I have a background (in the distant past) as a PHP dev, and currently make my income doing mostly Wordpress work.

For a very long time I took a jaundiced eye towards big PHP apps for the exact same reasons. That being said, I just two days ago finally installed Nextcloud in my homelab and exposed it to the world.

It’s worth noting that a lot of PHP’s bad rep comes from Wordpress, which is terrible in security terms in large part due to a huge and very poorly vetted ecosystem of plugins written by coders of all skill levels.

PHP itself had a number of anti-features which made security difficult in the past. A lot of those issues have been worked on. As somebody who was up to my eyeballs in PHP for years during the bad old days, I’m now confident installing big PHP apps if I think the dev team and dev process are reasonably mature.

Not the above guy but I believe it’s a database.

I’m ever so slowly teaching myself Zabbix, need something full-featured because I also need monitoring for my hosting clients etc

That’s awesome :)

I started by self-hosting an autoDJ to pipe music into Second Life, later did a weekly show on a tiny internet radio station for maybe 18 months … trying to make a name in order to get a DJ spot on-air at a local community radio station that was indie/alt-rock format at the time. Sadly my life took a turn and the community station changed hands and changed formats, but it was a cool experience nonetheless!

You might also check out rathole as it is very easy to use: https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole

oh nice. somebody else who’s done internet radio!

holy crap, that was … … … … 25 years ago???

I don’t honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I’d say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.

My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren’t always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem … and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn’t filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment … fix the typo and walk away slowly … wild west days!!

You can go a looong way hosting stuff on ultra-small form factor business PCs

Basically, subs with anti-corpo principles but refuses to leave corpo Reddit.

See also: Discord

I use .lan for everything the router can resolve names for, and .local for Avahi mDNS 😈

I’m currently running 16GB zramswap on my 32GB server, and 24GB on Optane / 3D XPoint on my 64GB server 😈

Same, but I’ve never once touched Docker and am doing everything old skool on top of Proxmox. Others may or may not like this approach, but it has many of the benefits in terms of productivity (ease of experimentation, migration, upgrade etc)

Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.

Go with “1-liter” aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don’t have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)

Matrix is awful.

I will say that they have been putting a lot of effort into making it better, and it is better than it was, for sure. But it still sucks.

I’m picky about software FWIW. Maybe in another couple years they’ll have basic UX, security, and performance figured out.

PiVPN on VPS works great btw

I’m curious if leaving the data-at-rest encrypted on the filesystem using something like EncFS would mostly solve this. (EncFS encrypts all the files on disk and gives you a mount point to access the corresponding cleartext filesystem)

haha this is amazing, I made similar comments in 3 threads or so, and people commented back about OptiPlex SFF in all of 'em :D

when I first started doing this again for real about 3 years ago, I built a stack of 3x OptiPlex SFF that I got from pcsforpeople.com (discount refurb gear for po’ folk), plus an Amazon refurb. I’ve started migrating to the “1-liter” USFF business PCs, but I still have the best of the OptiPlex SFFs - an i7-4770 with 32GB of RAM which now is my database server and NAS box.

It’s amazing how well the high-end 4xxx Intel chips still hold their own a decade after their release.

For people who don’t like cloudflare, it’s also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g. nginx on the front end, and rathole or frp for the reverse tunnel. I use ssh if I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don’t come from my “real” IP) and that’s not super ideal, but it works.

This is of course considerably more difficult than something that’s point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.

I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I’ll release a step by step HOWTO.

FWIW, I haven’t seen a similar change from Ramnode after they sold to InMotion. They still seem quite good, and I’m picky. A bit more info on my experience (plus my affiliate code) upthread.

The lower you go in price, in general the more problems you’ll have with overselling, poor management, poor support, etc.

After coming back to this thread and reading some more comments, it sure looks like I could save up to $3 a month over what I pay for cheap VPS at Ramnode, but in all my years of being a Ramnode customer, they haven’t pissed me off, and their support has always been excellent. I have no desire to move, and I’m somebody who has very little money, so cheaper hosting would make a difference.

Just a data point, good luck in your search!

Install PiVPN on the VPS.

That price is pretty fair for what you get.

I’ve had really good experiences with Ramnode for years. I run VPN endpoints, reverse proxies, and various web apps in a couple of their data centers and have had about as close to zero problems as possible, plus their support is quite competent when something does break. Performance is what I expect 99% of the time.

Before that, Linode was good for me as well, and I still have friends who like it.

If you do try Ramnode out, here’s my affiliate code, I am broke as fuck and really appreciate it. https://clientarea.ramnode.com/aff.php?aff=4335

I’ve heard bad things about this plugin which scared me bc I’m planning to use it on 2 sites

Then if you configure nginx on the VPS and allow it to cache most images you can save a lot of bandwidth on your uplink from home.

I’m doing exactly this with a different web app, works great although at this point I just pasted configs together and have no familiarity beyond that.

:ears perk up from the sinking ship that is X2Go:

(4th gen i7, yeah that old)

The i7-4770 and -90 hold their own amazingly well a decade later!

I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.

FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there… just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.

The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you’re planning to stack them vertically

I’ve definitely also had the experience of dodgy hardware support (in Armbian, which is all volunteer) with weird Chinese SBCs.