There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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.)

techviator ,

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.

ThorrJo ,

oh nice. somebody else who’s done internet radio!

techviator ,

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!

ThorrJo ,

That’s awesome :)

I started by self-hosting an autoDJ to pipe music into Second Life, later did a weekly show on a tiny internet radio station for maybe 18 months … trying to make a name in order to get a DJ spot on-air at a local community radio station that was indie/alt-rock format at the time. Sadly my life took a turn and the community station changed hands and changed formats, but it was a cool experience nonetheless!

techviator ,

Awesome! Dang, Second Life... we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣

LimitedDuck ,

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 😀

ZebraGoose ,

I also started with nextcloud because of my degoogle journey 😄

LimitedDuck ,

Are you still using it? I went through many deployments before I finally thought I had it settled.

ZebraGoose ,

Yeah, im still using it. Started on a digitalocean server installed hardmetal but now i got a small home server where i installed it with docker

phrogpilot73 ,
@phrogpilot73@lemmy.world avatar

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.

CaptainAniki ,

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.

brenticus ,

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.

teutoburg1 ,

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.

czech ,
@czech@no.faux.moe avatar

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!

SexualPolytope OP , (edited )
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I avoid product placements using SponsorBlock and billboards by being a stubborn bastard who refuses to look at them.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

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]

iMeddles ,

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

SexualPolytope OP , (edited )
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

iMeddles ,

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!

mim ,

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.

eximo ,

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.

hoodlem ,

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.

atzanteol ,

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

MoogleMaestro ,

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.

SexualPolytope OP ,
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Never heard about Kavita before, looks nice.

Fun fact: In my native language, Kavita (কবিতা) means poetry.

housepanther ,
@housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com avatar

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.

CAPSLOCKFTW ,

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.

housepanther ,
@housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com avatar

Okay, I will give it a try again.

Madiator2011 ,

Having own media library without having to use so many sub based services :)

  • Privacy :)
MajinBlayze ,

Definitely started with Plex for me.

  • Piracy :)
  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •