Basically, what the title says. I’m a C, C+, C# … Basically, a C languages dev. Work on Video Games mostly, but I like doing other projects as well. Working on some larger ones like in Unreal and Godot that need some big boy space / CI time so I’ve set off on a small self hosting journey.

Got Nginx set up with Gitea at the moment, but am open to Gitlab, etc.

I was wondering if it’s easy to setup these services for LFS space / CI runtime rental for a few buddies of mine just to handle management and potential rental costs depending on how far that goes.

I’m also wondering if Gitea or GitLab would be better for an endeavor like this? And I realize I wouldn’t make a huge profit or anything, this would mostly be to mitigate maintenance costs and give my buddies some good deals on CI run time for Unreal or Godot Exports.

  • oshu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    7 days ago

    I wouldn’t even think about charging anyone for anything until you get it all setup and dialed in with backups, etc and are sure you know how to keep the service running.

    • weirdbeardgame@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      Yes, I have the infrastructure setup. Shits got like 3 backups including a very hard offline 12 TB backup WD blue drive that’s absolutely purely for being nothing but backups for this server

      • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago
        • Ever tested restoring those backups? Do you have the exact procedure written down? Does it still work? If the service gets compromised/data corrupted on sunday, and your backup runs, do you still have a non-compromised backup and how old is it?
        • How timely can you deal with security fixes, and how will you be alerted that a security fix is available?
        • How do you monitor your services for resource availability, errors in logs, security events?
        • How much downtime is acceptable for routine maintenance, and for incidents?
        • Do you have tooling to ensure you can redeploy the exact same configuration to another host?
        • How do you test upgrades before pushing them to production?

        Not saying this is impossible, you just need to have these questions in mind, and the answers written down before you start charging people for the service, and have the support infrastructure ready.

        Or you can just provide the service for free, best-effort without guarantees.

        I do both (free services for a few friends, paid by customers at $work, small team). Most of the time it’s smooth riding but it needs preparation (and more than 1 guy to handle emergencies - vacations, bus factor and all that).

        For the git service I can recommend gitea + gitea-actions (I run the runners in podman). Gitlab has more features but it can be overwhelming if you don’t need them, and it requires more resources.