In my ever-ongoing struggle to disentangle myself and my family from our corporate overlords I have gleefully dived into self-hosting and have a little intranet oasis available; media, passwords, backups, files, notes, contacts, calendars – basically everything I needed the Big G suite for at one point, I’m hosting locally, and loving it. But Unfortunately… my ISP can be shitty. Normally its’ fine and no complaints, but every now and then the network itself goes down for maintenance for a few hours, half a day, a day. When those outages happen even though I have a battery backup/generator, I’m basically stuck treading water, unable to even listen to podcasts. I’m wondering what the folks here’ have as a contingency plan for these kinds of outages. Part of me is considering pricing out some kind of VPS for barebone, password manager, podcast player, notes etc for outages; but I haven’t dipped my toe into that world yet. Just wondering what folks are doing/recommending/
Reading a book. 😊
Most underrated solution!
Bliss…
All services which I need access to when I’m not home I host on a vps. All services which need lots of storage, I host at home.
Yes seems very reasonable. I like keeping things in silicon I can touch… but I may need to look into a remote solution for some essential services
I have good ole reliable t mobile. Fml
If you are hosting everything, why do your need your ISP? Is it for access to your home services outside your home?
Yes, several dozen services are exposed bids cloudflare tunnels. Passwords, media, podcasts, notes, calendars etc. need to bed and to access those while out and about.
Is it something you can address with your ISP?
Changing ISP is just not an option for most people. Sometimes a different class of service will Improve link reliability.
The other thing you could consider is some kind of mobile hotspot.
I set up a backup cell connection to my cable internet connection. Sketchy Chinese 4G LTE modem. My router was a DIY job I set up off of Ubuntu Server. Everything ran to a Cisco switch and then was VLAN isolated. For the two WAN connections, I ran scripts from the router that periodically tried to reach out to several DNS providers and then average response rates to determine if the main connection was up. If not then it would modify default routes and push everything to the cell.
The cell connection had pretty low data cap, so it was just for backup and wasn’t a home style plan. I used the old TTL modification trick to get it to pass data like a phone. When I moved the backup to 5G, TTL modification stopped working and I had to resort to creating tunnel interfaces to an actual phone. Since that tunnel is limited in bandwidth to the lowest value, my speeds were really cut in half.
Wait for it to go up gain 🥲. But now I’m curious how people use 4G as second option maybe I will try juat for fun.
We keep vital info cached locally to our devices, using Syncthing for credentials and files (KeePass databases, tech notes, documents, etc.), and a Radicale instance for syncing calendaring and contacts to our Android phones using Etar and DAVx⁵. So, no real need for any connectivity when away from the home.
I have starlink has backup for my DSL. Actually had a 5 day outage over eastern. Was a matter of 5 minutes to book a month of service and I was back online.
If everything is local it doesn’t matter if your ISP goes down, it’ll all work fine.
I have two internet connections - one is fiber and the other is cable. My cable is the backup connection and is a lower tier offering with a 1.2 TB/month cap while my primary fiber is 1gig symmetrical with no data cap. I use pfsense to handle failover in case of an outage.
USB tethering between home server and cellphone with cheap data plan. Setup iptables rules/default routes on the server and other devices on my LAN, to route traffic to the Internet through the server and the USB modem/phone. Call ISP and wait 3 months for them to unfuck phone/fiber pole trashed by tractor. Keep paying for service while it is down. Keep calm and carry on, at least I got a backup Internet access.
I don’t need to access this server from outside (and it wouldn’t work as the mobile Internet plan uses CGNAT), just to have the laptop or phone on the same LAN once in a while to let Nextcloud sync do its thing (essential files, Keepass database…). I suppose I could set up a wireguard tunnel between the home server and my cheap VPS, and access it from there, I just don’t have the need for it.
so most of the time if your ISP goes down power is also out so cellular service might also fail because ether the power outage or high usage by useres using it as backup maybe Starlink? as it’s not affected by your local power grid
Depends on the country / provider. Many cell companies provide battery backup & even gas generators
Just realised the residential package came with phone and tv so that probably makes up the price difference
I’ve been considering pulling the trigger on a cellular home network as backup. At least in the US you can get cellular home internet service as an add on to your cell phone bill. It would be significantly slower than my primary service, but seems like it would be a reasonable backup to avoid completely losing internet due to maintenance or general bad stability.
This probably doesn’t help you unless a competing provider is available to you, but I pay for business class internet just to avoid that issue. I pay double over residential rates, and it’s slower, but I get five static IPs and it’s rock solid uptime and latency because I get QoS’d over all my neighbors. It’s been down for more than an hour only twice in 17 years, and both times were due to cable cuts by construction work in my neighborhood. Even on those cuts my service was restored within 4-6 hours. I get better tech support, and a 4 hour response time for ANY tech issue with the service.
It’s one of the few times I’ve seen that “you get what you pay for” rang so true.
Whos your ISP? Sounds like the Virgin package i had but i dont remember it being that much more expensive than their residential package and im sure I had fairly comparable speeds. I had 350 down 20 up for about £50 about 3 years back
You probably won’t believe this after all the good things I said, but it’s Comcast. I usually leave that part out when I tell people my experience because they don’t believe it. But I’ve found there’s a world of difference between the residential and business experience with them. I absolutely would not use them for residential class service after things I’ve heard.