing Microsoft cloud after their recent certificate mess is an interesting choice.
Also, the “cloud responds to vulnerability” only works if you’re paying them to host the services for you - which definitely no longer is self hosting. If you bring up your own services the patching is on you, no matter where they are.
If you care about stuff like “have some stuff encrypted with the keys in a hardware module” own hardware is your only option. If you don’t care about that you still need to be aware that “cloud” or “VPS” still means that you’re sharing hardware with third parties - which comes with potential security issues.
Well with bare metal yes, but when your architecture is virtual, configuration rises in importance as the first line of defense. So it’s not just “yum —update” and reboot to remediate a vulnerability, there is more to it; the odds of a home lab admin keeping up with that seem remote to me.
Encryption is interesting, there really is no practical difference between cloud vs self hosted encryption offerings other than an emotional response.
Regarding security issues, it will depend on the provider but one wonders if those are real or imagined issues?
Well with bare metal yes, but when your architecture is virtual, configuration rises in importance as the first line of defense
You’ll have all the virtualization management functions in a separate, properly secured management VLAN with limited access. So the exposed attack surface (unless you’re selling VM containers) is pretty much the same as on bare metal: Somebody would need to exploit application or OS issues, and then in a second stage break out of the virtualization. This has the potential to cause more damage than small applications on bare metal - and if you don’t have fail over the impact of rebooting the underlying system after applying patches is more severe.
On the other hand, already for many years - and way before container stuff was mature - hardware was too powerful for just running a single application, so it was common to have lots of unrelated stuff there, which is a maintenance nightmare. Just having that split up into lots of containers probably brings more security enhancements than the risk of having to patch your container runtime.
Encryption is interesting, there really is no practical difference between cloud vs self hosted encryption offerings other than an emotional response.
Most of the encryption features advertised for cloud are marketing bullshit.
“Homomorphic encryption” as a concept just screams “side channel attacks” - and indeed as soon as a team properly looked at it they published a side channel paper.
For pretty much all the technologies advertised from both AMD and intel to solve the various problems of trying to make people trust untrustworthy infrastructure with their private keys sidechannel attacks or other vulnerabilities exist.
As soon as you upload a private key into a cloud system you lost control over it, no matter what their marketing department will tell you. Self hosted you can properly secure your keys in audited hardware storage, preventing key extraction.
Regarding security issues, it will depend on the provider but one wonders if those are real or imagined issues?
Just look at the Microsoft certificate issue I’ve mentioned - data was compromised because of that, they tried to deny the claim, and it was only possible to show that the problem exists because some US agencies paid extra for receiving error logs. Microsofts solution to keep you calm? “Just pay extra as well so you can also audit our logs to see if we lose another key”
