Oh okay…yes I heart about that too…in Austria it’s not the case I think…but this would also prevent the Selfhosting…
I am not belonging to the myopenHAB maintainers, so just can comment from what I heard from them.
AFAIK, regular maintenance is not costing much effort nowadays. It was until we decided to stop IFTTT support, which caused many database issues and invest in more ressources.
Actual development is moving our cluster torwards kybernetes or something similar.
So in general, we have a stable setup in place.
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Oh that is great! You know this software, maybe it would help you/the developers 
https://rancher.com/
It’s free and opensource…maybe it would help to use it in combination with the new rancheros successor:
https://burmillaos.org/
Rancher/Burmilla is really nice for cluster-servers, because EVERYTHING runs in a docker-container… therefore it’s extremely stable and secure (lightweight) with the correct config
Rancher maybe helps maintain the kubernetes-cluster…
If docker-swarm is sufficient, this maybe interesting:
Swarm is not so scalable and feature-rich but easier to maintain…
For storage/database this maybe an interesting solution:
Very few users have the knowledge, skills, and experience to self host any service directly accessible from the Internet. It takes much more than just adding a username and password to do so safely and reliably. I firmly believe that no one should open a port on their firewall unless they really know what they are doing. I strongly recommend against it.
And the authentication built into OH 3, right now, only protects the administration parts of OH. Anyone can still access and open your doors without authentication if it’s in your MainUI Pages.
There is a reason why these services work better with our cloud service. The establishment of trust between your server and the service offered by Amazon/Google is a relatively involved process. You can do it yourself and the instructions for doing so is documented in the readmes for those add-ons. But it’s never going to be “easy” to achieve. Trust is hard.
These are always better handled by a cloud service where a few experts can establish that trust relationship once on behalf of all openHAB users (because the trust is really between the myopenhab.org service and Google/Amazon, not something that is done per user). That’s why it’s currently implemented in our cloud service and not something we require users to DIY.
The amount of maintenance on the server is actually pretty minimal. And in today’s case, the problem wasn’t even ours but the service provider that hosts our virtual servers is having networking issues. myopenhab.org actually has a pretty good reliability record, at least on par with a lot of commercial offerings from the likes of eecobee and honeywell.
It takes far more than just TFA to make something like this safe to do for most users. Even the most secure system needs to be constantly monitored for attacks. The network traffic and logs need to be constantly monitored for breaches. Additional protections should be in place so when (not if) it becomes compromised the amount of damage that can be done is pretty minimal. These are not things that most users can do nor are they things that most users should do.
But, as Bruce points out, the openHAB Cloud Server is and has almost always been publicly available to run self hosted if one wants to self host. It’s even packaged in a Docker Image to make deploying it super easy.
Note that this isn’t due to a lack of funding, It has to do with a lack of volunteers. And for something like the cloud server, not just anyone will be given the keys to the servers. They will have to build up a good deal of trust with the maintainers before they can take on admin and maintenance of the cloud servers (yes, servers, it is in fact deployed in a load balanced with fail over architecture).
Someone can surely do that if they choose. They probably can’t use the openHAB logo and trademark if they did though. I seriously doubt a paid for service would do any better than what we are currently doing.
I can’t say but I believe there are at least 200K+ simultaneous users of the myopenhab.org service. That’s just a guess though based on a projection of old data so I could be way off.
This makes no sense because Alexa and Google are themselves cloud services. You are not becoming independent from the cloud if you use them. And if you are not, why go through the considerable work to self host the server? You are already dependent on the cloud.
Yes. That lets all the users maintain their firewalls without punching holes in them. That’s far easier for end users to manage since it’s almost always the default configuration anyway. They don’t have to mess with DYNDNS or ISPs complaining about them hosting a service or any of that. From a security perspective, this approach is far superior to self hosting for almost all openHAB users.
It really doesn’t, not since the IFTTT integration was turned off.
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@bf8392, I see from your profile that you joined the community in September 2019, which is right around the time that IFTTT support was removed. There was a two-month period before that when myopenhab crashed over and over, and you’re lucky to have missed it.
If I recall correctly, the idea of someone hosting their own cloud with a paid subscription also came about at that time…and I have a sneaking suspicion that it came from me. It’s exactly the kind of “if you think you can do better” suggestion I’d offer to someone complaining about a free service (and there was a lot of complaining).
I would guess that the number of significant, unplanned outages in the 15-16 months since then is in the single digits, which is pretty fantastic. So while it’s annoying that the service is down right now, I’d agree with others that myopenhab is performing very well and alternatives aren’t necessary. 
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Okay 
great thanks for all the information it gives me a better insight on OpenHab 
really appreciate all the information Okay after hearing all these Arguments, I think it doesn’t make any sense to drive this project further for now …
By the way I love myopenhab and I don’t know any opensource software, that is offering a free cloud! That’s extremely cool ! Very nice too hear that it is not taking too much maintainance for now thanks to all for the discussion
Thanks nice numbers by the way
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