I’m just mildly curious. I know this isn’t the self hosting chan, but how many of you self host services as part of your efforts to retain your privacy, security, and anonymity?
I’ve been self hosting something for decades now. I got really started back in the PreNapster era. I ran an independent, selfhosted, fully licensed, internet radio outfit. That was back when music on the internet was a lot of cheap, tinny, geocities, midis. LOL I worked with a company called IM Radio Networks. They and Phillips, developed one of the world’s first bookshelf stereo, that was internet ready. Hook it up to the internet, and you could listen to AM/FM and IM radio. I’ve often mused that if it weren’t for Shawn Fanning, the music landscape on the internet might look a bit different as he forced the music industry to reevaluate how they did business.
Now, I self host a ton of stuff just for my own needs. It’s an enjoyable, purposeful, hobby, that keeps me busy. It’s also, so very educational, and I learn new things daily.
ETA: Man it does my heart good to meet and greet privacy minded users who also self host. It is an integral part of my privacy, anonymity, and security posture. If you aren’t already, or are thinking of self hosting, do it! You don’t need massive racks in the closet that dim the lights on reboot. A simple NUC or even RPi are quite capable of serving up services. You don’t need a Tier 1 feed from your ISP. Keep it simple and basic and work up from there to meet your needs.
Thanks again to all those who responded and shared their experiences.
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Me, hi
Awesome!
Yep! I just started self hosting a lossless music and 1080p movie server for my dad and I! It goes online soon. I’d say self hosting is an integral part of gaining true digital sovereignty.
self hosting is an integral part of gaining true digital sovereignty
Absolutely! 100%
Oh god, where do I start?
3 node proxmox setup:
Net node:
- opnsense (dns, dhcp, edge firewall, wireguard)
- caddy
- ssh hub
Compute node:
- a few game servers
- wiki (kiwix), full copy of wikipedia
- searxng
- docker host (portainer plus 10ish containers)
- forgejo
- testing vms
- a separate zfs mirror
Storage node:
- all drives, zfs + mirror
- proxmox backup server
- home assistant
- immich
- ARR stack
- jellyfin
Oh and a monitoring node made out of a rpi 4b with an nvme hat,running dietpi, prometheus, grafana and homepage (gethomepage.dev)
Thats about it plus automations and stuff, wireguard so I can access it from anywhere. Not separated properly, no network zones, just a few vlans for now, work in progress.
It gets to be an obscession, no?
Yes. But its my outlet, its keeping me sane. Looking at the worlds nowadays, this is my happy place. More therapy than anything.
I think it’s very important for us humans to have something in our daily lives that distracts up for couple hours or so. A release. I like to get out and touch grass too. Balance.
Still shopping around for a cheap enough Optiplex or ThinkCentre that has bare minimum encoding (HEVC 10-bit) and RAM (16 GB), but once I find my baby I’ll be running Nextcloud, Immich, and Jellyfin in Proxmox. I want to leave Google behind very badly, especially for my files and photos I got in the cloud, but also for music streaming since I’m a daily YT Music user.
ThinkCentre
I’ve seen some really nice rack set ups for ThinkCenter. Small, unobtrusive, and quite capable.
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I’m currently running 2 Proxmox hosts with 3 LXC containers and 3 VMs between them, and on my NAS - 2 VMs and… 50 docker containers.
I reeeeeally don’t like centralized services. 😂
I really love my Proxmox server. For a freemium product, it covers a lot of ground. Personally, I think it out performs VM Ware, and is very straight forward. I’m sure you’ve checked out the Helper Scripts? Lots of good stuff there.
50 docker containers
I think I may have you bested. LOL Why not right? I mean, self hosting is a wide field and I can’t think of a lot that I need that I can’t self host. For a rather small entry fee, and some time, patience, and learning, it’s all achievable. I have never done a cost analysis but, if you were to add up all those subscription fees to all those centralized services, I think I am coming out on top. As long as you don’t try running enterprise grade, legacy stuff, and your equipment is relatively current, you’re golden.
100% agree with you re: Proxmox. I’ve recently migrated my gaming PC to a Proxmox setup with a Win10 gaming / VR VM, and a Debian 12 VM solely dedicated to serving, quantizing, and optimizing LLM (with full 3090FE vfio passthrough 😁). The other one I have is a super old mini-ITX tiny box with an i3-4130 in it, and I use it for a Plex LXC b/c my NAS has a CPU that doesn’t support hardware transcoding (even though I’ve literally showed all my clients how to disable transcoding completely so they all get direct streams / direct plays at original quality to their devices), just in case some transcoding needs to be done.
So I decided to set up the Cluster/Node bit a few days ago, and it is SO awesome to have instant access to both servers at one URL and interface to manage all my VMs/LXCs. I’ve only had one problem with Proxmox since I started using it a couple years ago, and I’ve loved everything else about it!
In the spirit of “why not right?”, here’s one of my favorite random services I run: https://github.com/jordan-dalby/ByteStash I love being able to save little snippets that I know in the moment I will hit myself later if I have to look it up again.
I love being able to save little snippets that I know in the moment I will hit myself later if I have to look it up again.
Oh you’re preaching to the choir. You ought to see the copious amounts of notes I take. Endless, detailed, step by step, EILI5 style. It’s not only nice to have, but it is quite essential. When I find something that works, I write that shit down and back it up.
I have a couple Minecraft servers using pterodactyl :3
I probably will self host a lot more when I have my own place and money tho
I used to be heavy into Minecraft. I had a really nice set up on a VPS. Ran shaders and a ton of add ons. Fun stuff.
services
- gitea (forge)
- pmwikis (PIM) e.g. fabien.benetou.fr including… notes on self-hosting
- affine
- wg-easy (WireGuard, VPN)
- copyparty (prototype collaborative filesharing)
- ntfy (notifications)
- peertube (videos) e.g. video.benetou.fr
- Jitsi Meet (video meetings)
- immers (federated Metaverse, really)
- WebDAV (files)
- networked-aframe (live collaboration in XR)
- open-easyrtc
- telegram-pim-bot
- transmission (seeding linux ISOs)
- fireflyiii
meta
- nginx (reverse proxy)
- grafana
- cadvisor
- pushgateway
- prometheus
- caddy
- nodeexporter
- alertmanager
also locally (and beyond thanks to WireGuard)
- HomeAssistant
- Immich
- miniDLNA
Damn son…leave some bandwidth for the rest of us. LOL
Ah, worry not only PeerTube takes bandwidth basically and that’s hopefully mostly distributed back per people watching!
PS: making this list (via
docker ps) made me think I should generate the visuals of https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/MyCloudTransition programmatically. Right now it’s done manually via https://fabien.benetou.fr/Infrastructure/GraphReverseProxyNewShell as GraphViz as you can see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Infrastructure/GraphReverseProxyNewShell?action=source but it could be generated on every update instead.Thanks for forcing me to stop back. I’ll consider it.
Quite an impressive set up there bro. Seriously. I see you have isolated your business from play. That’s good. I need to update my network map, just for the fun of it and it does help when I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why something isn’t working.
Self-hosting for a bit less than 10 years. My main pain is that my setup is now stable and I have nothing left to tinker with.
and I have nothing left to tinker with
Blasphemy! LOL Congrats on the stable stack.
Stack recommendations?
Immich, Vaultwarden, Radicale, Cozy, FindMyDevice, Ejabberd, Hauk, Memos, Beszel, Docker-Mailserver, Crowdsec,…
I was running a server hosting a Gutenberg mirror at home 30+ years ago. And no, it’s not public.
That’s pretty awesome!
I do. Nextcloud + Immich
I hear raves about Immich. How is that working for you?
Really well other than one major complaint, which is that the search function has no timeline order and everything is jumbled together. That’s the one issue I have, though.
I might give it a whirl. I have a fair collection of pictures.
Working on jellyfin and Nextcloud right now. I have not used NGinx or Tailscale, so now I have to figure out how to set those up to work outside of my house without getting hacked. Next I might try SearXNG or maybe host my own email again.
Tailscale super easy and a self-solving problem.
Searxng is rock solid.
DNS, Jellyfin and game servers mostly; occasionally will tinker with other stuff but those are the ones that have lasted
I just launched a business to help non technical people identify and selfhost their business tools. I faced such problems when I lived in a fascist country and now that I live in a fascist country again, I figured its a good way to go.
That’s super cool. I’ve always thought that every household should have a server as we live very digitally dependent lives now. Back when Microsoft released their homeserver edition, I thought that was going to be a good angle, however, it didn’t take off. If I were a younger man, I’ve often thought about assembling small, closet servers that could sit on a shelf and be used by the household members. I also see a lot of ‘mini’ server layouts using Lenovo ThinkCenters, which are surprisingly pretty snappy servers.
Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that. I take self hosting as not turning to big tech for the very same solutions I can spin up myself on a private server.
That being said, self hosting also involves servers at home that run personal services.
My line of work is mostly in business. Getting people to operate their businesses with open source tools on private servers, local, in the country and abroad, as they wish.
Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that.
Absolutely. I’m not one to split hairs in the definitions. Old computer at home, paid for VPS, hell even an old laptop.
That’s great to hear you’ve made it into a business. I’d been thinking of creating a “biz in a box” side hustle for small businesses. I’m not very business-savvy, though.
NAS, Jellyfin/Plex, Copyparty (Google Drive replacement), Kiwix (Wikipedia), Joplin, Searxng, Ollama (LLM). Plus all the various searching tools, the maintenance tools, etc. I have pretty strong compartmentalization of my storage into separate media pools that all have their own RAID setups, plus an external backup.
It’s a bit of work to get all set up, but I use docker compose and autoheal / watchtower to keep the services going. I use Caddy and my own domain to make the services I want available externally to my network.
watchtower
Do you find that Watchtower sometimes screws up the update? I know I was plagued with that issue enough to drive me out to search the webs. OG Watchtower hasn’t been updated in 2 years and shows no real sign of activity. I went searching for a fork:
https://watchtower.devcdn.net/
Haven’t had any issues since.
Thanks for that! I have struggled with watchtower from time to time, so knowing there is a good fork out there is great. I’ll try it out.
