blossom Summary
Things I specifically avoid self-hosting, and why.
Email servers
See Sending and receiving email from a custom domain for a guide on how I send and receive emails from @bencuan.me.
Self-hosting email is possible, not that hard in theory, and great from a privacy/ownership perspective. I know people who have done it for themselves. However, I would not recommend it to nearly anyone. If you’ve heeded all the warnings and still have the urge to do it, I’m rooting for you— but at a safe distance! 
conventional wisdom
A few discussions (both pro and against self-hosting email) from around the internet from people who have gone through this before.
- r/selfhosted: Why you really DON’T want to self-host your own e-mail server
- Privacy Guides: Is self-hosting an email server really that bad?
- Gilles Chehade: You should not run your mail server because mail is hard
i need ~100% uptime for email
From an industry-standard perspective, TurtleNet has very low reliability (~99% uptime). This is by design: nobody’s lives are on the line, nothing I host really needs to be around 100% of the time, and I get to reboot/rebuild the server whenever I feel like it.
Although modern email services have retry mechanisms and other sorts of things to almost-guarantee every message gets sent eventually, this is much more about peace of mind for me. If I self-hosted my own email, I’d constantly question whether or not a message I sent actually got delivered, or whether I missed an important email.
the spam problem
Spam goes both ways when self-hosting email:
- Incoming spam is especially bad unless you take the care to set up and tune self-hosted spam filters. Gmail and other commercial mail providers have over a decade of experience tuning their filters; I certainly don’t.
- Since your email will originate from a relatively unknown source, they’ll inevitably end up in your recipients’ spam folders by default. Be prepared to go down the DMARC/DKIM/SPF rabbit hole at the very minimum.
Static sites
It would be a fairly trivial one-liner for me to host my static sites (like this website, or my homepage) from my ingress server. However, it’s not worth my time because other peoples’ static site hosting services are free and also better in almost every way:
- Faster loading times for everyone!
- They have CDNs, web caches, and other neat tricks so people who live on the other side of the world don’t need to round-trip to California every time they load the page.
- Better development experience- PR/deployment previews, CI, pre/post-build hooks, asset optimization, etc.
- Much, much better uptime :)
I use Netlify for this site, mostly for legacy reasons (I’ve been hosting bencuan.me on it for many years, and I haven’t felt the need to switch yet); Github Pages and Vercel are also comparable (if not better).
If I ever need to turn this site or any other site into a responsive webapp, then I’ll migrate it over— but until then, I’m happy delegating this to someone else.
Git and backups
Traditionally, the 3-2-1 backup rule (3 copies of your data on at least 2 different devices with 1 copy offsite) is a good heuristic for ensuring data safety.
Practically, this is very difficult and expensive to achieve on a fully self-hosted system. Duplicating my data would necessitate building and hosting a second server off-site, which would double my costs. I’m perfectly happy hosting my most critical files on GitHub, paying Apple $0.99/month for iCloud, etc. for more reliable backup and version control at a significantly lower price.