Self Hosting 101 – A Beginner's Guide

I think it would be very cool if a company sold a box that lets people self-host really easily.

Basically some mid-spec box that comes preinstalled with some nice web UI that lets you easily install popular self-hosted applications (immich, nextcloud, jellyfin, wireguard, etc..).

Ideally it'd let you host an at-home iCloud without having to go through the headache. A lot of people I know (including hobbyists & swes) don't self host because setting up a linux vm/box and configuring everything + maintenance would take too much time.

I think the biggest weakness with this is HA. Residential internet/power isn't the most reliable and even though my homelab server is up ~98% of the time, the 2% is VERY annoying and always happens at the worst times.

Security would also be another large concern. I'd imagine a bad actor would have a harder time getting into my iCloud/Google Photos than my immich server.

Some more resources on self hosting and homelab: https://www.avni.sh/posts/homelab/building-your-own-homelab/...

And my advice to someone considering to start self hosting: Start with a setup that consumes less power and once you have the 80% the idea of the services you want to keep running 24x7 then you scale up your server or build/buy a new one.

This ticks 9/10 boxes on my detector for typical LLM generated SEO content spam. :\

Isn't getting a static IP address a problem?

Articles like this never really cover the downsides of self-hosted setups, and the real time, effort, and costs that'll go into it.

Statements like this are so disingenuous:

"Monitor Your Services: Set up monitoring to keep track of your server's health and performance: Use tools like Prometheus and Grafana for detailed monitoring Set up alerts to notify you of any issues"

That reads like it'll take 5 minutes, but requires learning PromQL, spinning up multiple services, which you then also have to maintain and support, and come with all their own issues.

"Full control over files, no storage limits except hardware"

This is technically true, but for the average user, compared to the vast and free data in Google Drive is just not really valid. Then get into the issues of maintaining drive arrays for redundancy, back-ups, IO performance, etc.

Everything that says "enhanced security" but you're asking someone with no experience in self-hosting to get security right. That's a really big ask.

I don't want to keep going on dissing the article, which is a good attempt at summarizing where the industry/hobby is now. I love self-hosting things at home, I've learnt a lot, and it lets me geek out. But, I'd contend that almost every sentence in that article is flawed somehow.

I liked the depth of the article.