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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.)

tehcpengsiudai Bot ,

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.

Crazyfrog ,

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.

madPorpoise ,

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.

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

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.

CannaVet ,

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)

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.

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.

credics ,
@credics@kbin.social avatar

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.

nix98 ,

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

Jardincorenda ,

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.

Tagen_AllAss ,

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

qazwsxedcrfv000 ,
@qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com avatar

Not quite related to selfhosting but modding routers and then DIYing x86 routers kinda got me into the scene.

notfromhere ,

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?

qazwsxedcrfv000 , (edited )
@qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com avatar

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

scrchngwsl , (edited )

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.

Crow ,
@Crow@lemmy.world avatar

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.

jimmy90 , (edited )

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

sunbeam60 ,

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!!

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

I too am a fan of various Linux distributions, in different languages and genres.

vividspecter ,

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.

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