I’m just mildly curious. I know this isn’t the self hosting chan, but how many of you self host services as part of your efforts to retain your privacy, security, and anonymity?
I’ve been self hosting something for decades now. I got really started back in the PreNapster era. I ran an independent, selfhosted, fully licensed, internet radio outfit. That was back when music on the internet was a lot of cheap, tinny, geocities, midis. LOL I worked with a company called IM Radio Networks. They and Phillips, developed one of the world’s first bookshelf stereo, that was internet ready. Hook it up to the internet, and you could listen to AM/FM and IM radio. I’ve often mused that if it weren’t for Shawn Fanning, the music landscape on the internet might look a bit different as he forced the music industry to reevaluate how they did business.
Now, I self host a ton of stuff just for my own needs. It’s an enjoyable, purposeful, hobby, that keeps me busy. It’s also, so very educational, and I learn new things daily.
ETA: Man it does my heart good to meet and greet privacy minded users who also self host. It is an integral part of my privacy, anonymity, and security posture. If you aren’t already, or are thinking of self hosting, do it! You don’t need massive racks in the closet that dim the lights on reboot. A simple NUC or even RPi are quite capable of serving up services. You don’t need a Tier 1 feed from your ISP. Keep it simple and basic and work up from there to meet your needs.
Thanks again to all those who responded and shared their experiences.
You must log in or register to comment.
I’m currently running 2 Proxmox hosts with 3 LXC containers and 3 VMs between them, and on my NAS - 2 VMs and… 50 docker containers.
I reeeeeally don’t like centralized services. 😂
I really love my Proxmox server. For a freemium product, it covers a lot of ground. Personally, I think it out performs VM Ware, and is very straight forward. I’m sure you’ve checked out the Helper Scripts? Lots of good stuff there.
50 docker containers
I think I may have you bested. LOL Why not right? I mean, self hosting is a wide field and I can’t think of a lot that I need that I can’t self host. For a rather small entry fee, and some time, patience, and learning, it’s all achievable. I have never done a cost analysis but, if you were to add up all those subscription fees to all those centralized services, I think I am coming out on top. As long as you don’t try running enterprise grade, legacy stuff, and your equipment is relatively current, you’re golden.
100% agree with you re: Proxmox. I’ve recently migrated my gaming PC to a Proxmox setup with a Win10 gaming / VR VM, and a Debian 12 VM solely dedicated to serving, quantizing, and optimizing LLM (with full 3090FE vfio passthrough 😁). The other one I have is a super old mini-ITX tiny box with an i3-4130 in it, and I use it for a Plex LXC b/c my NAS has a CPU that doesn’t support hardware transcoding (even though I’ve literally showed all my clients how to disable transcoding completely so they all get direct streams / direct plays at original quality to their devices), just in case some transcoding needs to be done.
So I decided to set up the Cluster/Node bit a few days ago, and it is SO awesome to have instant access to both servers at one URL and interface to manage all my VMs/LXCs. I’ve only had one problem with Proxmox since I started using it a couple years ago, and I’ve loved everything else about it!
In the spirit of “why not right?”, here’s one of my favorite random services I run: https://github.com/jordan-dalby/ByteStash I love being able to save little snippets that I know in the moment I will hit myself later if I have to look it up again.
I self-host a decent bit of stuff. My setup has been to rent rack space in a datacenter to put my own storage server in, plus a second server at my house that I mirror backups between. I run my own VPN, “Cloud” storage, lemmy instance, game servers, websites, CI build systems, media streaming, etc… You can find some cheap server hardware on eBay that’s only a generation or two old, which you’ll need if you’re running in a datacenter, but for home servers it’s super easy to just set up an old desktop with a battery backup.
CI build systems
I’ve always wanted to implement something like that.
There’s a few different services you can use to set it up. I quite like Buildkite since they’ve got a pretty easy setup for running jobs on your own hardware, but I think several other CI services have a self-hosting option.
The best part about it for me is I can run GPU tests and do automatic screenshot diffs for my game engine. Normally renting a GPU server is super expensive, but it’s basically free to run myself using my old hardware.
I quite like Buildkite
I put it on the list. Got to check it out.
I self-host my own Monero node and I self-host my password manager and my files
Monero node
Hmm. I’m pretty confident in my defences but selfhosting passwords and financials keeps me awake at night. LOL
I just make deterministic passwords based on what I’m using. It’s a hard to break pattern.
*Raises hand*
I see ya bro.
I was running a server hosting a Gutenberg mirror at home 30+ years ago. And no, it’s not public.
Self-hosting for a bit less than 10 years. My main pain is that my setup is now stable and I have nothing left to tinker with.
Stack recommendations?
and I have nothing left to tinker with
Blasphemy! LOL Congrats on the stable stack.
Self hosting looks interesting, but I’d generally rather keep things offline. Even as a software developer, I value simplicity, and most online “services” I find entirely superfluous ; self hosted or no.
Jellyfin ? How about a big external drive with movies on it, just plug it into your viewing device of choice.
Hosting my notes ? I take my notes on physical paper. (Loose sheets, because notebooks have the same scaling issues computer notes have. Sometimes I just want to splay everything out on the table and do big picture work. That’s also why I only use one side of the sheet.)
Music streaming ? I dont even know if you can self host this one (probably yes) but I’d rather just copy the file over ; even a huge library doesn’t take that much space.
Photos ? I just have folders on an encrypted drive, with some backups elsewhere. Though I guess Immich looks interesting…
Documents ? Okay, I should self-host this one. For now it’s all local, on-disk (encrypted of course, there’s no good reason not to), but it can be quite inconvenient if my only copy is at home on my desktop.
So no, I don’t self-host yet, and when I do (hopefully soon) it will be only in a limited capacity ; mostly out of a convenience concern, privacy being a distant second.
Totally understandable
Oh god, where do I start?
3 node proxmox setup:
Net node:
- opnsense (dns, dhcp, edge firewall, wireguard)
- caddy
- ssh hub
Compute node:
- a few game servers
- wiki (kiwix), full copy of wikipedia
- searxng
- docker host (portainer plus 10ish containers)
- forgejo
- testing vms
- a separate zfs mirror
Storage node:
- all drives, zfs + mirror
- proxmox backup server
- home assistant
- immich
- ARR stack
- jellyfin
Oh and a monitoring node made out of a rpi 4b with an nvme hat,running dietpi, prometheus, grafana and homepage (gethomepage.dev)
Thats about it plus automations and stuff, wireguard so I can access it from anywhere. Not separated properly, no network zones, just a few vlans for now, work in progress.
It gets to be an obscession, no?
Yes. But its my outlet, its keeping me sane. Looking at the worlds nowadays, this is my happy place. More therapy than anything.
I think it’s very important for us humans to have something in our daily lives that distracts up for couple hours or so. A release. I like to get out and touch grass too. Balance.
Working on jellyfin and Nextcloud right now. I have not used NGinx or Tailscale, so now I have to figure out how to set those up to work outside of my house without getting hacked. Next I might try SearXNG or maybe host my own email again.
DNS, Jellyfin and game servers mostly; occasionally will tinker with other stuff but those are the ones that have lasted
I’ve been selfhosting for about 4 years now. I wanted to break away from services like Google and find tools I could control on my own hardware.
I went from bare-metal Jellyfin and Nextcloud on my NAS to running the NAS with an NFS share and a Raspberry Pi as a pod orchestrator through quadlets. That little sucker is running pods for:
- media (audiobookshelf, kavita, Jellyfin)
- Immich
- Invidious
- Navidrome
- Peertube
- SearXNG
- Servarr suite (flareresolverr/jackett/prowlarr, gluetun/qbittorrent, jellyseerr, lazylibrarian, lidarr, mylar3, radarr, sonarr)
It’s also running instances of:
- mumble
- nginx-proxy-manager
- sftpgo
- syncthing
I’ve only opened a few services for family usage, but everything else is VPN-accessible.
Also, no more Nextcloud. Syncthing balances everything out, and I can use sftpgo’s webdav option to host my own seedvault backups. Now Google is collecting dust.
Invidious
I am keen to know how you keep Invidious operational? YT is on a killing spree to make it impossible to view videos unless you submit to their platforms. Ban hammering IPs happens constantly. I got frustrated and just use LibRedirect to access already established instances. I just don’t want to jump through all the YT hoops, listen to back to back un-skipable ads just to find out the tutorial I thought I was interested in was crap.
I recently got the homelab going and plan on expanding to a few family members as well.
12 nodes (some new Epycs for encrypted memory, some centreon ewaste for cold storage and background tasks, and a few in-between) so far. All Harvester HCI and Rancher. I run game servers, Ollama, and NFS for storing my encrypted back ups on it mostly at the moment, with a sync to send encrypted to Proton for that off-site.
I can only get so erect
I have a couple Minecraft servers using pterodactyl :3
I probably will self host a lot more when I have my own place and money tho
I used to be heavy into Minecraft. I had a really nice set up on a VPS. Ran shaders and a ton of add ons. Fun stuff.
I try to selfhost wherever possible. There are a few exceptions where it’s not practical (email for example), so I prefer not Google/Apple/Microsoft when that happens. In those cases, I also like to diversify so any potential enshitification is less painful to resolve.
Yeah, email is my kryptonite. I’ve run a couple packages in the past, but it is tedious. I use a EU service called mailo.com. Small, little company but in business for 20 years. Not a lot of gee whiz bells and whistles. Pretty much mail and a calendar, which is really all I need. I do make use of email aliases a lot.
There are very easy steps you can take here. It seems complicated, but there are tools for this and with a VPS/VDS, you can be up and running in under an hour if you are technically inclined. Moving to my own email, is by far, one of the best things I have done in my life.
It wasn’t the running it as much as the blacklisting.
So there is a bit of work you need to do, but if you manage your server well, do DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc and then nip it in the bud when you get warnings, its very easy to manage. Its about responsibility. Bad actors exist, but careful operators prevail.
Yeah, I might take a swing at it a few more times. That’s kind of my modus operandi. Do it, screw it up, restart. #$@$@ Do it, it works! Write that shit down! LOL
It took me 6 deploys to finally understand all the mechanisms. What I like about self-hosting and the open source mantra in general is that every failure is a lesson with field experience. So skills development and acquisition is fairly easy if you push for it and once you get it, its wash, rinse, repeat.
I don’t know if I’d call myself a privacy pioneer but I self-host some stuff and share/trade services with a few friends.
I don’t know if I’d call myself a privacy pioneer
lol I just needed something for the alliteration. Rock on my brother.
