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?
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Nothing federated. I respect everyone who makes it possible, and there’s an actual path to me being willing to participate, unlike corporate social media, but the level of exposure/overhead to prevent having genuinely bad shit touch my server is not something I’m comfortable with. I want stuff I can ignore for a week and not have the end of the world happen, which means at most user generated content from people I know personally.
In terms of what I’m currently hosting, just some mild personal content servers and a discord bot running a couple games on small servers with friends.
I’d like to get further into a personal site, to share my pictures/videos with friends, document/share my reading in ways goodreads and available alternatives don’t do, and similar things like that that I genuinely am fine if no one looks at, but I can tell a friend “yeah, these are my favorite psychology books with a blurb on each”, and “these are my favorite fiction series (actually organized by series as first class citizens, because no one really does that) with quick summaries of what I like about them”, etc. I do a couple of the lists on goodreads, but you can’t do blurbs on series, do lists by series, it won’t even display your lists ordered or with your reviews properly included any more, and ultimately I’m going to track it all anyways so I want it structured and displayed in a way that actually makes sense to me.
I don’t really want social media features and I definitely don’t want to try to “grow it” or any of that nonsense, but ultimately I want to better track and organize all of that and don’t really love the tools available, so rolling my own and “I might as well pretty up the presentation and make some of it public facing to discuss with friends” once I get the proper structuring handled.
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
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
Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts
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.
@unrushed233 @erev why are you leaving immich?
Just want to try out self-hosting Ente. I’ve used their cloud-hosted service in the past, and I liked it. Now I discovered that it can be fully self-hosted. But Immich is great as well, I haven’t had any issues with it.
I’ve been considering the idea of self-hosting lately, especially for my online projects. The thought of having full control over my data and applications is appealing. It seems like a step towards independence and flexibility in managing my online presence. However, I’m still exploring the best way to go about it. I’ve heard about VPS hosting as a potential option, particularly in the USA where reliability and support are crucial. If anyone has experience with buy vps usa and can share insights or recommendations, I’d greatly appreciate it!
I don’t have experience with them. I have been using linode for a few years now and love it!
PiHole, Plex and the related “*arr” apps. I also self-host my home automation platform (Home Assistant).
Me too, except it’s Adguard for me.
Came in handy yesterday actually. I have a friend who works for a University which was recycling some Chromebooks.
He managed to grab 3 for me, one for myself and one for my kids.
Problem is that one of my kids is being supervised through Google Family Link which means for some reason the Play Store won’t work.
So he is now unsupervised in Family Link just to get the Chromebook working.
So I’ve just given both my kids static IPs and pointed their Chromebooks at Adguard, then turned on Safe Search and adult content blocking.
Now I’m fairly confident they’re protected from a lot of the bad shit on the internet.
I’ve configured my kids devices to use NextDNS, that way they are getting filtering no matter what network they use.
AdGuard does what I need internally, it’s just external is the issue. VPN’s are not a solution, my kids are old enough to know they can just disable it to work around it. They don’t know about the Private DNS option that I have configured on their devices… Yet
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
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]
I’ve seen a few mentions of PiHole and AdguardHome, I started on PiHole, then moved to AdguardHome for adblocking. Then I heard about and have been using TechnitiumDNS server which is sort of overkill for our needs, but with the right ad-lists, it is fantastic at blocking advertisements on my home network. Super fast install too, even on a Raspberry Pi 2 :) I run that along with Proxmox-VE (Protected behind OIDC Login) and several other containers on my cranky old Dell Desktop server.
Mostly Vaultwarden, and a few other services for home private use such as PairDrop for inter system sharing and a self destructing file sharing server for when we need to send documents to our Attorney’s (rarely but sometimes we need to) office via Pingvin.
I also run:
With Authentik setup, I can login to things like my Fresh Tomato Router TechnitiumDNS (Both use HTTP Auth headers) and Memos which uses OIDC/SSO. It’s meant to replace our Google Keep notes.
docker logs -follow
command.I still use Portainer-CE and am happy there, I may try Dockage or the others, but it’s fine for what I need it for (It’s also protected by OIDC)
I’m sure I may have missed a few, but this post has gone on long enough. :)
Looks similar to Cyberchef. Any reason to use that one over Cyberchef?
Cyberchef, I’ve looked at but honestly for me, IT Tools works best for my needs so it’s all good on my end.
A bunch of people recommend dozzle in this thread… I’ve been using Dockge. I wonder how they compare. I’ll have to check that out later.
Dozzle is just log viewing plain and simple. Dockge shows more that’s all I know. I tested Dockge earlier on in development and haven’t been back since, I know it’s grown a lot more since.
It’s not so much that Dockge shows more, and more that it does more. Log viewing in Dockge is actually pretty bad; it’s honestly the one thing that really needs more work. But Dockge is a full management plane; it allows you to deploy, modify, bring up and bring down entire compose stacks. Dozzle is only a log viewer, nothing else. Given that log viewing is the one thing Dockge does badly, they’re actually a perfect complement to each other, and I’d strongly recommend running both.
The main things for me are: Wireguard, NextCloud and an NFS/SMB share and a torrent client (Deluge)
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 :)
(How/) Do you access your private stuff from outside your home?
@0x0 headscale/tailscale. I have a VPS that gives me a public IP so i use that to host a headscale control plane.
Nice until you’re at a hotspot that blocks most ports but the most common ones.
I use HTTPS for all stuff, that has given me the best results overall. But of course, you can offer multiple options simultaneously
(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:
On a bare metal machine at a reputable cloud provider:
Wishlist:
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.I know it’s been three weeks, but thanks for telling me about this! I might actually do this, for the projects here and there which aren’t packaged into nixpkgs (yet).
Any chance you could share any of your Nix config? I’m curious how it’s being used with Proxmox (I’m using ansible and terraform right now).
I thought about adding a link, but am a bit hesitant to de-anonymize myself on here 😅
But it’s basically this:
TBH this sounds way more complicated than it is / feels to use 😄
Jellyfin Plex (I wanted to get rid of it but I found my son’s TV has no Jellyfin client available so I have to keep Plex up for him) Nginx Caddy Ddclient to Cloudflare for my home dynamic IP Syncthing (such an underrated app) Wireguard HomeAssistant Some other stuff that isn’t all that interesting
It started with Emby and pihole. I’m now up to about 30 different services from Vault, email, 3CX, home assistant, firefox, podgrab etc.
What do you use for that?
Self-hosting as in at home, nothing to the outside world and i’m still sorting a local NAS; i have a VPS with a few websites but that’s not self-hosting category i guess.
I’d locally-host media stuff but not even that is that important to me atm. Next on my list is 3-2-1 backups so i can reorganize my setup and eventually selfhost a wiregard VPN to access some data.
Because emails can have a boatload of sensitive information (especially when collected en masse, think years and years of emails)… In the day of AI bullshit. Minimizing all that data being directly attached to an account associated with you and owned by google or some other corp seems like a sane desire. If you primary a gmail account… and they start (they probably already are) training on that dataset. Shit is going to get real testy.
If you email to people on gmail or outlook, won’t Google and Microsoft still end up with copies of most of your mail?
Yes, but at the very least they have to do queries to build that profile out across dozens or hundreds of recipients… And they only get what I explicitly sent to them/their users.
Google collects 100% of the emails you’re getting on gmail and it’s already sent directly to you… so they see it completely… including emails being sent to other sources since it originates from their server (so collecting information that would be going to an MS Exchange server as well…).
Self hosting this means that you’re collecting your own shit… And companies can only get the outgoing side to their users. And never the full picture of your systems/emails.
This matters a lot more than you think. Lots of systems for automation sends through systems like Mailchimp, PHPmailer, etc… So those emails from your doctor likely never originated from MS or Google to begin with. When it hits your inbox on Gmail or Outlook… Well now it’s on their system. Now they can analyze it.
I meant what software stack do you use to host your email.
Btw have you encountered issues with receiving/sending mail through that account, considering the ongoing cartelization?
Mailcow.
Personally. No. The hardest part is getting a clean IP and to setup PTR records for a static IP. The rest has been easy for me personally… but I do this shit for a living so I might be biased.
I set up a mail stack on Rocky Linux with Postfix, Dovecot, and rspamd. I don’t need a database because it’s all LDAP on the backend, and I don’t have webmail setup right now because I’m lazy. It’s a bit of a hassle to get up and running well but it’s pretty solid and I’m careful about managing my domain reputation so I don’t have any issues with my mail being delivered.
You can use Roundcube for web mail
I just haven’t gotten around to setting it up is all.
Really just video for me, I can’t handle paying for streaming anymore.
I’m trying to deGoogle/deFAANG/deBigData so I try to host FOSS alternatives to every service I use on the internet, though some services won’t be possible or practical (e.g., email).
I host:
I use the d.rymcg.tech framework. It’s a little over my head, but the framework makes it pretty easy to use all the apps. It’s a bit tricky to add new apps to the framework, but it’s fun and all the source is there to learn from and the developer is really nice and really helpful.
I haven’t gotten around to setting it up yet, but for a google photos type self hosted setup there is Immich which looks promising!
I am also trying to degoogle/debigdata my life, but it seems we’re taking radically different approaches to it. I wish you luck in your journey!
For sure anything with private data involved, aside from my email.
So everything to do with images, videos, file/document storage, etc…
Also game servers because they’re generally very easy to host at home, and due to generally high RAM and storage needs paying for hosting can be quite pricey.
Really?
I thought this was more the case with flexible providers like DigitalOcean. My current provider charges 5,36€ per month for 4 cores (though I assume this corresponds rather to 2 SMT-enabled cores), 6 GB of RAM and a 400 GB SSD. It offers better latency for most players (obviously not for myself) and in most cases has been sufficient regarding performance.
Fair, it does depend on what games you’re hosting. I often have multiple servers for different games running and some can use upwards of 10GB of RAM each when in use.
Highest I’ve had I think was an Avorion server that hit around 20GB of RAM usage with 5 or so players on.
I find that VPS cores are often very low performance cores, since they want high core density in their servers vs fewer high performance cores, and for games like Arma 3, Minecraft, Enshrouded, etc they really need high single thread performance to work well.