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I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!
I started with the 2020 tutorial from these guys. They’ve updated it a few times through the years so I can’t speak to how good the new version is, but I’m sure it’s probably plenty to get started.
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/
After I followed this guide, I’ve deviated significantly as I learned and started to do my own thing. It’s a great place to start and learn the basics of containerized applications and once you have that then you can host most things that are dockerized. All I need to do now to start up a new service is pull up the README on Docker Hub (or better yet, if LinuxServer.io has a container that does what I want to do, on their website), figure out what I want to do with the variables and any setup that needs to happen, and then I add it to my .yml and start it up!
I’ve got it all tracked now on GitHub so I can see what I’ve changed and when and if something were to go wrong I could revert back to a known-good configuration.
De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.
Engineering background for reference.
Honestly, I learned a ton from these guys: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/
I’ve diverged a good bit since then of the services I’ve added and the specifics of how I configure things (I still use Traefik whereas I think they’ve shifted to Nginx), but they have a great example of a GitHub repo and what it looks like to manage a self-hosted server.
For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.
So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.
You don’t need portainer for it to be easy! The wiki is quite great at providing setup examples for docker compose, regular docker, and others!
Although in the subscription version, SSO is not available unless you purchase the “Contact Us” version. https://sso.tax would like a word.
Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”
I use Fastmail.
My domain has me plus the wife, and she’s not willing to tolerate any amount of fiddling or bugs or anything, so we needed something that would Just Work™, and Fastmail fits the bill quite well.
Their features are great, I actually prefer their app over the native iOS app, and they’ve been rock solid since I signed up. I can also have any amount of aliased and I can put all three of my domains on there. Plus they’re not Google which was the biggest thing I needed them to be.
I’m not entirely sure on the absolute best, but I always use Switzerland. I believe they have extremely strong privacy laws that protect individual privacy and I believe they have a relaxed view on downloading so long as it is solely for personal use, though uploading / sharing torrenting is still very much disallowed.
Go and interview for a tracker like RED (https://interviewfor.red/). From RED, you can get just about anywhere within the private tracker world if you’re a good member and rank up.
I started out by setting up a Pi-Hole for my house and learning and failing small to get my head around how Linux worked and how to actually use a command line / SSH / the works.
From there I went to the website https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/ (specifically this guide) which was extremely helpful in understanding the basics of services, networking, DNS, etc. I’d say that if you’re able to get a full setup going with Traefik on Docker, that’s a really good setup for success for self hosting just about anything that can be Dockerized (which is basically anything).
Now I’m able to just read the documentation for a service at hub.docker.com, figure out how I want to customize it for my specific setup (e.g. putting gluetun in front of specific containers, setting up cron jobs to automate some container tasks, and creating a suitable backup) all with my knowledge of how this stuff works which I gained through lots of trial and error with the above guide.
That’s really all there is to it: just diving in, making mistakes, and learning from them until you start to build your knowledge of how stuff works and are comfortable going above and beyond copy and paste.
Cloudflare provides at-cost domain name registration. It won’t be as private as njal.la, but if you end up using them for your site, then it would be one less entity to trust if you have your registration and DNS with them.
It was streaming locally from my 920+ directly to my LG tv using the official Plex app on the tv and the Plex docker container on the NAS with iGPU passthrough. Tried it in both mp4 and mkv formats. Since the tv doesn’t support DTS it was transcoding into (I think) AAC. When I would change the playback from DTS to any other codec (for files with multiple formats), the video would play flawlessly, it was just the audio transcoding.
It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.