I am completely new to the realm of self hosting. I don’t know a single thing about how I can self host stuff. Regardless, I have the curiousity to learn it by myself but I don’t know where to start. I cannot find any sort of wiki or FAQ articles, nor do I have the ability to ask the forum for every single problem or doubt I encounter during the setup. Can someone direct me to a beginner friendly site that teaches all there is about self hosting and all the questions and misconceptions that come with it?
Additionally, is a self hosted server only accessible inside my home? What about accessing the services outside, like Bitwarden or Nextcloud apps that require syncing and availability of data wherever I am? If it is useless outside, there would be no point for me personally to self host in the first place since I am perfectly fine with using cloud services for now and the convenience that comes with it. Plus, no one else in my family cares about self hosting and I don’t wish to spend the effort to convince them to in vain, so setting up a server for convenience of everyone at home is also out of the question.
I’ve never heard about a guide like that. The topic is too broad to write a guide and keep it up to day. However, if you’re subscribed to ChatGPT4, I highly recommend asking it all your questions:
nor do I have the ability to ask the forum for every single problem or doubt I encounter during the setup
From my experience, it’s a very good mentor. But don’t use ChatGPT3.5 - it’s completely delusional.
Like the other commenter mentioned, ChatGPT can be really helpful for these kind of questions. I’m not sure if there’s any “starter guide” since everyone starts with different wants and needs.
I will say, you should look into Tailscale once you’ve got your services up and running on your home network. Tailscale makes it simple and secure to access those services from outside your home network without any port forwarding.
I think everything I ever learned was one piece of software, one problem at a time.
Choose a platform: proxmox, bare Linux server, Unraid
(Look up comparisons)
Then start looking up install tutorials for different pieces of software.
And just take it like that, one piece at a time.
There’s no guide thats covers everything, because the possibilities are nearly endless.
The first step is to get a server and choose an OS. You can build your own server at home or you can rent a VPS.
If you rent a VPS your services will be accessible from everywhere. If you decide to get a homeserver everything will be only accessible at your local network. You can acces your services from outside through VPN or port forwading.
When your server is ready, you can start to host your services. Just look at the documentation of the project e.g. on github.
LearnLinux.TV is a pretty nice resource. Redhat offers some guides, too. I think I started on youtube and that led me to written resources, eventually.
A lot of software actually offers its own guide with it. You could also go the IT Cert route and learn CompTIA stuff. It’s more rote and less hands-on, though, but it might point you towards concepts you want to learn.
Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.
The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.
That is a great analogy of explaining the broadness of the concept of self hosting that I wasnt able to understand from the other comments.
As a beginner, I would like to start out with a storage provider like Google Drive (& Google Photos). I currently don’t have any hardware for a home server but I can get one as per my requirements.
The biggest issue for me would be the OS running in the home server. I would preferably want something compatible with Windows since I have worked with Windows for my whole life. I am also fine with working with Linux, however I don’t want to spend weeks banging my head on setting up and using Linux before I even start configuring it for my home server. I will be able to handle learning about networkings of the server on the go and troubleshoot problems as long as the OS does not bother me. As with self hosting, I am a beginner in the field of Linux so I don’t know what ‘distro’ would be best for me for this purpose, but nonetheless I will research more about it thanks to your headstart.
I still feel like a noob, but I spent a lot of time to get to this point where I am now. I can install fresh OS and run Nextcloud in less than 1 hour probably. When I started it took few months, I was burning all my free time but I loved it. It takes only few steps, but its probably a pain if everything is new. My steps would be:
- Install Debian OS
- Install docker and docker-compose
- Install portainer (also docker container, has simple web GUI to manage all other containers)
- Load docker-compose (with nextcloud and db config) in portainer stacks and start nextcloud container
Googling steps above for your OS or hardware should point you in the right direction, but there are many other ways of course. You can use any OS, but Linux is the way to go, especially if you are looking for help on lemmy.
Im accessing server using wireguard, it behaves like Im home and it needs to be set on each client (scanning QR code or loading config). Wireguard requires opening port 51820 on your router, but that should be safe enough. Alternative is tailscale that doesnt require opening port at all. Other options are probably too complex (read unsafe) for begginers afaik.
If you are going to selfhost cloud service then also look into backup solutions. Losing data is not fun at all.
My post might not answer your questions, just wanted to share my thoughts. If you decide to dive into selfhosting, Id say arm yourself with time and patience and get some cheap or free hardware to start with (old laptop with dead screen and battery should be more than enough) and enjoy your linux advantures.
Good luck
Wait, is an old laptop also good enough for setting up a home server? I thought you would require a completely separated and dedicated PC box like the ones you can see in studios or offices. That’s new to me!
You can use any computer as a server, you just have to realise that low powered computers will be able to do less than something more powerful.
As you get into it more, you might find that you need better hardware, or more network ports etc., but most of us would probably be ok with a decent PC.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #131 for this sub, first seen 11th Sep 2023, 11:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Additionally, is a self hosted server only accessible inside my home? What about accessing the services outside, like Bitwarden or Nextcloud apps that require syncing and availability of data wherever I am? If it is useless outside, there would be no point for me personally to self host in the first place since I am perfectly fine with using cloud services for now and the convenience that comes with it. Plus, no one else in my family cares about self hosting and I don’t wish to spend the effort to convince them to in vain, so setting up a server for convenience of everyone at home is also out of the question.
It is only accessible from your local network (if it is there in the first place, you can always selfhost on rented virtual private server), until you make it accessible. There a different ways to achieve that:
- Wireguard tunnel
- cloudflare tunnel
- (reverse) ssh tunnel
- dynDNS
- opening ports on your router
Which is the way for you depends on the circumstances, how your ISP connects you to the internet mainly
Tailscale might also decent be an option for remote access, right?
Might be, I don’t know it 😅
What do you have in terms of available hardware?
I started out by setting up a Pi-Hole for my house and learning and failing small to get my head around how Linux worked and how to actually use a command line / SSH / the works.
From there I went to the website https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/ (specifically this guide) which was extremely helpful in understanding the basics of services, networking, DNS, etc. I’d say that if you’re able to get a full setup going with Traefik on Docker, that’s a really good setup for success for self hosting just about anything that can be Dockerized (which is basically anything).
Now I’m able to just read the documentation for a service at hub.docker.com, figure out how I want to customize it for my specific setup (e.g. putting gluetun in front of specific containers, setting up cron jobs to automate some container tasks, and creating a suitable backup) all with my knowledge of how this stuff works which I gained through lots of trial and error with the above guide.
That’s really all there is to it: just diving in, making mistakes, and learning from them until you start to build your knowledge of how stuff works and are comfortable going above and beyond copy and paste.
landchad.net was useful for me.
Others have already supplied a bunch of very handy guides and sources, as well as the disclaimer that the possibilities for selfhosting pretty much anything are endless.
That being said, I want to supply my own source, a guide I’ve started writing up to bridge exactly this gap: https://how2host.it. It’s still in development, and I’m working on more and more detailed guides. It’s also most definitely opinionated (the use of Linux as the host, docker as the containerization and nginx as the reverse proxy, as well as a bunch of other things) but it’ll provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge which you should be able to expand from yourself.
I hope it can be of use to you!
Check out yunohost
