This is a great resource. I just think the term “landlord” is a misnomer here. It implies you’ll be making income off the rent of your new self-administered infra, and as has been pointed out already - mostly this site pertains to stuff built on hyperscaler platforms.
I’d probably say “…internet homeowners where, like in the UK leasehold property system, you’re still basically a tenant but without paying someone else’s mortgage, and even when you’re a freeholder the king actually still more or less owns the land”.
No, hoarding is accumulating for the sake of accumulating. A housing provider offers a service, 12 month leases on places to live temporarily. It is a cutthroat low margin business, very few people are truly getting rich being small time providers, most are just breaking even and banking on their asset appreciation.
It is a “service” that is way cheaper than owning a home, not everyone wants to be a homeowner and pay massive maintenance costs. That burden is handled by the provider.
Why is it cheaper than owning a home? Because landlords are driving up the price of homes by using an essential human right as speculative asset and investment class.
The burden is imposed by the "provider", as a result of their greed.
Nice website that focuses on the simple basics of setting up one's own infrastructure, like it was back in the '90s.
Disagree with the "land ownership" portion of the title as it will be obvious to anybody following the tutorials that they don't own their web server or their domain name.
In some countries (e.g. Singapore, China, Israel), when you buy a house, on paper you get something like a 99-year renewable lease on land — different from a domain name in scale, but not so much in substance.
So I guess the aptness of the analogy is unevenly distributed geographically. :)
How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?
Once you have everything else set up, you can migrate to a server hosted on your own internet connection. Running your own data center is one of the more tricky parts of the equation, compared to almost-free web hosting for a 10MB site.
You’re also only renting your internet connection!
If you want to be a real rent-seeker (sorry, meant to say “landlord”) you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks.
> ... you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks
Which is doable as an individual. One of my very best mate did just that: granted he's got quite the networking skills but he did that entirely on his own.
He'll even get 256 IPv4 addresses but for these he was put on a long waiting list (I think in one to two months he'll get them but he's waiting since about a year): IPv4 addresses are the actual scarce landlordy Internet resources!
Your buddy probably still has to pay for internet exchange with the backbones, they only give it for free if you're also a tier 1 ISP (i.e. see Lumen's requirements[1] and the others'[2]). Even massive ISPs like Comcast still have to pay for internet access[3] because they're not big enough to be a "peer" to the tier 1s.
PS. I think you're shadowbanned since this and your last 7 comments all showed up as [dead].
And even with a decentralized mesh network you rely on good behavior from your peer/local nodes. Turns out the only way to truly own land is when your network consists of 10.0.0.0/8.
It’s not a racket — the state does use its monopoly on violence to enforce your title to the land. Otherwise it would only be yours until someone bigger and stronger came by.
And the mob really does honor their protection racket, too. If some punk comes and tries messing with a store protected by the mob, the mob deals with the problem.
Yet nobody goes around looking to purchase protection from the mob either, do they? The key problem with the arrangement isn't that the protection isn't provisioned, it's that the entire arrangement is involuntary and forced upon the business owner through threat of violence, whether by the mob or the state.
This is a great concept, but it’s not really for internet peasants. It’s for internet plumbers who already know how to do a whole bunch of stuff. An internet normie who doesn’t know their way around the command line wouldn’t even know where to start with this.
* It'd be helpful to offer some context. For instance, talking about ufw without even mentioning that we're talking about Linux, or even a specific Linux distro, would make most people confused. Same with apt.
These are good guides, but it should be kept in mind that they don't try to teach you anything - they're more guides to simply follow, and if you happen to learn something along the way, great.
But it makes sense to have guides that just tell you how to do a thing and don't explain it, because that represents a good chunk of the people out there. It wouldn't be bad to have links to stuff for those who want to understand what they're doing, though.
This is a really unhelpful attitude. There are periods of life where buying doesn't make sense and it's financially impossible - landlords provide people with a home at these times. I'm not saying there aren't bad landlords - there are - but being a landlord isn't inherently bad; they are providing an essential service for society.
Providing a place to live is surely not one of those services though. There will always been some portion of the population that can't afford to buy a home. Without landlords, what are those people supposed to do?
>Providing a place to live is surely not one of those services though
that's not what landlords are. That's the construction company or the building manager and he or she's indeed doing a great service. Landlords are absentee owners who extract economic rent. You can of course, like say Vienna, nationalize most of the housing stock and hire people who provide actual services just the same.
Landlords are an excellent thing, as anyone that cannot afford, or does not want, to simply buy a house could tell you.
Set up is a phrasal verb and omitting the space is incorrect, yes, but only an annoying pedant would point it out.
It recommends Debian and says:
>I make my guides on this site for Debian 11. If you use another OS, just know that your [mileage] may vary in terms of you might need to change some instructions here minorly.
If you were going to complain about bad grammar, that sentence is a much better target, and yet it is still quite easily understandable.
I would even suggest apache. It is ubiquitous, config samples are easy to find, it can act like a file server and certbot --apache easily sets up your https.
+1 for Apache. Lots of tutorials and examples available. I would argue that Nginx is mostly going to be overkill for the use-case of a small personal vps.
Nice resource! What always bothers me is that virtually every resource of this type leave what is imo the most important part: backups and restore.
Setting up all these services can be tedious but it’s not the hard part. Robust backups and a strategy around them is, and there is very little information on this topic in comparison (generally)
You can only really be a landlord if there's a limited supply of land (or capital to build useful things on the land). Neither is true on the internet. The premise is flawed to the point it's always going to be a scam if anyone claims this is a useful thing to do.
The salient point is right on the front page of this site:
Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.
If that is true for someone attempting to become an "internet landlord", it is also true for all of their potential customers.
This is a really nice guide. Its also timely for me as I'm looking to move away from my over-priced and under-specced web host.
Anyone have any comments on Vultr as a vps provider - positive or negative? As far as I can tell they provide 2TB of egress bandwidth and uncapped ingress: is that right?
Luke Smith and this site was what got me and several other CS students I know started with Linux, OSS, and hosting our own websites. Some of his more philosophical content has been really valuable to me as well.
> What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?
I set up a new mailserver a few years ago and have had no delivery problems whatsoever. All messages get through to gmail and outlook/o365 inboxes I've sent to. Didn't even have to register the IP with O365, it's just worked flawlessly from day one. That was from an IP address/netblock not associated with cloud or VPS providers, so initial reputation may have been higher.
A few months ago I set up a mail server on a VM in Digital Ocean, and have had no delivery problems to gmail/Google Apps recipients.
More recently, for new IPs sending mail into O365, they appear to be blocked by default but the rejection message gives you a URL to go to where you can register your IP(s). After doing that, we haven't seen any problems.
If you end up getting an IP that has been associated with previous spam or abuse, I assume your experience will be different. But in my experience, my handful of servers have not had delivery problems. This is all, of course, with proper reverse DNS records that match what the server advertises in its HELO/EHLO, SPF and DKIM all set up, etc.
Yeah there are shadow blocks on all these major email services. I have just slowly asking my circles to stop using them.
And I'm NOT just talking about gmail, Rackspace and ATT as well. (Proton and Tuta are good default for non tech ppl ATM.)
For more regular email user, it is better that one host or find some reliable person or entity that can host your email under domain that your own.
I personally use my server to have people contact me mostly ( it also helps to flag, which stores sell what emails to who ). Although, by now, I likely have enough 'karma' equivalent to not be considered spam by other providers.
honestly I wouldn't mind an email server just to have temp throwaway emails for services that require email signup. Not sure how those that detect temp mail services would work with this though
What is the practical difference between doing something like this and using a home NAS setup? Commercial solutions like Synology — let’s forget their new hard disk policy for a moment — have some overlap.
Starting a website these days seems very dangerous. If you don’t comply with some obscure regulation imposed by a government somewhere you can be sued to oblivion. Someone should create a guide on how to start a website and cover your ass.
Not really true. You can largely ignore foreign governments as you are not in their jurisdiction.
It also does not apply to everything listed there. Build your own platform is doing things governments will not even notice if you do it for yourself and people you know rather than as a public service.
They probably would not. So how could they do anything to you?
You might have problems in countries with poor rule of law if you had done something to offend the rulers. In anywhere with a reasonable system of justice you would be fine.
This is a great resource. I just think the term “landlord” is a misnomer here. It implies you’ll be making income off the rent of your new self-administered infra, and as has been pointed out already - mostly this site pertains to stuff built on hyperscaler platforms.
I’d probably say “…internet homeowners where, like in the UK leasehold property system, you’re still basically a tenant but without paying someone else’s mortgage, and even when you’re a freeholder the king actually still more or less owns the land”.
Admittedly this is less snappy.
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you don’t know that, maybe the term “landlord” hurt their feelings
landlord really is a derogatory term, they should be referred to as “housing providers”.
"Housing hoarders" seems more apt. Landlord is a euphemism
No one “hoards” housing, they buy it then rent it out for others to use.
That is hoarding, with the intent of parasitically using it to benefit from the misfortune of others.
No, hoarding is accumulating for the sake of accumulating. A housing provider offers a service, 12 month leases on places to live temporarily. It is a cutthroat low margin business, very few people are truly getting rich being small time providers, most are just breaking even and banking on their asset appreciation.
A "service" that wouldn't be necessary if landlords weren't taking away housing from them in the first place. Mao had the right idea about landlords.
It is a “service” that is way cheaper than owning a home, not everyone wants to be a homeowner and pay massive maintenance costs. That burden is handled by the provider.
Why is it cheaper than owning a home? Because landlords are driving up the price of homes by using an essential human right as speculative asset and investment class.
The burden is imposed by the "provider", as a result of their greed.
If a central AC unit blows you’re staring at a $4-$5k bill, mandatory, or you have no AC.
If your attic gets some mold that will be $8k to get rid of it.
Home insurance, you must pay. Property tax, you also have to pay. Water and electricity too.
Or, you can pay a housing provider a flat monthly fee, and not worry about any of that.
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At least it's accurate
Nice website that focuses on the simple basics of setting up one's own infrastructure, like it was back in the '90s.
Disagree with the "land ownership" portion of the title as it will be obvious to anybody following the tutorials that they don't own their web server or their domain name.
In some countries (e.g. Singapore, China, Israel), when you buy a house, on paper you get something like a 99-year renewable lease on land — different from a domain name in scale, but not so much in substance.
So I guess the aptness of the analogy is unevenly distributed geographically. :)
Note that there is a section about self hosting: https://landchad.net/selfhosting/
Still subject to ISP whims, and still just renting the domain name
And renting the Internet access.
The second instruction says to rent a VPS. How are you a landlord if you're renting a server?
How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?
Once you have everything else set up, you can migrate to a server hosted on your own internet connection. Running your own data center is one of the more tricky parts of the equation, compared to almost-free web hosting for a 10MB site.
You're also just renting a domain name.
You’re also only renting your internet connection!
If you want to be a real rent-seeker (sorry, meant to say “landlord”) you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks.
> ... you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks
Which is doable as an individual. One of my very best mate did just that: granted he's got quite the networking skills but he did that entirely on his own.
He'll even get 256 IPv4 addresses but for these he was put on a long waiting list (I think in one to two months he'll get them but he's waiting since about a year): IPv4 addresses are the actual scarce landlordy Internet resources!
Your buddy probably still has to pay for internet exchange with the backbones, they only give it for free if you're also a tier 1 ISP (i.e. see Lumen's requirements[1] and the others'[2]). Even massive ISPs like Comcast still have to pay for internet access[3] because they're not big enough to be a "peer" to the tier 1s.
PS. I think you're shadowbanned since this and your last 7 comments all showed up as [dead].
[1]: https://www.lumen.com/en-us/about/legal/peering-policy.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#Other_major_net...
Getting your own backbone cable installed in the ocean is where the real expenses begin though.
I guess it's renting all the way down unless it's something like a decentralized network where control of keys represent ownership.
And even with a decentralized mesh network you rely on good behavior from your peer/local nodes. Turns out the only way to truly own land is when your network consists of 10.0.0.0/8.
> How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?
Asking the important questions.
Easy question. You're only a Lord, not a King, so you pay fealty.
The government graciously allows you to sublet their property as long as you keep up with the annual protection racket payments
It’s not a racket — the state does use its monopoly on violence to enforce your title to the land. Otherwise it would only be yours until someone bigger and stronger came by.
And the mob really does honor their protection racket, too. If some punk comes and tries messing with a store protected by the mob, the mob deals with the problem.
Yet nobody goes around looking to purchase protection from the mob either, do they? The key problem with the arrangement isn't that the protection isn't provisioned, it's that the entire arrangement is involuntary and forced upon the business owner through threat of violence, whether by the mob or the state.
The violence is inherent in the system.
this is why i love Tor. you can simply host a site from any pc without certificate, domain, proxy, vps.
Really helpful site from Luke Smith. I would advise anyone interested in web development to check out this page. There's a lot of cool stuff on there.
This is a great concept, but it’s not really for internet peasants. It’s for internet plumbers who already know how to do a whole bunch of stuff. An internet normie who doesn’t know their way around the command line wouldn’t even know where to start with this.
I kove the vibe of this website and their mission. Nitpick though, “FOSSPAY” seems to make no sense because it’s really just Stripe?
A few nitpicks:
* landlords aren't a good thing.
* "setup" is a noun.
* It'd be helpful to offer some context. For instance, talking about ufw without even mentioning that we're talking about Linux, or even a specific Linux distro, would make most people confused. Same with apt.
These are good guides, but it should be kept in mind that they don't try to teach you anything - they're more guides to simply follow, and if you happen to learn something along the way, great.
But it makes sense to have guides that just tell you how to do a thing and don't explain it, because that represents a good chunk of the people out there. It wouldn't be bad to have links to stuff for those who want to understand what they're doing, though.
Overall, we need more sites like these.
Why aren’t landlords a good thing? Is it unreasonable for people to provide a service to people seeking it?
Rent seeking is inherently immoral. Landlords are leeches.
This is a really unhelpful attitude. There are periods of life where buying doesn't make sense and it's financially impossible - landlords provide people with a home at these times. I'm not saying there aren't bad landlords - there are - but being a landlord isn't inherently bad; they are providing an essential service for society.
Depending on the service, sure.
Providing a place to live is surely not one of those services though. There will always been some portion of the population that can't afford to buy a home. Without landlords, what are those people supposed to do?
>Providing a place to live is surely not one of those services though
that's not what landlords are. That's the construction company or the building manager and he or she's indeed doing a great service. Landlords are absentee owners who extract economic rent. You can of course, like say Vienna, nationalize most of the housing stock and hire people who provide actual services just the same.
Landlords are an excellent thing, as anyone that cannot afford, or does not want, to simply buy a house could tell you.
Set up is a phrasal verb and omitting the space is incorrect, yes, but only an annoying pedant would point it out.
It recommends Debian and says:
>I make my guides on this site for Debian 11. If you use another OS, just know that your [mileage] may vary in terms of you might need to change some instructions here minorly.
If you were going to complain about bad grammar, that sentence is a much better target, and yet it is still quite easily understandable.
I would suggest Caddy over nginX if this is for casual sysadmins.
Yep. Caddy is so easy to use.
I would even suggest apache. It is ubiquitous, config samples are easy to find, it can act like a file server and certbot --apache easily sets up your https.
+1 for Apache. Lots of tutorials and examples available. I would argue that Nginx is mostly going to be overkill for the use-case of a small personal vps.
Nice resource! What always bothers me is that virtually every resource of this type leave what is imo the most important part: backups and restore.
Setting up all these services can be tedious but it’s not the hard part. Robust backups and a strategy around them is, and there is very little information on this topic in comparison (generally)
Do they really mean "homeowner" (self-sovereign) vs "landlord" (charging others rent).
[dead]
You can only really be a landlord if there's a limited supply of land (or capital to build useful things on the land). Neither is true on the internet. The premise is flawed to the point it's always going to be a scam if anyone claims this is a useful thing to do.
The salient point is right on the front page of this site:
Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.
If that is true for someone attempting to become an "internet landlord", it is also true for all of their potential customers.
This is a really nice guide. Its also timely for me as I'm looking to move away from my over-priced and under-specced web host.
Anyone have any comments on Vultr as a vps provider - positive or negative? As far as I can tell they provide 2TB of egress bandwidth and uncapped ingress: is that right?
Luke Smith and this site was what got me and several other CS students I know started with Linux, OSS, and hosting our own websites. Some of his more philosophical content has been really valuable to me as well.
What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?
> What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?
I set up a new mailserver a few years ago and have had no delivery problems whatsoever. All messages get through to gmail and outlook/o365 inboxes I've sent to. Didn't even have to register the IP with O365, it's just worked flawlessly from day one. That was from an IP address/netblock not associated with cloud or VPS providers, so initial reputation may have been higher.
A few months ago I set up a mail server on a VM in Digital Ocean, and have had no delivery problems to gmail/Google Apps recipients.
More recently, for new IPs sending mail into O365, they appear to be blocked by default but the rejection message gives you a URL to go to where you can register your IP(s). After doing that, we haven't seen any problems.
If you end up getting an IP that has been associated with previous spam or abuse, I assume your experience will be different. But in my experience, my handful of servers have not had delivery problems. This is all, of course, with proper reverse DNS records that match what the server advertises in its HELO/EHLO, SPF and DKIM all set up, etc.
Yeah there are shadow blocks on all these major email services. I have just slowly asking my circles to stop using them. And I'm NOT just talking about gmail, Rackspace and ATT as well. (Proton and Tuta are good default for non tech ppl ATM.)
For more regular email user, it is better that one host or find some reliable person or entity that can host your email under domain that your own.
Don't forget the PTR record.
So that your domain could one day expire and someone could host their email server completely impersonating you
I personally use my server to have people contact me mostly ( it also helps to flag, which stores sell what emails to who ). Although, by now, I likely have enough 'karma' equivalent to not be considered spam by other providers.
honestly I wouldn't mind an email server just to have temp throwaway emails for services that require email signup. Not sure how those that detect temp mail services would work with this though
Many email provider let you have a virtually infinite number of aliases, you can do want you want here with that.
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This gave me pre-mobile Internet vibes
Sadly in today's world, 90% traffic happens on phones. And the free app landscape is bad.
I followed his email guide but installed mailinaabox. I was able to install it in one go about 4 years ago.
Smooth sailing since.
This is a goldmine
What is the practical difference between doing something like this and using a home NAS setup? Commercial solutions like Synology — let’s forget their new hard disk policy for a moment — have some overlap.
The practical difference is you're using someone else's resources (hardware, utilities, etc.) or your own.
Starting a website these days seems very dangerous. If you don’t comply with some obscure regulation imposed by a government somewhere you can be sued to oblivion. Someone should create a guide on how to start a website and cover your ass.
Not really true. You can largely ignore foreign governments as you are not in their jurisdiction.
It also does not apply to everything listed there. Build your own platform is doing things governments will not even notice if you do it for yourself and people you know rather than as a public service.
Really? So you can just collect cookies quietly with no warning
Sure you can. If you're not going to have a business entity in Europe, or travel there. Worst thing they can do is block your website in Europe.
You are usually safe travelling there as long as your website or whatever is owned by an entity in your country.
But how would they know?
They probably would not. So how could they do anything to you?
You might have problems in countries with poor rule of law if you had done something to offend the rulers. In anywhere with a reasonable system of justice you would be fine.
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