For me, it was PhotoPrism. I used to be an idiot, and used Google Photos as my gallery. I knew that it was terrible for privacy but was too lazy to do anything about it. When Google limited storage for free accounts, I started looking for alternatives. Tried out a lot of stuff, but ended up settling on PhotoPrism.
It does most things that I need, except for multiple user support (it’s there in the sponsored version now). It made me learn a bit about Docker. Eventually, I learned how to access it from outside of my home network over Cloudflare tunnel. I’m happy that I can send pics/albums to folks without sharing it to any third party. It’s as easy as sending a link.
Now I have around a dozen containers on a local mini pc, and a couple on a VPS. I still route most things through Cloudflare tunnels (lower latency), only the high bandwidth stuff like Jellyfin are routed through a wireguard tunnel through the VPS.
Anyway, how did you get into selfhosting? (The question is mostly meant for non-professionals. But if you’re a professional with something interesting to share, you’re welcome as well.)
Around the 2000s I hosted a Shoutcast server that played a playlist of about 30 punk rock MP3’s on continuous loop. As far as I can remeber, it was running on a Win2000 machine. Yeah - Pirate Radio 😆
2003 I had a custom built full ATX tower with some parts from work running RAID for disk storage, and three cable capture cards. The box ran MythTV to record and serve shows DVR style to my modded Xbox that I had loaded XBMC on. From there I moved over to Plex for watching the recorded shows and ripped my DVD and VHS collection.
A little bit of everything, just the constant thought of “this would be more convenient if I hosted it myself” made me finally actually set up a server.
I got into self-hosting quite by accident. I had just started on Mastodon when I saw somebody posted about self-hosting and Cloudflare tunnels. I went to their blog, followed the guides, and next thing I knew I had a fully functioning Mastodon docker instance. From there I began wondering about other ActivityPub services were out there. In January I get rid of the Cloudflare tunnel and stood up a free Oracle VPS.
I created a wireguard tunnel between my home server and my VPS. I then installed nginx on the VPS as a reverse proxy. I’ve been hooked ever since. I moved my blog to hosting at home. I stood up a Lemmy instance. Next move is standing up a BookWyrm one. I am in now hooked.
I really want to host my own email but I’ve been rightly disuaded from doing so because the Big Bois don’t play well with small email servers, even ones that have been correctly and sanely configured.
Try mailcow and follow their manual on configuration. Gmail, some big european mail providers, smaller organisations, my mails arrive everywhere. Despite having a somewhat dodgy tld.
A pihole. Given how much I’ve spent over the years on self hosting kit, few ‘cheap’ things have ended up costing me more than that first 30 quid raspberry pi
My home network is somewhat overkill ;p but so far, about £500 on compute to run VMs, >£1000 on a nas and various other offsite and local stoarage, a couple hundred quid on networking gear, and then the extra premium on smart home devices you pay for non-tracking versions of the hardware (e.g a ring video doorbell would have cost me £40 less than the reolink I ended up buying). I’ve also so far spent over £75 on smart light switches trying to find one that both works with home assistant and fits inside my really narrow back boxes without yet finding one that works, so the number is continuing to go up!
Piracy. I couldn’t live with 25%+ of my TV watching time being advertisements. Manually downloading episodes became too much trouble so I setup a Plex/sab/sonars/radarr config on a pi connected to a 4-bay external drive enclosure featuring refurbished HGST 2tb HDDs in an lvm raid-5 config.
Eventually I also substituted my radio with paid Spotify so about the only ads im served are product placements and billboards. Its amazing how much less you’ll spend without ads!
I wanted to host a Minecraft server for some friends, so I got cobbled together a PC out of some spare parts and put Ubuntu server on it. Over time I added an emby server and tools to get media for the emby server and that was good for a few years. Then I moved and had some more space and fell way down the rabbit hole of used enterprise gear.
A vague interest in taking my data away from “Big Tech” led me to get hosting a few years back and use a private email solution professionally hosted. Last year, I bought a pi then went through a breakup and didn’t touch it until recently haha.
I just had to rebuild from scratch but I’m running Flame dashboard, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Baikal, and a rickroll server disguised as a Docs app, because I’m a red blooded American. :P (and the boring stuff lol)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
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Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
RTCW. I ran a game server ‘back in the day’ and got my own domain name. Then phpbb and a website, mail server, etc…
Around the 2000s I hosted a Shoutcast server that played a playlist of about 30 punk rock MP3’s on continuous loop. As far as I can remeber, it was running on a Win2000 machine. Yeah - Pirate Radio 😆
Copyright?
Never heard of him.
I wanted to host my own website, so I got a VPS. After that, I got addicted to spinning up servers for various services.
2003 I had a custom built full ATX tower with some parts from work running RAID for disk storage, and three cable capture cards. The box ran MythTV to record and serve shows DVR style to my modded Xbox that I had loaded XBMC on. From there I moved over to Plex for watching the recorded shows and ripped my DVD and VHS collection.
Nextcloud the snap package. I was starting to get rid of google contacts and calendar
A little bit of everything, just the constant thought of “this would be more convenient if I hosted it myself” made me finally actually set up a server.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #3 for this sub, first seen 18th Jul 2023, 22:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Mid 90s, my ftp server with music and warez over dial-up that wasn’t always online!
I got into self-hosting quite by accident. I had just started on Mastodon when I saw somebody posted about self-hosting and Cloudflare tunnels. I went to their blog, followed the guides, and next thing I knew I had a fully functioning Mastodon docker instance. From there I began wondering about other ActivityPub services were out there. In January I get rid of the Cloudflare tunnel and stood up a free Oracle VPS.
I created a wireguard tunnel between my home server and my VPS. I then installed nginx on the VPS as a reverse proxy. I’ve been hooked ever since. I moved my blog to hosting at home. I stood up a Lemmy instance. Next move is standing up a BookWyrm one. I am in now hooked.
I really want to host my own email but I’ve been rightly disuaded from doing so because the Big Bois don’t play well with small email servers, even ones that have been correctly and sanely configured.
Try mailcow and follow their manual on configuration. Gmail, some big european mail providers, smaller organisations, my mails arrive everywhere. Despite having a somewhat dodgy tld.
Okay, I will give it a try again.
A pihole. Given how much I’ve spent over the years on self hosting kit, few ‘cheap’ things have ended up costing me more than that first 30 quid raspberry pi
What do you spend on? For me, the only recurring expenditures are VPN, and VPS. I think I pay <$5 a month on all of it.
My home network is somewhat overkill ;p but so far, about £500 on compute to run VMs, >£1000 on a nas and various other offsite and local stoarage, a couple hundred quid on networking gear, and then the extra premium on smart home devices you pay for non-tracking versions of the hardware (e.g a ring video doorbell would have cost me £40 less than the reolink I ended up buying). I’ve also so far spent over £75 on smart light switches trying to find one that both works with home assistant and fits inside my really narrow back boxes without yet finding one that works, so the number is continuing to go up!
Piracy. I couldn’t live with 25%+ of my TV watching time being advertisements. Manually downloading episodes became too much trouble so I setup a Plex/sab/sonars/radarr config on a pi connected to a 4-bay external drive enclosure featuring refurbished HGST 2tb HDDs in an lvm raid-5 config.
Eventually I also substituted my radio with paid Spotify so about the only ads im served are product placements and billboards. Its amazing how much less you’ll spend without ads!
I avoid product placements using SponsorBlock and billboards by being a stubborn bastard who refuses to look at them.
Plex on my Pi 3
This is more or less how I started learning Linux too
I wanted to host a Minecraft server for some friends, so I got cobbled together a PC out of some spare parts and put Ubuntu server on it. Over time I added an emby server and tools to get media for the emby server and that was good for a few years. Then I moved and had some more space and fell way down the rabbit hole of used enterprise gear.
My first Plex server was an old laptop running windows 8
A vague interest in taking my data away from “Big Tech” led me to get hosting a few years back and use a private email solution professionally hosted. Last year, I bought a pi then went through a breakup and didn’t touch it until recently haha.
I just had to rebuild from scratch but I’m running Flame dashboard, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Baikal, and a rickroll server disguised as a Docs app, because I’m a red blooded American. :P (and the boring stuff lol)