Gentle Guide to Self-Hosting

I’m an old-timer, I’m surprised that paying for shared hosting is now “self-hosting.” Nothing wrong with that, but that would never have been called self-hosting ten years ago.

I guess it’s like how “cooking from scratch” evolved. A cookbook from the nineteenth century might have said “1 hog” as an ingredient and instructed you to slaughter it. Now of course you buy hog pieces on foam trays.

Love self-hosting and really got into it over the last couple of months. I run a bunch of services for my company now and also in my home lab. I use a Hetzner VPS and provision things either via ansible + docker compose files or via https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/.

The awesome-selfhosted repository is also a great place to find projects to self-host but lacks some features for ease-of-use, which is why I've created a directory with some UX improvements on https://selfhostedworld.com. It has search, filters projects by stars, trending, date and also has a dark-mode.

> Practically, it is foolishness, for what you save in money you lose in time and sanity.

Kubernetes gets a lot of side eyes in the self-hosted community. That's all of self hosting though. So why not go all in?

I've got 3 dell r720XDs running nixos with k3s in multi master mode. It runs rook/ceph for storage, and I've got like 12 hard drives in various sizes. My favorite party trick is yoinking a random hard drive out of the cluster while streaming videos. Does not care. Plug it back in and it's like nothing happened. I've still got tons of room and I keep finding useful things to host on it.

The author nails it here:

> It is 2024, and I say it is time we revisited some of the fundamental joys of setting up our own systems.

Self-hosting really is joyful. It's that combination of learning, challenge, and utility.

+1 to Actual Budget

+1 to Changedetection.io

-1 for not mentioning threat modeling / security. The author uses HTTPS but leaves their websites open to the public internet. First-timers should host LAN-only or lock their stuff way down. I guess that's tricky with shared hosting without some kind of IP restriction or tunneling, though. No idea if uberspace offers something like that.

For folks getting past the initial stages of self-hosting, I'd really recommend something like Docker to run more and more different apps side by side. Bundled dependencies FTW. Shameless plug for my book, which covers the Docker method: https://selfhostbook.com

I'm with the other old timers.

If it's not your hardware running in a space you own or rent, you're not self-hosting.

Currently I have a little Micro-ITX box. But once upon a time I had a proper server rack with 6 U worth of servers, UPS, networking, etc. (Before I was married...)

I'm a big fan of self hosting. I have learned a lot on a small hobby project.

for those who are curious about my setup, I bought a used Dell R630 on ebay for cheap. 1tb raid 1 on ssds, 32gb ram, 32 cores, and i am enjoying running a few small hobby apps with docker, virsh, and minikube (yes i learned all 3). I have a 1gbps fiber connection. I use a 1m cronjob to detect if my IP changes, and i use the linode api to change my DNS A records.

1.5Gb RAM/10Gb disk? Hetzner's basic cloud VPS comes with 4Gb RAM and 40Gb disk for E4.51.

spoiler alert, the article isn't about self-hosting, it's about shared-hosting

But then someone whispers K8S into your ear…

Once you graduate from this guide, be sure to check /r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter ;)

"Why I self host my servers and what I've recently learned", 130+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41440855

I am part of a company that promotes self hosting and provides external routing for self hosting [1]

We made Cloud Seeder [2] an open source application that makes deploying and managing your self-hosted server a 1-click issue!

Hope this comes in handy for someone! :-)

[1] https://ipv6.rs

[2] https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder

I loved the idea of PikaPods until I realised even if I use 10 small (no tiny) instances/services and that too just for me to be used really really rarely) I was getting into integral USD x 11 (or whatever the number is) cost. Can't blame them because it costs money to run things. But I would have rather preferred something that isn't that costly or doesn't go up in prices with number of services/apps used. I wish there was a cost effective solution for this self/web/app hosting.

Miniflux is very good. It even has a telegram integration which will send you notification whenever a new article is published

It's a good writeup, but I do take exception to this:

"Seriously, else-hosting is the practical option, let someone else worry about the reliability, concurrency, redundancy and availability of your systems."

Spend one time trying to get through a maze of automated phone answering systems, then try to ascertain whether the human, when you finally get them, even understands the issue, then wonder how much of what they're telling you is to just get you off the phone, all the time wondering if calling even really does anything, and you'll wonder whether it's better to blindly trust a company that likely doesn't have tech people we're allowed to talk to or to just do it ourselves.

At least when there's an issue with my things, I can address it. Although a bit of a tangent, I'd love to see a review of major hosting providers based on whether you can talk to a human, and whether said human knows anything at all about Internet stuff.

OK:

    This has not been a detailed step by step walkthrough 
    on how to do things, by design. You are meant to go and explore; 
    this is simply a way pointer to invigorate your curiosities

Sorry, but because I came looking for solutions, I found the invigoration aggravating, but then helpful in focusing my attention.

Scalable services and sites I can build, 10 different ways.

My enduring, blocking need is for dead-simple idiot-proof network management to safely poke a head out on public IP from home. And to make secure peer-to-peer connections. Somehow that process never converges on a solution in O(available) time.

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