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.

  • @sv1sjpEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    Personally, I would prefer docker containers as I can move them to a new server or even create backups very easily.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•1 year ago

      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

      • @sv1sjpEnglish
        -1•1 year ago

        Yes they are, but still, you have to backup an entire OS too except the applications/services you want!

    • @callccEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Docker is convenient but not really a solution if you care about free software. It’s as in-transparent as a windows installer. Not really of course but it drags the FLOSS community in that direction. I think we should work on making distributions better at installing and maintaining complex web applications (including their databases etc). Why can’t I just install lemmy or whatever package in a standard debian? Why is state scattered around? Why is it tough to have several versions of interpreters or libraries installed side by side? These are questions we should ask the people making distributions. Maybe GUIX or Nixos style distros are the answer to these questions.

      All in all, docker isn’t really about isolation or containers, it’s about having a convenient but in-transparent abstraction for a package and their state.