In spirit, I would love to self-host, but I have neither the sysadmin skills to do it, nor the time to keep up on security patches, etc.
I definitely don't want a "hosted" offering where my stuff lives on someone else's hardware and vanishes when they go out of business.
What I would love is a "sysadmin contractor" who runs my stuff for me, on my hardware, on my bandwidth. I pay them not for the hosting, but for the admin skill. Probably a step up from fiverr, but not a full-time employee.
This wouldn't scale very well if the contractor wanted to work for a hundred-plus people like me and learn all our individual tech stacks. But if I could pick from the contractor's menu of supported stuff, and configure it with a menu of supported connections, they should be able to automate a great deal of the administration across all their clients.
Does anything like this exist? I'm aware of various host-it-yourself platforms and distros, but they all expect me to be my own admin, which is a dealbreaker.
Self-hosting email is just hugely problematic because of the extensive anti-spam measures by major providers, causing deliverability issues if you don't use a lot of effort to keep your domains and IPs clean. As the saying goes, friends don't let friends host their own email.
I would imagine such a person would heavily script a lot of things and be able to spread their time among hundreds of customers, and I'd get the cheap rates if I'm willing to pick off their menu of preferred software packages for each need, rather than picking my own specific one, for instance.
I don't know if it's realistic, but I'd love something on the order of $20/mo for something simple like my own photo gallery (whatever package they recommend), maybe a peertube instance, a personal pastebin or etherpad. I'll provide the hardware and connectivity, I just want someone to help me set it up, log in periodically and apply patches, and manage backups and stuff.
I'd expect to pay more if I had weird requests or high-maintenance stuff like email.
Some time ago, I heard an interesting idea for "investing" in indie musicians -- buying their music actually buys stock, and if they become popular, your shares become more valuable. Similarly, if I'm picky about wanting my CTO-on-demand to support _this particular_ photo gallery software, and I pay extra for that special service initially, but later it becomes popular and many of their customers request it and they're able to service those requests because I paid them to develop the skill, maybe I get something in return? I dunno, that gets complicated, but it's worth thinking about how the incentives work.
I definitely don't want a "hosted" offering where my stuff lives on someone else's hardware and vanishes when they go out of business.
What I would love is a "sysadmin contractor" who runs my stuff for me, on my hardware, on my bandwidth. I pay them not for the hosting, but for the admin skill. Probably a step up from fiverr, but not a full-time employee.
This wouldn't scale very well if the contractor wanted to work for a hundred-plus people like me and learn all our individual tech stacks. But if I could pick from the contractor's menu of supported stuff, and configure it with a menu of supported connections, they should be able to automate a great deal of the administration across all their clients.
Does anything like this exist? I'm aware of various host-it-yourself platforms and distros, but they all expect me to be my own admin, which is a dealbreaker.