this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
151 points (93.6% liked)

Selfhosted

60887 readers
923 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.

  8. AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] misterbngo@awful.systems 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Your phrasing of the question implies a poor understanding. There's nothing preventing you from running containers on bare metal.

My colo setup is a mix of classical and podman systemd units running on bare metal, combined with a little nginx for the domain and tls termination.

I think you're actually asking why folks would use bare metal instead of cloud and here's the truth. You're paying for that resiliency even if you don't need it which means that renting the cloud stuff is incredibly expensive. Most people can probably get away with a$10 vps, but the aws meme of needing 5 app servers, an rds and a load balancer to run WordPress has rotted people. My server that I paid a few grand for on eBay would cost me about as much monthly to rent from aws. I've stuffed it full of flash with enough redundancy to lose half of it before going into colo for replacement. I paid a bit upfront but I am set on capacity for another half decade plus, my costs are otherwise fixed.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Your phrasing of the question implies poor understanding.

Your phrasing of the answer implies poor understanding. The question was why bare metal vs containers/VMs.

[–] sepi@piefed.social 0 points 9 months ago

The phrasing by the person you are responding to is perfectly fine and shows ample understanding. Maybe you do not understand what they were positing.