Some of you may still remember that in 2014, puush.me shut down registration for new users. If you don’t know what puush.me is, it was one of the many free services like Lightshot, Imgur, Gyazo, and similar platforms. With Imgur getting hit by legal issues, it might be the next victim. In this thread, I hope to awaken your interest in self-hosting, and I’m very curious if there are other members of the community doing that too. If you’re interested but don’t know where to start, I’d love to get a discussion going.
The only thing in this life that’s free is the light and warmth from the sun. If a service is free, then you’re probably the product. Time and time again it’s been proven that a free service either shuts down or get’s taken over. At the end of the day, regardle…
Some of you may still remember that in 2014, puush.me shut down registration for new users. If you don’t know what puush.me is, it was one of the many free services like Lightshot, Imgur, Gyazo, and similar platforms. With Imgur getting hit by legal issues, it might be the next victim. In this thread, I hope to awaken your interest in self-hosting, and I’m very curious if there are other members of the community doing that too. If you’re interested but don’t know where to start, I’d love to get a discussion going.
The only thing in this life that’s free is the light and warmth from the sun. If a service is free, then you’re probably the product. Time and time again it’s been proven that a free service either shuts down or get’s taken over. At the end of the day, regardless of the intentions of the owners of such services, you’re the one getting fucked over.
For starters:
- A whole load of emoticons, back when the shoutbox was a live version of 4chan, were hosted on puush.me. In 2014, not only did puush.me block new user registrations, but it also silently removed every user’s images if they didn’t meet a certain view count per year. You also had to log in a few times. This resulted in a large userbase losing their images. You can see the results here:https://perpheads.com/threads/the-shout-banter-box-emoticon-emoji-list.6465/
- PlaysTV, better than Medal in **every way,**shut down on very short notice, and over 50% of clips were lost. Your 2014 paralake_v2 frags were probably a victim of this too.
- Tinypic, Megaupload—same story. Imgur is the perfect next candidate. It’s heavily in debt, and now with legal issues impacting its service, they’ll need to make changes.
Why I Self-Host
For over 10 years, I’ve been self-hosting more and more services. I’ve learned a lot and migrated a lot of servers over the years. I’ve saved an incredible amount of money, and it’s extremely funny being able to find old shoutbox screenshots from 2015. I can’t post those anymore because I’d risk the forums being taken down by the british.
Just to paint you an example:
- Netflix: 13,99€
- Google One 2TB: 10€
- Lastpass Premium: 3€
- Minecraft server: ~10€ etc.etc. We’ve nearing 40 euro’s already. What a waste.
For as cheap as €8/month, IONOS can provide a virtual server with 240GB SSD storage.There are hundreds of options to choose from. I personally use a dedicated server from Hetzner with solid specs and 24TB of storage. I host virtually everything myself and only pay €38/month. HETZER has server auctions and you can rent older dedicated servers from them that outlived their original use. They are an incredible bang for your buck, just make sure that you use proper back-up procedures if you use them because their hard drive’s will be old. Free replacements if they break, ofcourse. I can host:
- As many websites as I want
- Any game server and as many as I want (Minecraft, Gmod, CS:S, Squad, SCP:CB)
- Images and files, for example, https://u.smeris.me is my Imgur and Dropbox replacement and runs on XBackBone
- My own Netflix using Jellyfin, Jellyseer and the *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc) (Plex is old!) Alternatively, you could even use an old desktop from the thrift shop. Seriously, even a slow as shit machine will run great on Linux. You can host that from home and use some Dynamic DNS tricks if you don’t have a static IP address at home.
The only limit is what I decide. No ads, no slow downloads. I can click a button, torrent any film or series, and watch it from anywhere in the world. Google isn’t spying on my emails because they’re on my own server with my own domain. I can blackmail half the staff team with screenshots from 2015 with the archives I’ve created :lenny: 
Resources & Discussion
I’ll stop nerding out here, but I’d love to hear other people’s self-hosting solutions or questions. If you want to learn more, check out:
- https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ - hundreds of free self-hosted service examples.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ - community examples
- https://wiki.r-selfhosted.com/ - wiki for getting started Lastly, there are downsides to self hosting. You do need to make a fair effort into ensuring that what you are hosting is safe and secure from unwanted intruders. You can never guarantee a data breach won’t happen, but if it happens to Google, atleast you’ll have someone else to blame.