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?
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 :)
I self host jellyfin, nextcloud, owncast, tandoor, komga, photoprism and searxng. I use nginx proxy manager for a reverse proxy and SSL cert automation. Works great for me but I would like to get into traefik sometime.
I self host for privacy reasons, also it's fun, it's a learning opportunity and sometimes self-hosted services are functionally better than the other options out there.
From what I heard is that the NPM project only has 1 developer and so they can’t really respond and fix security flaws in a proper timeframe.
It's mostly just nginx with a webui. You can even see the nginx config files if you bash into the container. It has the same bugs as upstream nginx. Do not expose the management port to the internet.
Plus compared to normal nginx, it's harder to misconfigure it. Most of my services are just the default config, so I can't mess it up accidentally.
About lockouts: Once also happened me, but that was just a messed up update, next update fixed itself. If you lock yourself out you can usually edit the db directly, it defaults to sqlite, but I used it with mariadb.
How did you set up a VPN to securely connect to your services over the internet? I have looked for guides to do this and haven't had much luck. I would really like to implement this in my setup.
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).
I thought about adding a link, but am a bit hesitant to de-anonymize myself on here 😅
But it's basically this:
Proxmox is not Nix configured. There's a project for that, but IMO t'll take a couple of years to be ready for production.
I've created a custom nix module that essentially just sets my default values for stuff like bios type, boot order,... And allows to set CPU cores, RAM, IP,...
all this does though is just setting the corresponding values from the nixos-generators proxmox output
additionally, all the usual stuff is handled (user, known ssh keys, base config of the system)
for each VM, I only have a single file containing the VM settings (ID, RAM, cpu, ip,...) and the service config for whatever the VM is for
then lastly I have a custom script/shell that essentially just allows to do "nixvm-new <flake output name>" which generates the image, moves it to the nas, and calls on proxmox to import the image, plus some cleanup
TBH this sounds way more complicated than it is / feels to use 😄
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:
Home Assistant
Transmission Dockerized so I can help contribute to the Linux community and share the ISO's.
For some of my externalized sites, I run Authentik It acts sort of like a Reverse Proxy if you configure it to do so. I love that I can simply identify myself with my WebAuthn device skipping any passwords. :)
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.
Tailscale is installed and I connect to it from my phone when away from home to always stay on my network. Sometimes, hotspots block it so I generally avoid those as much as possible.
Wallos to help keep track of our re-occuring subscriptions.
Grafana and Promethus - both are staged and ready for configuration and one of those I will get around to eventually.
InfluxDB - I plan on moving Home Assistsant logging soon to that which should tie nicely into Grafana later.
Ben Phelps' Homepage - it's my main server dashboard my wife and I use to access our server. Quite simply one of the best dashboards IMHO.
Wyze Cam Bridge - One of the better services in which you can log into your Wyze cams and convert their streams to RTSP, RTMP or HLS streams easily. I have that feed to my Home Assistant Security Dashboard.
Baserow It's a good Airtable alternative and I use it to keep track of my Static IP assignments, Sleep tracker (I suffer from insomnia), and other data points. It's pretty amazing. I even created a pain logging for for my wife so she just accesses it and answers basic questions about her pain levels and it pushes it to the database for later retrieval.
Joplin Server - Sorry, I don't have the link, but it's installed via compose. I use Joplin Notes on my phone and computer for keeping my code snippets. I've tried Obsidian and it didn't really meet my needs and Also Anytype, but that's not self-hosted. Joplin server is for me and that's become handy a time or two when on the road.
Bookstack - my grand plan for that is to build a Wiki for my family to use in the event something should happen to me, they can know how to manage the server with nice screenshots and instructional steps. I have that protected behind Authentik's OIDC logins.
IT-Tools - hands down one of the coolest self hosted tool sets you can use.
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.
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.
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.
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Butter: The unsalted butter in this recipe operates like an emulsifier—stabilizing the fat and the liquids—resulting in a tender cookie.
Eggs: We rely on eggs to help leaven and form the shape of these chocolate brownie cookies.
Sugar: The sugar imparts sweet notes into these brownie cookies while caramelizing their edges.
Vanilla extract: We add a splash of vanilla extract to help enhance the sweetness of the chocolate in these brownie cookies.
Petunias: Pretty petunias are popular because of their exceptionally long flowering period. As with most annuals, they get leggy by midsummer, so you’ll want to prune the shoots back by half. See more tips on planting and caring for petunias to keep them blooming.
All of the services that I host are for private use:
Nextcloud
FreshRSS
Immich
Jellyfin
RSSBridge
And they are all behind Caddy, which reverse proxies and handles HTTPS. I'm not sure if it really counts as self-hosting, but I also use my server as a host for my backups with Borg. I also use it as a sort of central syncing point for Syncthing.
I did have a Pi-Hole at one point, but I kept running into issues with it — I may look into it again in the future.
At some point I'd like to try implementing some ideas that I've had for Homeassistant (a camera server with Frigate and some other automation things). Once federation has been implemented, I would like to host a Forgejo instance. I may also host a Simplex relay server, depending on how the app progresses. I've been considering hosting a Matrix instance, but I'm not sure yet.
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
I host way more than I probably should, but everyone should have some stuff like immich, vaultwarden, and nextcloud. I also like to host gitea and 30+ other things (check out netboot.xyz, it isn't something everyone needs but why wouldn't you want to be able to boot off the network), but that's just what some people do as a hobby I guess lol.
pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it's easier to have them to domain filtering.
mythtv/kodi, because I'd rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.
LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it's a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).
Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn't want to sort out, and it's useful to have some lights on timers.
I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.
Do you have any input on whether running your Pi-Hole as your DNS service versus how you have it, with pi-hole in front of a standalone DNS server, as to which is functionally "more better?"
I had been toying with making my pi-hole into a full DNS server using Unbound, but I had been debating if it would be better to have that service running seperately.
I have isc-bind running behind pihole so network clients can register their own hostnames, and as near as I can tell, that's outside the scope of pihole's DHCP and dnsmasq. Pihole alone is probably fine if you only want to name static hosts, but (I understand) Unbound doesn't support ddns, either.
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'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:
audiobookshelf (to stream and sync podcasts between my devices)
baikal (to host contacts and calendars)
cryptpad (for collaborative spreadsheets and kanban, though it does more than this)
drawio (flowchart-like diagrams
forgejo (my git repos and oauth2)
homepage (personal dashboard of services and links)
invidious (youtube frontend)
lemmy (duh :) )
minio (S3 object storage)
mosquitto (mqtt server)
nextcloud (can do a lot, but I'm only using it to look at Memories for photo storage and management - I currently selfhost Photostructure, but it's not FOSS)
peertube (youtube alternative)
prometheus (metrics monitoring)
qbittorrent (torrents)
syncthing (currently only used to sync photos from my pixel to my server, but might be replaced if I switch to a photo management app that has an android app that can sync images)
tiddlywiki-nodejs (pretty powerful wiki, but I use it just to sync text-based info between devices)
traefik (reverse proxy in front of everything I host)
tt-rss (RSS feeds)
vaultwarden (password management - this is a fork of bitwarden)
wordpress (for my personal websites)
xbrowsersync (bookmark syncing between browsers/devices)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to selfhost more, but honestly it started to feel like a job, and it was getting exhausting (maybe also irritating) to keep up with patches & updates across all of my services. I made decisions about risks to compromise and data loss from breaches and system failures. In the end, In decided my time was more valuable so now I pay someone to incur those risks for me.
For my outward facing stuff, I used to selfhost my own DNS domains, email + IMAP, web services, and an XMPP service for friends and family. Most of that I've moved off to paid private hosting. Now I maintain my DNS through Porkbun, email through MXroute, and we use Signal instead of XMPP. I still host and manage my own websites but am considering moving to a ghost.org account, or perhaps just host my blogs on a droplet at DO. My needs are modest and it's all just personal stuff. I learned what I wanted, and I'm content to be someone else's customer now.
At home, I still maintain my custom router/firewall services, Unifi wireless controller, Pihole + unbound recursive resolver, Wireguard, Jellyfin, homeassistant, Frigate NVR, and a couple of ADS-B feeders. Since it's all on my home LAN and for my and my wife's personal use, I can afford to let things be down a day or two til I get around to fixing it.
Still need to do better on my backup strategies, but it's getting there.
My cloud and in there my keepass file. And a own git remote server. And my media streaming box, which streams in Quality I want ( I need to pirate stuff I pay for to be able to watch the content in the quality the streaming services has advertise it ) 😤
For media, I host the some of the arr apps, qbittorrent, Jellyfin, gpodder2go, and navidrome. For personal photos, I host PhotoPrism. I host a file sharing service fileshelter, and a link shortening service chhoto-url. I host Wiki.js for mostly recipes, and some notes. I've recently started hosting Forgejo for my git repos. I also host SageMath for computation, it's especially useful when I only have my phone with me and need to use it. I use caddy as a reverse proxy and serve these through a VPS using a Wireguard tunnel.
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