HN Reader

Nice website that focuses on the simple basics of setting up one's own infrastructure, like it was back in the '90s.

Disagree with the "land ownership" portion of the title as it will be obvious to anybody following the tutorials that they don't own their web server or their domain name.

This is a great resource. I just think the term “landlord” is a misnomer here. It implies you’ll be making income off the rent of your new self-administered infra, and as has been pointed out already - mostly this site pertains to stuff built on hyperscaler platforms.

I’d probably say “…internet homeowners where, like in the UK leasehold property system, you’re still basically a tenant but without paying someone else’s mortgage, and even when you’re a freeholder the king actually still more or less owns the land”.

Admittedly this is less snappy.

The second instruction says to rent a VPS. How are you a landlord if you're renting a server?

Really helpful site from Luke Smith. I would advise anyone interested in web development to check out this page. There's a lot of cool stuff on there.

I kove the vibe of this website and their mission. Nitpick though, “FOSSPAY” seems to make no sense because it’s really just Stripe?

This is a great concept, but it’s not really for internet peasants. It’s for internet plumbers who already know how to do a whole bunch of stuff. An internet normie who doesn’t know their way around the command line wouldn’t even know where to start with this.

I would suggest Caddy over nginX if this is for casual sysadmins.

Nice resource! What always bothers me is that virtually every resource of this type leave what is imo the most important part: backups and restore.

Setting up all these services can be tedious but it’s not the hard part. Robust backups and a strategy around them is, and there is very little information on this topic in comparison (generally)

You can only really be a landlord if there's a limited supply of land (or capital to build useful things on the land). Neither is true on the internet. The premise is flawed to the point it's always going to be a scam if anyone claims this is a useful thing to do.

The salient point is right on the front page of this site:

Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.

If that is true for someone attempting to become an "internet landlord", it is also true for all of their potential customers.

Do they really mean "homeowner" (self-sovereign) vs "landlord" (charging others rent).

This is a really nice guide. Its also timely for me as I'm looking to move away from my over-priced and under-specced web host.

Anyone have any comments on Vultr as a vps provider - positive or negative? As far as I can tell they provide 2TB of egress bandwidth and uncapped ingress: is that right?

What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?

I followed his email guide but installed mailinaabox. I was able to install it in one go about 4 years ago.

Smooth sailing since.

This is a goldmine

Starting a website these days seems very dangerous. If you don’t comply with some obscure regulation imposed by a government somewhere you can be sued to oblivion. Someone should create a guide on how to start a website and cover your ass.

Luke Smith and this site was what got me and several other CS students I know started with Linux, OSS, and hosting our own websites. Some of his more philosophical content has been really valuable to me as well.

What is the practical difference between doing something like this and using a home NAS setup? Commercial solutions like Synology — let’s forget their new hard disk policy for a moment — have some overlap.

This gave me pre-mobile Internet vibes

Sadly in today's world, 90% traffic happens on phones. And the free app landscape is bad.