this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Selfhosted

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When hosting on my own machine, should I use a virtual machine or not? (roznotech.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by rozno@roznotech.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I run everything in docker compose and the two wins I feel like I get out of doing so are:

  • State in well-identified volumes. I've run multiple services on shared bare metal, and multiple services in isolated VMs. In both cases, I was equally terrified of upgrades and migrations because I frequently had no idea where in the filesystem critical data was stored. I would often have some main data dir I knew about, but little confidence that other important data wasn't stored elsewhere. With docker volumes, if I can restart a container without losing data I can migrate to a new host without losing data just by copying my volume dirs. And I restart containers frequently so I always have high confidence in my ability to backup, upgrade, and migrate.
  • Library and os-userspace isolation. This is the thing docker is known for, I never worry that upgrading a lib for app-a is going to break app-b. This is really a secondary benefit for me, though. I rarely had this problem even on shared metal with many apps, and never experienced it in isolated VMs. For me it's a secondary benefit to the nice volume management tools.

Docker is in no way unique in its ability to provide state management, but ephemeral container enforce good state management, and the docker tools for doing it provide a very nice experience, so it is my preference.