Most self-hosters use one DNS provider and call it a day.
That’s fine until they have an outage or your account gets suspended.
DNS is a single point of failure you can split if you plan for it.
At some point the old box dies or just can’t keep up.
You need to move your services — DNS, web, backups, all of it — to new hardware.
Downtime is optional if you plan.
Domains fail quietly.
One day your site stops resolving or your emails bounce. You find out weeks later.
Monitoring DNS and domain health is cheap insurance.
Killing a service isn’t failure. It’s maintenance.
But a lot of self-hosters just pull the plug. That’s how you lose data, break dependencies, and end up afraid to clean house. Decommissioning is a skill.
One domain is easy.
Two or three, and suddenly you’re juggling DNS records, SSL certs, and email settings you barely understand.
Self-hosters tend to accumulate domains like clutter. The trick is managing them without chaos.
Most home servers die quietly.
You notice three weeks later when someone says the wiki’s down or a cron job hasn’t run.
You don’t need a full observability stack. You need a pulse check.
One backup is not a backup.
It’s a single point of failure wearing a comforting disguise.
If you’re running self-hosted services or even just a home server, you need a plan that survives disk failure, human error, and a house fire.
You don’t need enterprise money to get there.
Everyone says “back up to the cloud.”
What they mean is “rent space on someone else’s machine and trust them forever.”
There’s another way: peer-to-peer sync. No central servers, no lock-in, no single point of failure.
Every self-hosted stack has secrets.
Passwords, API keys, SSH keys, tokens — all the things that keep the bad actors out.
The problem: solo ops rarely have a vault. Most just hardcode keys in configs and hope nobody looks.
Everyone says “keep off-site backups.”
What they really mean is “pay a cloud vendor and hope you never need them.”
You don’t have to outsource your data to meet the off-site rule.
You do have to plan for what happens when your house burns down.
