1y ago

What got you into selfhosting and what was the first thing that you hosted?

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.)

136 comments

Having own media library without having to use so many sub based services :)
Privacy :)
- Definitely started with Plex for me.
  Piracy :)

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.

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.

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!

1TB hard drives were on sale, and I wanted to digitize all my DVDs and stream them to my Xbox 360. That was 15 years ago.

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!!
- Damn. I'm 25 years old lol.
- Heh, I did about same but on FreeBDS. Plus proxy server to share dialup connection around home.
  
  Me too. I had a FreeBSD box that routed my dialup and ran a transparent caching squid proxy. Had a cronjob for scheduled downloads.
  External? Apache and ftp. Once cable was available had an IPsec wan with a couple friends for file sharing and "lan" gaming. Used samba to span the subnets into a big windows workgroup called "biggroup".
  I used to tinker with php alot back then. Made sense to run my own web server.

Probably Apache? I've been running web servers since the early 2000's.
- Yeah. Probably Apache. Can't remember what that I was doing, but it almost certainly ran on Apache, and I almost certainly spent 90% of my energy configuring Apache.
  
  XAMPP? I started with that in Secondary School (equivalent to high school)

At the beginning of the pandemic I looked into ways to de-Google and found Nextcloud. It wasn't the easiest thing to start with, especially for a novice, but I had the time and the hardware, and I'm the type to not mind jumping into something difficult if it means solving a specific problem. I then found out about Bitwarden and had a great experience setting that up. After that I was confident enough to try hosting anything I could find. It's been good times ever since 😀
- I also started with nextcloud because of my degoogle journey 😄
  
  Are you still using it? I went through many deployments before I finally thought I had it settled.

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
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx	Popular HTTP server

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]

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.

Plex, then Jellyfin, then it snowballed out of control.

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.

I guess it would've been a bulletting board system that people used a 14k modem to connect to, one at a time, and it would completely block the phone line.
My parents weren't thrilled, but hey, we had a message board and LORD running there.
- I loved LORD, I used to spend hours playing that and Trade Wars on a local BBS.
- Jeez, I had forgotten all about LORD! Thanks for bringing back such good memories! I used to play it all the time back in the good ol' days.
- Hi, lurker here: what is/was LORD?
  
  Video demonstration

Off topic but could you explain a little on how you use a VPS to access your internal services? There’s a few services I want to open up but I don’t trust cloudflare and I don’t want to port forward.
- Basically what the other guy said. I have a wireguard tunnel set up between my home server and the VPS, with persistent keepalive. The public domain name points to the VPS, then I have it set up (simply using iptables) so that any traffic there in port 80 and 443 is sent back to my honeserver and there it's handled by nginx reverse proxy, and sent to jellyfin.
  So, the only ports I need to open are 80 and 443 on my VPS to make this setup work.
- Not the OP, but my current solution involves a small instance in AWS with a wireguard server in docker. This is configured with a few peers. One peer is a container on my home server that can access my jellyfin deployment. This container is also running socat to redirect the traffic to jellyfin. Then my phone and laptop are the other peers and I have a DNS record pointed to the IP of the wireguard peer on the server, if that makes sense.
  I've been using this image pretty painlessly. The only hiccup I had with setup was ensuring persistent keep alive was configured on the peer forwarding traffic to jellyfin.

For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).
I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I'm back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.
- oh nice. somebody else who's done internet radio!
  
  Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!

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.

Mid 90s, my ftp server with music and warez over dial-up that wasn't always online!

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.

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.
- I'm surprised there aren't more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.

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.

2008/2009, learnt how to make webpages in school using Dreamweaver, so went home and found out eventually after months of trying, to host my own webpage using XAMPP. That kinda died and turned into a blogspot page instead.
Fast forward to today, piracy, privacy and posterity. Aka, Plex, Adguard and a bunch of tools for storing family photos, documents, ebooks.

2006 Our Highschool had "recycled" some of the older machines and it started from there.
A Dell Optiplex GX1 500MHz, with 128mb of ram, and a 80gb IDE HHD. Installed Debian Sarge, This was running a dial-up gateway for our home network as well as samba.
It allowed one machine to be the LANs internet connection, abet slow. Samba was so I could download installers once, and then pull them from the network drive.
2008-2012 that machine was a dedicated WordPress machine. Around 2019 I pulled it out of the closet and powered it up. The whole site was there, still ran without a hiccup. It was actually recycled shortly after that, Dell used to make great hardware.

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.

Plex on my Pi 3
This is more or less how I started learning Linux too

I wanted to host my own website, so I got a VPS. After that, I got addicted to spinning up servers for various services.

My own wordpress website to host recipes on a Synology NAS. Unfortunately, the built in NGINX server has some default configuration (from Synology) so that it cannot properly serve the Wordpress REST API. The NAS is (according to Synology) to weak to run a container, where I could easily run a separarate server. So I gave up and just recently bought a Dell Optiplex Micro, which I will turn into my new homeserver. Guess I will keep the Synology for storage though.

Ever since the CS1.6 days I wanted to have a server, but it was only when I got a free Raspberry Pi that I actually started self hosting stuff 24/7. I put OwnCloud on it and a bunch of scripts to track and statistically evaluate my investments, and just took off from there. Like many others, my desire to disconnect and reduce my dependency on "Big Tech" was a big motivator, but so too was "fun" and having things exactly the way I liked.
In the beginning I rolled my own scripts most of the time, but now I tend to use more off the shelf tools as self hosting has gone more and more "mainstream"/accessible and docker has become ubiquitous.
I still do my own scripts tbf, like my DIY smart thermostat/heat pump controller. Ultimately it's just a lot of fun.

Samba (and later NFS) on a crappy bulldozer-era AMD laptop combined with a set of USB drives as a ghetto NAS, so I could access data from any system without leaving my desktop on 24/7. It worked, but that thing overheated so easily that I had to undervolt and underclock it to get it to run reliably. I relatively recently switched to a affordable Terramaster NAS, and to using containers, and have been expanding pretty rapidly. The whole Reddit situation got me to start revaluating the services I was using. A kind of software/service spring cleaning if you will.

NAS, backups, matrix, home assistant, gitea, etc

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)

It started with me running plex on my PC. Now I have a server room with multiple systems always running. It still feels like magic.

Nextcloud the snap package. I was starting to get rid of google contacts and calendar

I ran a NSLU2 with custom firmware and a mumble server on it. We used it to talk during online gaming without the need for teamspeak etc.
Played BF3 mostly.
Those where the days
Edit: clarification

Not quite related to selfhosting but modding routers and then DIYing x86 routers kinda got me into the scene.
- Yea modding routers can be a lot of fun. Can be super unstable sometimes too. Are you still practicing? What’s your favorite custom firmware?
  
  No not anymore. I no longer find it necessary now. Things have become much easier. Many routers have out-of-factory OpenWrt support or are outright built with/on OpenWrt. Companies like GL.iNet has made the barrier to entry the lowest ever.
  Gone were the days we had to spot the right hardware versions, find ways to access debug ports, tinker with das uboot (or it had to be added...), flush the official firmware, and flash the right OpenWRT image. And this often would set you down on a path to compile the "right" kernel to work with proprietary driver/firmware blob files so hardware acceleration (e.g. NAT or WiFi radio) could work properly.... Indeed I have learnt a lot but honestly I don't really miss those days lol

My first Plex server was an old laptop running windows 8

RTCW. I ran a game server 'back in the day' and got my own domain name. Then phpbb and a website, mail server, etc...

Started off with just hosting a permanent Minecraft Server on a Raspberry Pi. Later added stuff like Nextcloud or Calibre Web to it and now it's just a teensy tiny bit out of control (I'm self-hosting a good 2 dozen services now).

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 got a raspberry pi and some wd red drives when Google photos went for a pay model. We use it to back up our phones and pc, and to run jellyfin and torrents. It's not wildly different from doing things on pc, except it's set it and forget it. Having something always on, reliable, and "just works" makes it worthwhile.
- I have my mini pc always on too lol.

A friend in high school helped me install a counter strike server on linux on an old desktop. From there, I experimented with hosting some forums and an upload script to save files remotely. In the days way before the cloud was a thing. That got me interested enough to start figuring things out and get into it.

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.

I started off hosting UT2004 servers at LAN parties back in the day then Tremulus? servers, then coubter-strike 1.5/1.6/cz. Started learning VPS with CS:S.

@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org I wrote my own music player, after that I installed PiHole. After that I realized there were much better music players out there :-P
- I do use a couple of containers written by myself. There are a probably better alternatives out there, but these do exactly what I want them to do, no bloat, and I know them inside out, so I keep using 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 too am a fan of various Linux distributions, in different languages and genres.

136 comments