Booking at the venue itself will almost always be cheaper and provide more luxuries like a free drink in the bar or free breakfast.
The third party takes a cut of the cost. The hotel wants that cut badly, so just call them up, say you found a cheaper price at the third party and see what they do. They will likely give you a better offer and they themselves will have a better profit as well in the proces.
How much are you really saving? I value my time much more than I do saving $20. Booking.com does provide a really nice UI for finding great places as well.
That's ok if you book a single hotel from time to time. But if you book several hotels for a road trip (our last Scotland road trip would have been 12 different hotels/BnBs, and because it was during a holiday season and we intended to visit islands just doing the classical "BnB" strategy of driving into town in the afternoon and look for a BnB was not feasible) having everything on a single site is hard to beat.
And with Covid hitting in early 2020 it was even easier to cancel everything on one site with just a few clicks.
Some of those hotel third party sites demands that the hotel don't give any other price than what they have on the third party site. So you really have to call to have a chance at a better price.
Don't get me wrong, but that implies she is not using Firefox as her daily driver.
Changing the icon to, shudder, the edge icon might help and call it "Internet" and maybe she will use it. Most people do not really know, or care, that their browser is.
I do this with very un - techsavvy people and install uBo and they have a fairly safe time online.
Author here. I have had some suggestions for this, because of this post. I have experimented a little, but I first want to fully understand what is going on in the mail landscape.
I want to write a beginner friendly guide on selfhosted mail in the future, so if you happen to have some tips, or things you want to know about, let me know!
> IRB now supports autocomplete, and even shows the documentation when you tab through the options.
Oh this is pretty useful. How many times have I not wanted to learn about how to use a function. Showing the documentation when tabbing through the options can save me a lot of time browsing through the ruby docs. Looking forward to using this while working.
> Generally, supporting open interoperable standards that make switching providers easy is bad for business, so I'm generally a lot more surprised at where it is supported, rather than at where it isn't.
Exactly this. Google makes it very, very easy to have everything synced to a Google account on Android devices: just log in and it just works. You contacts, mail and calendar are all immediately available on your new device. If they'd implement CalDAV in an easy manner, it would probably be a more viable option for less tech-savvy people.
What the parent commenter said: from a business perspective it doesn't make sense to implement it.
Fortunately there are some good, relatively simple to use apps available to implement it for us.
>rather than the author's one-time export solution, and they seem to work ok.
The reason why a simple one-time export was my go-to solution, is because I really don't want my data on Google's servers. In the blogpost I explain how to import the data to Nextcloud and use that as a 'single source of truth'. Other devices can then sync up to your nextcloud instance.
I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not sure how/if this would work on iOS, but I am sure that it's possible to sync it up in a similar manner.
Interesting; I am quite hesitant to move from Protonmail to a selfhosted mail. How long have you been selfhosting your mail? How do you deal with spam? Are your mails always received at the other end?
I moved to selfhosting email about 2 years ago from google gsuite. I use mailcow[1] and have it on Hetzner Cloud. I don't send much but they have always gotten to their destination. Spam is very minimal, next to zero. Mailcow has built in spam detection with rspamd and lets you train it if any spam does get through just by moving the email to your junk folder.
Another big thing I love about mailcow is that it has sync jobs so I can create mailbox's within it and have it sync my emails from other gmail accounts I have or really any mail host that you can connect to with IMAP. You can even set it so it deletes the email on the source account, which is great as most of my extra gmail accounts are just used to receive.
The dashboard is pretty great too and you only really need to use the shell, apart from the initial install, to update it every now and then. So many great things I have to say about it and how you can super power it like hosting custom domains and nextcloud among other things. I'm glad I made the change to selfhost. If you know what you're doing I'd 100% recommend you test out running your own mail server for a bit to test the waters.
Late reply but it's around 15 euro. I'm using the CPX31 on Hetzner Cloud[1]. It holds my main setup and the extras like nextcloud, custom domains, etc.
I'm self hosting with mail-in-a-box as well. It comes with a nextcloud install. It hasn't been flawless but it's been good and I'm happy to have some control.
With e-mail, I haven't had any problems with one exception. When e-mailing the local school system, they reject my e-mails. I looked into it and it turns out that their spam provider was blocking me because I was a private domain or something like that. It was a configuration on their side. Their tech support told me that I should "get an e-mail address with a normal extension."
Outside of that issue, my e-mails have gotten delivered. Between graylisting and the built-in spam filter software, I haven't had any spam issues. It's been smooth as far as that goes. The webmail (roundcube) isn't as nice as gmail but desktop and mobile clients are good in any event.
The mail-in-a-box nextcloud install does use sqlite which means that you should make sure to backup contacts in case sqlite breaks. It broke for me once but I was able to copy my contacts from Thunderbird back into the system without any real problems.
Calendaring works pretty well with Nextcloud but I haven't found any calendar software that I really love. The web software is good but not super fast. Lightning has gotten better but still feels bolted on. Kontact calendar is too groupware-oriented for my personal use. Evolution never quite felt right to me. The built-in Apple calendar and Samsung (Andriod) calendar apps work fairly well.
I’ve been running MIAB (mailinabox) for business and personal since 2016. I haven’t seen any major issues with deliverability but YMMV. You have to register with all the feedback loops. Once you do, you get feedback when something you send gets marked as spam. Spam on MIAB is handled with postgrey and with spamassasin. It’s pretty good, although I’ve had recent issues with spam coming from gmail and hotmail. I’ve also customized some of the config to bounce Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Docs since neither companies control spam coming from their networks.
I self-host on a small-ish VPS. I don't really have to deal with spam, mail-in-a-box comes with pre-configured spamassassin. I haven't had issues with deliverability. When I created the box I did a scan of the IP and domain, found out that one antispam provider was blocking my IP, I sent a request to unblock it explaining this is my new IP I just acquired, they unblocked it. That was the last time I had to deal with deliverability issues, in any case I have an automated warning that I set up on MxToolBox. Let me know if you have more questions.
Hi Teekert! Thank you for your feedback; I will 'unexpose' the mariadb port in this example. That is one less service open for exploiting! :)
I now about Traefik, but I use the Synology reverse proxy at the moment. I felt that it is not fair to include it in this blogpost, since it is not an open source solution and not truely in the spirit of selfhosting. I plan to make the switch in the future to another reverse proxy like Traefik, Caddy or maybe just Nginx, not sure yet.
Could you give me the link to the blogpost? I might link to it :) Quality conten t must be shared and I think we as selfhosters should make it as approachable as possible for newcomers.
I really have to think about the post and update it, perhaps I'll get back to you and put it on a vps, not on "the hub of my digital life", before I share it.
Actually almost everything I learned and use I heard about on the Self-hosted podcast [1], and on one of the host's GitHub repos [2] (who takes personal infra as code to the next level).
Author of the blogpost. Thank you for your feedback. The problem with hardware choice, is that many selfhosters have really low-power, budget, powersaving hardware, including myself. The point of this article was for me to discover how I could move some of my data away from Google, of which this is one piece.
I had this running on a Raspberry Pi 4 in this blogpost, which functioned just fine; although only with one user and little apps installed. I might do a follow up when I have used Nextcloud more extensively and explore different hardware options.
I switched from dropbox to nextcloud recently. I use pis for VPN gateways and DNS servers, but don't trust them for things like data storage.
I host nextcloud via TrueNAS SCALE running on a dual E5 + 4x2TB NVMe. TrueNAS handles the docker images with a kubernetes cluster managed by middleware. Straying from default settings is a time-consuming path, but the defaults work great.
Nextcloud doesn't feel perfect with lots of UI jank (initial photo upload was a real headache), but I trust the data put there will not delete itself. I love having the ability to selectively view and sync files with native OS explorers on windows, mac, and iOS. iOS photo backup with live photos is also something no other solution I've seen can compete with.
I'm also running NC on a RPi 4 (8GB), with an NFS share from my QNAP NAS as its data store. I didn't go the docker route, but rather elected to just do a local install.
I have ~12 users, ranging from a few with less than 5GB of data to a couple power users with ~100GB each.
Overall, I'm quite happy with NC. Sure, there are a couple of rough edges, but for the most part, having a single install handle file, contacts, calendar, chat, etc. has been great.
Before everyone moved to cloud services, self-hosting was a goto choice for nerds who wanted their own stuff, including me. One challenge that self-hosting has not really conquered is availability. If your rpi dies, so does your self-hosting. You might want to explore (and blog about) setting-up a failover device. I'd definitely read about that.
