Anything on the public internet is some amount of risk.
It sounds reasonably configured, and for a single service that’s been fairly robust, the only thing you really should make sure you’re doing is updates - better if you configure automatic updates, so you don’t even have to think about it.
unattended-upgrades is what you’d want on a Debian-alike for updates, and Overseerr depends on how you installed it.
They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.
That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.
But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.
TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.
UptimeKuma is what I use; it’ll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites… whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.
That’s fair; I wasn’t really considering how poorly performing PSUs were at extremely low loads, despite knowing that they are.
Odd that a random brick would be substantially better than a same-era actual PSU, but I suppose it’s hard to say without more specifics.
The T variant is the low-power, lower clocked (3.2ghz vs 2.5ghz) almost half the TDP (65w vs 35w) variant; kinda the whole point is it’s going to use less power.
The answer for your question is ‘no’.
You’re never going to reduce power usage substantially by swapping PSUs, because there’s just not enough efficiency gains to be had even if a Pico PSU was more efficient which they really aren’t.
You say the hardware is ‘nothing too different’ but you mention ddr4 vs 3, which makes me think the Dell is a generation or few older which could easily impact power draw by 10w.
Geeky yes, but Mark Lenard is great in every appearance.
Balance of Terror from TOS is, without any doubt, my favorite Star Trek episode.
Technically you’re correct: your VPS provider can inspect your network traffic, the contents of RAM and anything on the disk.
Bluntly: you have to trust your VPS provider, and if you’re unsure they’re trustworthy you shouldn’t use them.
(Scaleway is legitimate, bound by actual useful data protection laws, and has a comprehensive privacy and security policy.)
That’s not really the right approach on OCI, unfortunately: if you just flush the rules you also break a lot of their management plane.
You’d want to modify the /etc/iptables/rules.v4 and rules.v6 files to add any rules you want to load on boot (and, of course, if you just flush the rules without saving them, then it won’t persist and a reboot will break things, again).
It’s an arguable benefit: I’m a fan of having the security policies AND iptables sitting between me and doing something stupid, but I also spent most of the last decade dealing with literally thousands and thousands of compromised hosts that just whoopsie oopsed redis/jenkins/their database/a ftp service in a publicly accessible state, got hacked, then had the customer come crying to us asking why we didn’t keep them from blowing their foot off - which, basically, is what the OCI defaults do.
I’m paying Google for their enterprise gSuite which is still “unlimited”, and using rclone’s encrypted drive target to back up everything. Have a couple of scripts that make tarballs of each service’s files, and do a full backup daily.
It’s probably excessive, but nobody was ever mad about the fact they had too many backups if they needed them, so whatever.
For anyone who doesn’t know what ‘registering for DMCA notification’ means, you’re after https://www.copyright.gov/dmca-directory/
That said, there’s no particular requirement that a DMCA notice be sent to you even if you have a registered agent and some reporters will send it to the abuse contact for the IP netblock you’re hosted on regardless of registration, so you may want to make sure you understand what steps your provider may or may not take when they get a DMCA notice before you actually get a notice.
One other option is the “Always Free” tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.
There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I’ve used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.
The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.
Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.
We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.