Hey all,
Just wondering what the consensus is on hosting directly on a computer versus virtualization? Right now I’m hosting my Lemmy instance on a Hetzner VPS, but I would like to eventually migrate to my Linux box at home. It currently runs as a media PC (Ubuntu) in the living room, but I always intended to self-host other software on the side since it should be more than capable of doing both (Ryzen 5600G, 16gb DDR4).
I’m just torn though - should I host a virtual machine on it for Lemmy, or run it directly on Ubuntu as-is? I plan to do some further self-hosting projects as well later down the line.
Run everything in docker containers. Much easier to manage than virtual machines and lighter on resources.
User accounts are a reasonable isolation mechanism for reasonably trustworthy server software.
Personally, I would prefer docker containers as I can move them to a new server or even create backups very easily.
Backups are easily done with virtual machines as well. Taking, moving and restoring such backups is in fact much easier than moving docker containers between hosts as you don’t have to differentiate between volumes and locally mounted directories for example. That being said, depending on the use case, containers can be a nice and lightweight solution to separate applications on a userspace level
I have my Docker stuff in a VM. Much more reliable than bare metal OS
You want so isolate the things you host from one another (security, making updates easier etc). So if you host just one thing you can do so on the host directly. If you host multiple services you may seek some separation method.
VMs is one method, but it wastes a lot of resources, especially RAM. A more elegant way is containers. Both the docker/podman route as well as the LXC way are quite polular.
If you use a full VM you’ll lose plenty of performance and I don’t think it’ll cope really well with domain names. If you really want to go the “keep everything separated” route use container software, like Docker. It’ll use the same kernel as the host, so no weird networking rerouting/bridging etc… I don’t have any experience with containers, since I run all of my “homelab” bare metal on a Pi, and with this approach I never faced any issues. Containers could be useful if you were running something unorthodox like Gentoo and you need to run software that won’t work on it, even if compiled to run, but it exist as a package on another distro. Then you can just spin up a container for that distro, install the software et voilà, you’re ready to go. AFAIK there shouldn’t be a package for lemmy on any distro, so just clone the source code and compile it, it should be fairly distro-agnostic. Maybe you could compile it in a container to keep your host clean of compile dependencies, but other than that, there’s no real gain. I like to compile stuff, so having a shitload of dependencies already there is pretty handy for me, but for a production system, it’s better to keep it clean.
