I have started setting up a server with three domains and three users using Yunohost, but I find it hard to get to work.
The documentation can be frustrating to go through and the community on the forum answers slowly or not at all (because due to the sparse documentation questions from beginners like me tend to touch similar topics I guess). A big part of the forum answers are in French, which I don’t read very well.
All in all I have been trying very hard to like the project. The work done by the developers really deserves all my respect and I would love to remain involved, but trying to get Yunohost to work as a non-techie leaves me often desperate and looking for alternatives with a more active community or a more thorough documentation.
I’m a bit divided here. I like the project but I’m a half-techie stoopid who needs more support. What do? And what would be my alternatives on a Linux VPS? Especially if I don’t want proprietary stuff?
Sorry, wasn’t clear, it’s my own and my kids portfolios I’m hosting, I do not host anything for professional clients (yet). So it’s basically our own choice how concerned we want to be about uptime right now. I have been looking around and I think I’ll end up hosting these portfolios as HTML and CSS sites with My Webapp. They are now Wordpress and Dokuwiki, but that’s just overkill and just happened because that’s what we had available per One-Click install on shared hosting before. Then I can install one or two or even three Dokuwikis, one for personal note keeping and one or two for collaborative projects.
I found emails to be working fine under Yunohost, got all of the accounts I created there set up in Thunderbird eventually after finding out where to change DNS zone entries at my provider.
I think I will play with it a little longer, and as a learning resource for the basics I decided to dive into the Debian administrator’s handbook (books are my favourite resource), after all that’s what Yunohost is built on.
Now for all of that: I’d love to have it all in a home computer git repository to work on, and then push it to the server. Would that be possible?
For the future (maybe a project for dark winter evenings), I might decide to split up my setup and run my personal websites or even all of them on a solar-powered setup at home. I predict that I will not be able to resist this idea for very long, given that I have all the components already at home. So far about sitting in front of a screen, or tables full of cables and plugs. I guess I do enjoy it at times.
It’s just that I do need time for my animals, and my garden, and my job - so server admin is hopefully not a 24/7 thing for the things I have in mind.
I totally can relate to that, and have similar project waiting for me.
When it comes to wordpress, we quickly abandoned it in favour of simpler, static site generators, based on the fact, that we don‘t need all of the bloat that comes with wordpress. If you‘re interested, hugo is one example that is referred to quite often.
A git repository should be doable. Not sure about the wordpress part, but I guess anything could be setup with CI/CD pipelines or with ansible if you‘re up for another tool. (There‘s currently a hype around this approach and I see why it appeals, but I haven‘t wrapped my head around that tool yet)
I’m wary around new hypes - I have come to prefer the simplest, less complex solution in many things in my daily life (think local) and after extending some days of thought around the matter I’m getting more and more convinced it makes sense to extend this to computing - and it seems that in computing and in daily life hypes are something to rather avoid or at least not immediately jump in with all assets (eyes the drone collection gathering dust in a corner). Computing should support real life, it doesn’t really have to be pretty or complex. It’s great for collecting knowledge, connect points of knowledge, and make them accessible world wide (the only exception where I would embrace ‘think global’). And it really, really should be decentralized.
But then, I’ve not really gotten the ‘big picture’ around server administration and website administration yet to really appreciate if some of the newer approaches are helpful. I sometimes get stuck in a ‘back to the stone age’ approach that just hinders whatever I’m trying to do.
Yeah, I feel the same about hypes, still ansible seems like a useful concept. Anyway, I agree it should support actual needs and not collecting dust somewhere. Which in my case are some microcontrollers.
Lemmy was my way back into federation and so far I enjoy it! :)
It think to strive for a simple to maintain solution is not necessarily requiring technology from the early days of the internet. We‘ve come a long way and personally I enjoy to be able to build something „simple“ that still looks modern. So, yes. I try to keep the amount of screen time small, but there are so many cool services out there to try!