That’s the problem, When you’re running too many services as it is, you will be staring at a terminal at home sooner or later. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky and haven’t been ravaged by the cruel gods of fate yet, but it absolutely happens, and eventually it will happen to you. When you’re relying on family notifications and disaster response, you don’t get to choose when that happens, and sometimes you’ll have to spend a LONG time staring at a terminal at home. And when it happens often enough, or badly enough, you end up not just staring at the terminal at home, but also thinking about the terminal at home, and losing sleep over it, and that’s just not a great way to live your self-hosting life. I’ve been there.
Making the investment in repeatable, reproducible, maintainable infrastructure now means you get to decide WHEN you’re staring at a terminal, and for exactly how long. Even when you don’t make it through as much progress as you wanted to, you can just close it down without any stress, get back to your life and continue from where you left off next time. You can’t do that, at least not without some significant consequences when your server got hacked and is sending spam or your entire server is refusing to boot and you need the files on it.
You may still have to hit the terminal sometimes when you don’t choose to, but it’s going to be less often, and less complex when you do. That’s when the investment pays off, and your return on investment is the goal of having ultimately less time spent at the terminal at home, and that payoff is especially rewarding if you’re good at prioritizing the time you do choose to spend on the terminal at home, to find low-value moments to effectively repurpose for this hobby, and save the actually valuable times of your life from ever having to be used for emergency maintenance.
Well, like i said, I don’t wanna stare at a terminal at home. I’m running too many services as it is.
Automate the updates with a cron job and use family for outage notifications.
That’s the problem, When you’re running too many services as it is, you will be staring at a terminal at home sooner or later. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky and haven’t been ravaged by the cruel gods of fate yet, but it absolutely happens, and eventually it will happen to you. When you’re relying on family notifications and disaster response, you don’t get to choose when that happens, and sometimes you’ll have to spend a LONG time staring at a terminal at home. And when it happens often enough, or badly enough, you end up not just staring at the terminal at home, but also thinking about the terminal at home, and losing sleep over it, and that’s just not a great way to live your self-hosting life. I’ve been there.
Making the investment in repeatable, reproducible, maintainable infrastructure now means you get to decide WHEN you’re staring at a terminal, and for exactly how long. Even when you don’t make it through as much progress as you wanted to, you can just close it down without any stress, get back to your life and continue from where you left off next time. You can’t do that, at least not without some significant consequences when your server got hacked and is sending spam or your entire server is refusing to boot and you need the files on it.
You may still have to hit the terminal sometimes when you don’t choose to, but it’s going to be less often, and less complex when you do. That’s when the investment pays off, and your return on investment is the goal of having ultimately less time spent at the terminal at home, and that payoff is especially rewarding if you’re good at prioritizing the time you do choose to spend on the terminal at home, to find low-value moments to effectively repurpose for this hobby, and save the actually valuable times of your life from ever having to be used for emergency maintenance.