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What do you self host?
I'm interested to see what people on here self host, or if they self host at all. Reply with what you self host, why you host it and any other thoughts you have!
I'm interested to see what people on here self host, or if they self host at all. Reply with what you self host, why you host it and any other thoughts you have!
Running on a VPS:
While it's not really a "service" per se, my server uses certbot to automatically request and renew SSL certs from LetsEncrypt for all the domains it serves. Nginx provides SSL termination for all the services that use it.
Running at home, on my LAN:
One notable thing that's not self-hosted:
While some people claim to self-host email with no problems, I've heard a lot of horror stories (mostly of the "Google and Microsoft will silently blackhole your mail" variety), and Fastmail is cheap and easy. I highly recommend paying somebody for the service, rather than throwing your data into the privacy meat grinder of Gmail; but privacy concerns specifically about hosted email are almost all overblown, since email is just fundamentally not a very private medium.
You're right about the horror stories. I've been self hosting my own mail for quite a few years and it takes a bit of work to keep up with the requirements of the big players [which, lets be honest, is almost all MS and google]. And they are so powerful that they really can just blackhole any little individual provider they want without any care at all.
Thing is, that's actually a reason for more people to self host. A federated protocol is only powerful as such if it has a diverse ecosystem. Just like many cryptocurrencies, as soon as one player gets a commanding control, the system starts to break down. The more individual email hosts we have, the less able MS + google are to act without noticable consequence.
We're already seeing signs of things going pear shaped already with many original federated protocols, with the changes they are pushing to their services [google with AMP for email, MS with their basic auth changes], and even what Apple does with SMS+imessage. At my workplace, it doesn't even feel like email any more, I just call it "microsoft mail" [and die a little inside].
Anyway..... that's a ranty way of encouraging anyone who is interested in self-hosting email to give it a go. And know there are plenty of people who are eagre to help :-) Don't necessarily host your primary email right away, but definitely play around and help get some diversity in the ecosystem!
Companies such as Migadu do a good job at helping this cause. Instead of paying for email you pay for email hosting. For those who can't self host email, this is something that I can thoroughly recommend!
Thanks for the suggestion, I've currently pay for runbox and have it sitting as a standby as an emergency failover. But this company also looks pretty great too. I certainly like how humble their disclaimers are, haha.
I always like the idea of self-hosting lots of my services, but maybe, I never saw the huge benefit of it. So, my question is, why self-host? Simply to avoid vendor lock-in? Just to have full control of your content?
I'm actually thinking in hosting my first website (also static) but I have to say, that there are multiple options and I'm not sure what are the pros and cons of each. I could host it on AWS using S3, I could use a VPS, I could use a NAS, I could use a Raspberry Pi, I could simply use a CDN like Cloudflare. Probably there are even other options, so, my question to you is: why host your website on a VPS and not on other hosting solutions out there? Wouldn't a VPS be slower if I also want to server images? Sorry if the question is really not in scope with self-hosting, but I'm very curious. :)
For most people, there's probably not a huge benefit to self-hosting. For me in particular, I do it for the following reasons:
My thoughts on your thoughts on hosting options:
Yes, strictly speaking a good CDN will be faster than a single VPS in most cases. However, unless you're serving tons of requests, or very large files, it's unlikely to make a significant different to your users. For serving large amounts of (or a large variety of) data, space on the VPS may be a limiting factor, as most are not provisioned with very large drives. For most personal users, I think the decision should rest mostly upon how interested you are in administering a server.
I really like the idea of hosting services on a raspberry pi, but with one big concern that I can't get over: if someone cracks a VPS, they're in your VPS; but if they crack a Pi on your home network, they're in your home network. (Edit: typo)
Oooooo this is gonna be fun! Ok, so I have three servers, an Intel NUC (running debian), an R710 rack server (running unRaid), and my ASUS router (running Merlin).
On the R710 (this is my main server), I have a number of Docker containers, and then a debian VM running a few things that weren't worth it to Dockerize. Docker first:
On the debian VM on my R710:
On the NUC:
Router:
My router is mostly just a router, but I'm also running OpenVPN on it so that I can have access to my encrypted/piholed DNS setup no matter where I am in the world :D
I think that's everything!
Any channels in particular that you would recommend?
Sure!
vlogbrothers - this is peak YouTube, in my humble opinion. Two brothers, who have been making videos to tell each other about interesting things since they first moved apart almost a decade and a half ago. They vary dramatically in content, though Hank is a science educator and so his videos often veer toward science, and John is a YA novelist (though Hank has also written two YA novels recently!) and tends toward more introspective content, often around mental health, emotions, and philosophy.
Corridor Crew - this is the behind the scenes channel for Corridor Digital, a small special effects company in LA. They have great SFX breakdowns, stunt breakdowns, fun SFX challenges, etc. They’re all pretty impressively entertaining to watch as individuals, just a fun time.
Adam Neely - I’m a big music nerd, so I find Adam’s stuff pretty entertaining. He’s a jazz bassist that tours with the band Sungazer (pretty sure some of their covers have been posted here, actually). He does great Q&As, song breakdowns, etc. He had an excellent video on “the worst jazz solo” a few weeks ago that is definitely worth checking out.
Smarter Every Day - this is probably my most hit or miss rec. More hits than misses, for sure, and when Dustin gets really into something, it’s hard to be bored, but sometimes he has a video or two that just do nothing for me.
I think that’s most of what I watch regularly!
How is NextCloud to set up? I have a CPU/mobo/RAM from when I upgraded to a Ryzen 3700x so I've been thinking about just buying a couple drives and a case to set up a NextCloud/Plex server.
It’s a breeze with the official Docker image! You just need a MariaDB/MySQL (or... I think they also support Postgres?) db, too (I have a MariaDB Docker container). The actual software is really great, especially if you can get email hooked up (usually pretty easy if you use a hosted email provider). Let me know if you have any specific questions!
Thanks! I may end up messaging you in a couple of weeks if I decide to do it! :)
Nextcloud keeps getting easier and easier to install/setup. Sure i've seen or heard about minor errors (often a missing php library, that is easily remedied), but with every new version the process is getting leagues better! I should clarify my experience is on installing/managing nextcloud (and owncloud years before) on VPS; and have never tried on my own server at home. But i suppose that one's own server at home is usually easier because one has total control of the machine, i would guess.
You’re well on your way with your Nextcloud setup!! Plex and Nextcloud were the first things I ever set up myself; I’ve installed and reinstalled Plex like five or six times on different machines at this point!
On my server:
/admin.phpeven if you never installed php in the first place. So I setup a small funny python script that takes care of those things. Try running sqlmap or gobuster or something like that :-) Or just go here and watch your RAM usage. Some browsers tend to protect users against it, but it works well enough for me. I never see most of the bots afterwards :)/var/www/htmlto my laptop. So I edit a file, open web browser and it's there! Everything works so flawlessly. I use it for backup as well. It's theoretically just a synchronization program, but there is now way five different devices are going to fail at once. This is great post about Syncthing.Currently I'm thinking about hosting my own Matrix instance and Bitwarden server. But I don't know if it's wise putting so much of my communication channels and everything into one machine that might fail every moment. I'm scared of my setup as it is, and I have just my email there. I actually had my email server down for few days before I noticed because I changed the way firewall works and forgot to allow email ports. I should probably setup some monitoring of some kind.
But yeah, I quite like the setup. I thought I won't use a personal server, but I couldn't be happier. Btw, if you're a student, you can get server and domainname for free from github for few months.
Recently during covid I rebuilt my whole setup using containers using docker while previously I installed everything manually and it became a mess. I see self hosting as a good learning opportunity and a way to be less reliant on online services.
To manage all this I use:
I keep backups of the data for the containers of it with borgbackup while docker files and configs I keep in a git repo.
Do you use Trilium on your phone? I recently tried migrating all my notes to Trilium, but found that the mobile site just wasn't good enough to use. The bottom few lines of the tree and every note was cut off.
No, I don't use it on my phone but I tried it now and it works fine for viewing notes and some simple editing of notes but it isn't great compared to the desktop experience. I don't have an issue with the bottom of the page being cut off, if it helps I'm using firefox on android to use trilium.
I run a very small Linux shell-based social community for people interested in minimalist, text-based computing. Including a number of services that are only available internally (to those logged into the shell), it also hosts:
Why? It's fun!
I self-host a few of my blogs, an ephemeral pastebin service I made, and my own file synchronization / media streaming infrastructure, for peace of mind.
I have a Wireguard VPN set up, with a DNSMasq resolver on top of it, allowing me to automatically block all the DNs from dangerous / unethical services, like googletagmanager.
For TLS management (i.e. https), I use the caddy reverse proxy, which handles this mess for me, as I still have bad memories from certbot and all that madness...
Running on a VPS.
I see a lot of people mentioned blogs here. I have one, but I don't like the static site generator I use to build it. Any recommendations on simple blog tools (both simple for me to maintain and write articles for, and simple for the browsers that visit it) I should consider?
Just wondering; what generator do you use right now?
For recommendations, It depends on how complicated your site is. If it's just a good ol' blog, you can probably get by with some clever shell scripts gluing stuff together.
For "out of the box" generators, I only have experience with Hugo and Jekyll.
Hugo is pretty great if you can just use someone else's theme. If you want a custom theme for your site, just letting you know that their theme documentation is awfully complicated (in my experience, anyway)
Jekyll was a bit easier on the custom theming part, but it requires Ruby, which isn't commonly available in many systems, so it's yet another thing you'll need to install. Both on your machine and any automated build environment you use.
Please note that there are many more generators. These are just the two I had any experience working with (and even my Jekyll experience is probably outdated today)
All of these options will, when set up, be as easy as putting a Markdown file on a folder and running a command to generate the rest of the site (that can be automated if you really want to)
For maintenance, the shell script approach might not be the easiest, but since you know how it works, you probably will be able troubleshoot anything easily.
This one really depends on what the resulting site will be built on. Most "pre-built" themes for the known generators are all regular pages with minimal JS, so that should be pretty simple for any browser to render.
If your site being simple is important, I would highly recommend you to avoid any generators that use React, Vue, or similar frameworks. Even if they're claiming to be server-side rendered, those frameworks will download massive amounts of JS for little to no functionality advantage.
I'm currently using Katsup
I've made a static site generator of my own, I've used hugo, and now am using pelican...but honestly, the biggest timesink regardless is creating/designing the template/look-and-feel. If you have no isues just using a default theme, or leveraging a template that someone else creates (or that comes with a static site generator), then setup these days is quick and easy...and well worth it!
Also, i think someone else noted about hugo's less-than-stellar documentaion around creating themes/templates...oh yeah, i agree. As fast as they say that hugo generates a site's content...for me that is not so compoelling a feature...but good documentation is always worth its weight in gold. and, hugo's documentaiton around building themes/templates (all due respect to the project implementors) needs lots of work.
I'm looking for a very minimalistic template, so I would hope there's already something out there for me.
Bitwarden, Tiny Tiny RSS, Plex, PiHole, and a couple blogs
May I ask which Bitwarden server do you use? And whether can you use premium-only features (like the TOTP generator) when you selfhost without paying for it?
Probably bitwarden_rs, which is an unofficial rust server implementation that supports premium features. The official Bitwarden requires multiple docker containers.
I'm self hosting a docker image on linode. The premium only features are still premium only, even when self hosting. The free version suits me just fine though.
I really really want to get in to self-hosting the downside is things like getting past my own router and similar smaller technical issues that are beyond me. The rest is easy but that part is just too damn tricky.
How much money and experience with text-only Unix sysadminning do you have? A cheap VPS can easily run you under $5/month. (Low End Box gives some really stupid cheap options, but if you're planning to depend on it at all, I'd go with the cheapest offering from an established provider—I used RamNode for years and was totally satisfied.) That gets you a virtualized server that:
The major downsides would be that if playing with hardware is one of your goals, it obviously won't satisfy that; and there are potential privacy concerns with running your software on systems managed by and shared with third parties. It is much easier and more reliable than trying to get all the necessary network configuration and port forwarding set up on a home network behind a residential ISP, though.
I love the low-end scene. It’s amazing what you can get for $5/yr. I used to run my bouncer off of a cheaper one and it was perfect.
I’ve flirted with the idea of moving my relatively simple vps needs back.
I've got a $5/month VPS from something in the OVH family of companies that's honestly overkill for my requirements (pretty much just messing around with python web stuff). Really nice to have it available when I want to host something without having to deal with port forwarding and whatever else comes with self hosting. Last time I tried that, it was just a big headache getting everything to work, though I was also like 16 and trying to run a minecraft server on a laptop that could barely run singleplayer minecraft, so that likely contributed to the problems.
I would absolutely get a VPS. You can get a system that is legitimately on the Internet, not violating any terms of service, and it's not in your house. If you can handle running a server over an ssh connection, it's the way to go. If you can't, AFAIK this is how it's done, you will learn a bunch of useful skills.
Well I wouldn't mind doing that but I also have a bit of a thing for it being with a good company for privacy (so in Sweden Bahnhof was one idea), the other is using it as a place to save workfiles and the cost quickly goes way up there. In comparison I already have available tech to set up my own in my own house, with more than enough available diskspace etc.
Just curious, how does that work in Europe? I live in the Northeast US, but the two VPSs I have had are in Texas and California, and it really doesn't matter. (Although, I would not visit those places right now). How much do privacy laws differ within Europe? Is the bandwidth between Sweden and, say, Germany any less than within the country?
Well German internet is supposed to be sorta crud tbh. Different countries have different privacy laws and how they are actually implemented tend to be different too.
Personally I trust Bahnhof in Sweden (because of theirs pretty hardball stand on privacy) but at the same time they are kinda costly.
Man, my VPS is boring compared to everybody else.
The CMSs I use are all flat (mostly PicoCMS) and the content most likely hasn’t been viewed by anybody else.
... and that is pretty much it.
I don't host as much as everyone else because I only have a single, very low end VPS, but here they are:
I don't use anything specific to manage the different services, though I previously used Docker via docker-compose for a long time.
Things I am thinking of self-hosting, but not yet:
Things I wish i could self-host:
PeerTube, Plex/Jellyfin, Nextcloud
E-mail
Minetest
Matrix
CI / Build Server
I run a home server with Windows 10 on it, and a small number of Linux VMs managed with Hyper-V. Storage on this box is a 128GB boot SSD, and a Windows Storage Spaces array with four 8TB HDDs and a 256GB cache SSD. The cache is very handy because writes to this array can be kind of slow due to the parity setting I use.
Windows is hosting Plex for my movies and TV shows. I plan to migrate to Jellyfin when the various clients for it become more mature. Windows also provides LAN access to my iCloud Drive and Photos via Samba share. This is to make these things available to Linux machines on my network. It also hosts my UniFi controller software.
The Linux VMs host these services:
When reading all these comments I really want get back into the self hosting game, this is so cool! But over the years I basically moved everything from self-hosted to 3rd party services except my home-media stuff (plex) and a virtual server to still stay up to date to play around with things.
I always ended up with some issues here and there, you have to keep an eye on security all the time if it's an endpoint you have available over the internet for everyone (in theory).
I ended up with subscriptions to mailing-lists for Wordpress, Nextcloud, all GitHub notifications etc. to stay up to date. And of course, something went wrong and/or down when I was away or otherwise on vacation or on a longer trip. It might not be important when your Plex server goes down at home but when e-mail stops working while you're away for three weeks it really sucks.
I've recently switched my setup recently to outsource some previously self-hosted services. Currently I have a small server running in my home that runs
Fileserver: I was running on Seafile, but now switched to Syncthing. There was no real upside to the switch, but also no real downside. I lost the ability to have a web interface that I could access from my phone (e.g. to show peoplpe funny vacation pictures every once in a while), but that wasn't working perfectly before due to misconfigured DNS anyways.
VMs that are hooked up with VPNs. I do all my private browsing over those VMs, so I don't leak privacy info. Every VM has it's own "user identity", with their own email accounts and passwords.
A git repository collection
I plan on setting up Pihole on the server, but haven't gotten to it yet.
Things I don't self-host anymore:
I recently outsourced email to protonmail. Email is too important a service to not get it right, and my own setup was too unreliable. This reduced my downtime and made it easier to access email from my phone. The switch was way less painful than I thought.
I switched from having a VM that would run torrents over VPN to using a seedbox (that I still control over a VPN-backed VM). I moved to a country that has stricter IP laws than before, so the extra layer of security is worth the price.
I replaced my offsite backup storage with just uploading my encrypted backups to Google Cloud Storage. Their archival storage is dirt cheap, and this is a much easier solution to backup. Should've done this ages ago -- I store a few Terabytes of backups for a few dozens of cents a month.
I have a super boring openvpn and plex server. That's it.
You guys are living in the future.
Do you use IRC? Might be worth checking out ZNC if you do.
Not really, last time I use IRC was like 15 years ago.
Nothing, really. I had set up NextCloud and Wallabag (Pocket-like software) a while ago, together with a couple of other services (Gitea, at the very least, and I'm not sure what else), but then I never used them: it was partly because I was worried about security, partly because I didn't really trust the server, and partly because I didn't feel like using a web interface/install apps to interact with them.
By then, also, I was feeling sure enough in my knowledge of Linux to ditch the DE, and I started using Emacs & org-mode. I transitioned away from NextCloud to Syncthing, which had the added bonus of working even when the Internet connection didn't (not uncommon where I lived, and I never used its other functions), wrote a couple of scripts to scrape stuff off the web which mostly use org for their output, and realized that I didn't need to set up a server to host my git repos (which, incidentally, I'm not keeping on my VPS but on Keybase).
I still have an HTTP server running, but my website/blog is still theoretical, only living on my SSD. It is, of course, written in org and produced by Emacs, with bespoke elisp and a couple of Python scripts to post-process the HTML output.
I privately self-host (that is, running on one of my Pis or my NUC and only accessible from my local network):
Then I do have a webserver (one of the cheap crappy ones with only PHP and MySQL and no SSH or root or any access) which powers a telegram bot for our group chat, my blog, and a few utilities for pnut.io
I've got a blade server set up in a closet only accessible via NX that hosts my personal wiki via Zim, all of my documents, an autosyncing calendar, and the like. Everything is encrypted and backed up daily to Amazon S3 in case of catastrophic failure, which costs around $.03 a month.
I use an inexpensive ($5 USD/month) VPS via digital ocean (though i'm sure there are cheaper offerings via ovh or hetzner, etc.) to host the following:
In the past, i've setup a matrix synapse homeserver (on a vps) just to learn/play around...but it did require more resources back then (very early days in matrix life) so had to pay for a bigger, more expensive vps...so abandoned it. also because i didn't have enough activity from my family that i felt i could use the money elsewhere. Nowadays, i'm considering self-hosting a matrix synapse homeserver from my home (not a vps)...we'll see.
I stopped hosting my own email in the early 2000s...the black hole issue with proividers like gmail, microsoft, etc. wasn't too much of an isue back then...mostly, i was not diligent about security updates, etc. Around that time email began to become too essential for me, so started using g suite. (I'm running an experiment now to likely migrate to zoho mail to de-google my life as best as possible.)
I hope this helps!
On VPS:
A reverse proxy using Alpine Linux and lighttpd with separate containers for:
The containers are done using lxc/lxd
At home: