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.)
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)
RTCW. I ran a game server ‘back in the day’ and got my own domain name. Then phpbb and a website, mail server, etc…
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.
Having own media library without having to use so many sub based services :)
- Privacy :)
Definitely started with Plex for me.
- Piracy :)
Kavita and Jellyfin both sold me on self hosting.
I no longer have to worry about transferring my media to every computer, it’s accessible now via the web browser which is ideal.
Never heard about Kavita before, looks nice.
Fun fact: In my native language, Kavita (কবিতা) means poetry.
Home Assistant was the first thing I self hosted. It wasn’t until now with Lemmy though that I am hooked. I’m looking into hosting a Matrix instance next. I tried Mastodon but it’s resource needs were much higher than I needed for my usage. I may give it a try again sometime. Peertube is also on the list.
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.
After picking up a set of Hue bulbs and using them for a while I wanted to do more in terms of automation especially when arriving home etc. I found home assistant and never looked back.
Back then I was using a raspberry pi but upgraded to a dedicated Debian box a year later to which I’m not running around 50 containers.
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!
Honestly? Probably boredom. Computer-related projects are addictive to me.
Haven’t ventured too far, but searxng was my first selfhosted service. It’s very easy, single container, no database.
I like to tinker with things, and I had hardware lying around I wasn’t using. First thing I ever self-hosted was very basic: a Terraria server.
Then a Minecraft server.
And then a fully featured and defederated Matrix server with a fully functional telegram bridge, mostly as a test to see how feasible it was. Ran it for several months before shutting it down, deciding to wait for dendrite, since it’s supposed to be lighter.
Haven’t done anything since, but I’ll be looking to build a few more things in the near future.
Of all the things I have or am self-hosting the Matrix server was the biggest pain in the ass. I seriously hope they streamline that process because as it was it’s too much work for what it does.
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.
A desire to set up a permanent download station that could extremely securely and very automatically keep track of all the Linux distributions (eg I really want to make sure I try every version of Mint Linux and with various arr programs I could ensure that as soon as a new version of Mint shows up, I automatically download it and get it shown in an interface where I can try the new version of Mint Linux. Linux distributions - I just love them!!
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.
I started with gaming servers back in the quake 2 days, then got into doing web stuff, then I made a career out of Linux. Now I build systems for fun and for profit. I try and contribute to FOSS projects in any way I can and hope one day one of these stupid utilities I come up with is actually useful to someone.
