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.)
Honestly? Probably boredom. Computer-related projects are addictive to me.
Haven’t ventured too far, but searxng was my first selfhosted service. It’s very easy, single container, no database.
A pihole. Given how much I’ve spent over the years on self hosting kit, few ‘cheap’ things have ended up costing me more than that first 30 quid raspberry pi
What do you spend on? For me, the only recurring expenditures are VPN, and VPS. I think I pay <$5 a month on all of it.
My home network is somewhat overkill ;p but so far, about £500 on compute to run VMs, >£1000 on a nas and various other offsite and local stoarage, a couple hundred quid on networking gear, and then the extra premium on smart home devices you pay for non-tracking versions of the hardware (e.g a ring video doorbell would have cost me £40 less than the reolink I ended up buying). I’ve also so far spent over £75 on smart light switches trying to find one that both works with home assistant and fits inside my really narrow back boxes without yet finding one that works, so the number is continuing to go up!
1TB hard drives were on sale, and I wanted to digitize all my DVDs and stream them to my Xbox 360. That was 15 years ago.
holy crap, that was … … … … 25 years ago???
I don’t honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I’d say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.
My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren’t always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem … and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn’t filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment … fix the typo and walk away slowly … wild west days!!
Damn. I’m 25 years old lol.
Probably Apache? I’ve been running web servers since the early 2000’s.
Yeah. Probably Apache. Can’t remember what that I was doing, but it almost certainly ran on Apache, and I almost certainly spent 90% of my energy configuring Apache.
XAMPP? I started with that in Secondary School (equivalent to high school)
I was probably running some weird little Python web CGI dice roller or some such. I spent a lot of time teaching myself the HTTP stack the unnecessarily hard way, lol.
For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).
I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I’m back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.
oh nice. somebody else who’s done internet radio!
Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!
That’s awesome :)
I started by self-hosting an autoDJ to pipe music into Second Life, later did a weekly show on a tiny internet radio station for maybe 18 months … trying to make a name in order to get a DJ spot on-air at a local community radio station that was indie/alt-rock format at the time. Sadly my life took a turn and the community station changed hands and changed formats, but it was a cool experience nonetheless!
Awesome! Dang, Second Life… we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣
Plex, then Jellyfin, then it snowballed out of control.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mid 90s, my ftp server with music and warez over dial-up that wasn’t always online!
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)
I guess it would’ve been a bulletting board system that people used a 14k modem to connect to, one at a time, and it would completely block the phone line.
My parents weren’t thrilled, but hey, we had a message board and LORD running there.
I loved LORD, I used to spend hours playing that and Trade Wars on a local BBS.
Hi, lurker here: what is/was LORD?
Jeez, I had forgotten all about LORD! Thanks for bringing back such good memories! I used to play it all the time back in the good ol’ days.
