I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
Everything
Public services: my social network(hubzilla), Email(mailcow), Matrix chat, Peertube.
Private: my media (jellyfin, audiobookshelf, calibre, homeassistant.
I enjoy the freedom that comes with this and its like having your own home on the internet. I have a very modest setup but its enough to host my friends and family so nothing fancy like k8s. Just a refurbished optiplex running docker :)
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Home Assistant
There’s no fucking way I’m using a cloud service to control parts of my home, that just feels so wrong to me on so many levels -
Nextcloud
There’s no way I’m saving my files on someone else’s computer (the Cloud). Even with encryption, it’s expensive. Hard drives are cheap. Put them in a server, install Nextcloud and you have your private, cheap, independent cloud service. -
Immich (currently migrating to Ente) for my photos
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Jellyfin + arr Stack
I’m not paying $100/month for 5 different streaming services to have access to all the content I like. -
Navidrome for my (pirated) music
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Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts
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Pi-Hole with Unbound set up as a recursive resolver, cause why should I trust someone else with DNS?
I also self-host Matrix or Revolt servers as well as game servers for me and my friends, because it’s much cheaper than getting VPS or a hosted option, and I already have this server that I use for a bunch of other stuff, so I can also just use it for that.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption SSO Single Sign-On Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging k8s Kubernetes container management package nginx Popular HTTP server
23 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #871 for this sub, first seen 15th Jul 2024, 16:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
(Preface: almost all of this is handled in a single Nix config, and no docker in use at all)
At home, in a two-hosts Proxmox cluster:
- blocky for adblocking
- a full *arr stack with torrents and nzbs for uuuuuuhhh Linux ISOs
- Jellyfin so friends and family can watch, I mean use the Linux ISOs
- Paperless (HIGHLY recommend)
- Wastebin (Pastebin alternative)
- Sterling-PDF (also really recommend, allowed me to get rid of Acrobat Reader for filling out and signing PDFs, plus a bunch more)
- Homeassistant
- Linux and Windows clients available for whenever you might need them (not often, but can come in handy)
- Borg client, backing up parts of my NAS to a cloud storage box
- OPNSense backup for the hardware firewall
- Forgejo
On a bare metal machine at a reputable cloud provider:
- my personal Email, Calendar, Contacts (super easy with Nix)
- another blocky instance
- another borg client
- Rustdesk server (OSS Teamviewer)
- wireguard that’s just used by my TV so crunchyroll thinks it’s in (other country), Lmao
Wishlist:
- Vaultwarden
- Immich, once added to nixpkgs
- PeerTube
- Pixelfed
If you want to keep everything inside a singular Nix configuration while still using Docker, you can check out the NixOS option
virtualisation.oci-containers
- essentially, a declarative way of managing docker/podman containers (similar to docker-compose) but with Nix.