That explains how you wound up in the position you’re currently in lmao.

https://www.usememos.com/ Would be great for this.

You clearly don’t understand a single thing about how the internet works and are very confused. Let me help you out.

how you self host a CDN hosted by fastly?????

You don’t? The website is what would be self hosted. Not Fastly.

When did I resolve the Hostname to a DNS record? … I resolved it's domain to an IPv4 address which points entirely to a fastly server

Right there. You resolved the host record, probably an A record or ANAME for the website (dev.to) into an IPv4 address, using DNS.

It's not a resource that get's delivered by CDN, it's the whole fucking website they are serving, which is a service they sell and that's not self hosting.

Here’s what you’re critically misunderstanding about this. Just because you resolve the record for a website and the IP that’s returned belongs to fastly does not mean fastly is hosting the content. You literally haven’t done anything to prove that the website isn’t self-hosted on a computer in some guys garage. You’re making assumptions based on ignorance and using those assumptions to gatekeep self hosting because you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s very possible that site isn’t self hosted, but so far you haven’t actually found any proof of that like you think you have.

If you think a domain is a hostname and an IPv4 address is a DNS record

A domain can have several host records of different types including one at the root of the domain. What you’re resolving isn’t “a domain” it’s a single record for that domain, and its associated IP address is contained in the DNS record. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with this system, try this: https://www.dummies.com/book/technology/information-technology/networking/general-networking/dns-for-dummies-292922/

It’s clear that you’re a hobbyist with very little understanding of how the internet and self hosting works on a fundamental level and that’s ok. But I recommend instead of wasting your energy being confidently wrong very publicly for the purpose of gatekeeping, you use that energy to learn how these things actually work instead.

Not local, but I’ve been shopping at Lidl and Aldi for years and while their prices raised some with inflation, it was negligible compared to bigger grocery stores. I pay less than half at Lidl than I would at another store.

I’ve been seeing the horror stories of $9 milk for years but I’ve never paid more than $2-3 for. Gallon of milk.

use homelabs to experiment in. It's a sandbox environment where if you break it, you fix it, and more importantly it isn't costing money while it's down.

Pretty in line with what I’ve said. It’s for experimentation and is meant for it to be ok to break. You’re trying really very hard to ascribe meaning that isn’t there. I don’t really know why you’re trying so very hard just to be wrong. another hint you’ll notice here is how r/homelab is its own subreddit apart from r/selfhosted

i wasn't talking about a homelab, as evidenced by the fact that i said the most broad, least specific form of lab, laboratory.

So you were just talking nonsense about something unrelated, got it. You tried to compare a homeland to the only definition of a laboratory that doesn’t apply to a technical environment. Very big brain move there.

yeah, that's my point, i was playing by your rules of the definition, which are very explicitly strict.

No, you’re just confusing technical terms and phrases for their literal equivalents. Making arguments about things that were never said. Whatever drugs you are on must be some good shit because the world as you seem to see it is all Willy Wonka.

I.E. literally anything you don't have strong attachment to, because unlike the corpo world, you can simply do whatever the fuck you want with your hardware, you don't even have to test shit in a testing environment if you want to.

No not at all. By that logic, I know some pretty big global companies with production environments that can be considered “home labs” in your eyes. The defining characteristic is the purpose and intent for the environment.

It’s very simple, not nearly as complicated or vague as you’re trying to make it out to be. If your purpose for the environment is to experiment, and nothing on that environment is of any importance to you, I.E. you could wipe the whole thing clean in a moments notice and lose nothing of value, you have a home lab.

If on the other hand you have a Nextcloud instance running on it with files you expect to be there, and would be distraught if they were gone, you do not have a home lab.

Very simple. Nothing complex or vague or overly explicit about it.

I’m really glad they used that low effort development time on Starfield. Maybe that games piss poor reception will shock someone into putting a little more effort into the next fallout.

Of course it would be self hosting. If the website isn’t hosted on fastly, and is hosted by an individual, that would be the definition of self hosting. You’re also assuming that Fastly is caching responses, do you know that for certain?

Literally all you’ve done so far is resolve the host name to a DNS record. You think you’ve done something, but you haven’t.

That’s what the definition is, nobody said you have to like it. Home labs have been a thing for a long time now. Long before laymen starting confusing the term with something it’s not, muddying up its meaning.

I mean sure they're a sterile environment, but it's incredibly unlikely that a lab is wiped clean and built from scratch, unless you get millions of dollars, and a lot of free time, i guess.

What the? No you doughnut, the data is wiped. As in you can erase all the data off the drives, install a different OS, spin up a new cluster on some different hypervisor. It’s not a lab as in “physically sterile” it’s a lab as in a place meant for experimentation.

People often refer to their "homelab" as an entire server rack, you want me to believe that people are willing to wheel out their entire server rack and discard the entire fucking thing?

What are you talking about guy? You don’t wheel anything out. You don’t discard the hardware. You ‘d discard any and all data or services on it. It’s for experimenting with things. Often for configuring things from scratch. Thats what you’re experimenting with and studying. Your home lab is the entire rack. Everything that’s running on it is what is ephemeral.

In some capacity a homelab has to be semi permanent,

The opposite. The purpose of a home lab is impermanence. The only permanent part of the home lab is the hardware itself. You can test service reliability over a long period of time on your home lab if that’s what you’re experimenting with, but you wouldn’t do so with all your live, precious data. If you’re putting things into it that are meant to stay there permanently, it’s no longer a home lab. A home lab is for testing things out, experimenting, ripping it all out, setting it all back up, in an environment outside of production. It’s the non-business version of “pre-production” or a testing environment.

Oh yeah like that’s part of it. If this article is supposed to be a call to action, somebody who starts looking into “homelabs” is going to get confused, they’ll get some sticker shock, and they won’t understand how they apply to what’s said in the article. They’ll see a mix of information from small home servers to hyperconverged infrastructure, banks of Cisco routers and switches, etc. my first home lab was a stack of old Cisco gear I used to study for my network engineering degree. If you stumbled upon an old post of mine talking about my setup and all you’re looking for is a Plex box you’ll be like “What the fuck is all this shit, I’m not trying to deal with all that”

“Self hosting”, and “home server” are just more accurate keywords to look into and actually see things more closely related to what you want.

Fastly is also a CDN. The fact that a website is behind Fastly doesn’t imply that it isn’t selfhosted at all.

Only if nothing on it is permanent. You can have a home lab where the things you’re testing are self hosted apps. But if the server in question is meant to be permanent, like if you're backing up the data on it, or you’ve got it on a UPS you make sure it stays available, or you would be upset if somebody came by and accidentally unplugged it during the day, it’s not a home lab.

A home lab is an unimportant, transient environment meant for tinkering, prototyping, and breaking.

A box that’s a solution to something, that’s hosting anything you can’t get rid of at a moments notice, is just a home server.

It really bugs me in general how often the term “home lab” is conflated with a “home server”, but in the context of what this article is trying to communicate, it’s only going to turn the more casually technical people it’s trying to appeal to off.

For many people, their home lab can also function as a server for self hosting things that aren’t meant to be permanent, but that’s not what a home lab is or is for. A home lab is a collection of hardware for experimenting and prototyping different processes and technologies. It’s not meant to be a permanent home for services and data. If the server in your house can’t be shut down and wiped at any given time without any disruption to or loss of data that’s important to you, then you don’t have a home lab.