I’ve been doing small hosting off and on for a while. Mainly for accessing files at home and the occasional Minecraft server. Not smart, as I’ve never used a specialized router. I used to use ddwrt, but now it’s impossible to flash most consumer grade routers.
id like to learn more stuff about cyber security, host other stuff, maybe host a website, but I’m just a guy who lives in an apartment. I’m stuck with 1 Internet service that claims it will terminate my service if they find me to be hosting anything. They must be semi-lax with that rule, because i haven’t gotten terminated for using ssh and cockpit.
Do you guys own a house, or are just fortunate enough to have access to an ISP that will let you host your own stuff?
I have a yearly vps subscription with 16GB ram, 160 GB ssd and 8 cores, including 5TB network limit. It is some Lithuanian company (time4vps). I don’t have a static ip at home, and if I want to get one I have to pay pretty much the same amount, so why bother?
It has Debian 11, and ufw as the only security measure, together with Caddy as reverse proxying everything so only a handful of ports are open (80,8080, 443, and one for syncthing and one for dot).
I have the following services running:
- Nextcloud (for office tools, calendar, to do, boards)
- firefly iii for self accounting
- technitium dns server for doh and dot with blocking
- grafana, prometheus and node exporter foe monitoring
- libreddit for, well, you know
- searcxng
- trilium for private knowledge base
- tailscale for tunneling and VPN
- syncthing for file syncing and password sync together with keepassxc
- my personal page, auto updating with github actions over sftp.
I have partially documented most of my work in my blog, so you can take a look if you wish https://mustafacanyucel.com/#blog .
Your blog looks nice , how did you made it?
Thank you. It is only css and html, but since my creative skills are no better than a potato’s, I am using a designer-made template for css 😅.
I’ve been slowly adding things to the mini PC someone in my family gifted me. I keep thinking there’s no way this little machine can take one more thing. But as I sit here it’s idling between 10-20% and basically never peaks up to the top. I’ve had no issues with this little machine keeping up. I also have slow internet, the lowest package offered. But my little champion just keeps proving it’s self time and time again. It’s made me realize that most people on here are making this sound much more burdensome than it actually is for a personal use server. If it’s just you and family, you probably don’t need to worry about it.
The more I self host the more I realize everyone needs to be self hosting at least one thing. But really why not more? Things are getting easier and easier mostly because those amongst us with really in depth knowledge are making easy launch scripts and self deploying programs. It’s taught me a lot and has been a lot of fun. It’s also really practical. I especially like having the FTP which might be the first and easiest thing I setup. It’s really cool to have my own cloud it’s not super secure being that there’s no data redundancy but it’s more than adequate for things I already have redundancy for like my whole phone syncs up every night, but I also upload all my photos to a cloud service. I also have common space for me and my spouse to share files really really easily and keep these files all in a common space. This has been helpful when looking for medical records during an emergency. But also just to share larger files in general. We even keep a collection of ebooks on there, we read from my server every night. My kid watches most TV from my server too. This avoids my kid being exposed to most ads I find inappropriate.
For me it’s simple: my ISP has crippled the upload to 30mbps making it impossible to host something from my home publically (download is 300mbps or more) but I do selfhost on unraid … it’s just for stuff in my house or for my privately with vpn outside. I run a TON of apps this way… I just don’t need them to be … public they are just for me to use at home mostly.
That for me is also selfhosting.
Now that said: I still ask the same question to my isp when they want to upsell me something: and what about the upload? The sales persons mostly don’t know what I mean or how it matters 🤦♀️… anyway I’ve been doing this for 20+ years now…… kinda lost hope? But nah not yet 😏 … “hoop doet leven” we tell or selves over here (translates to: hope is live)
I host my stuff at home from a combination of old desktops, laptops and other leftovers. In addition I have a cheap vps which I use as a wireguard server which routes traffic to the different servers hosted at my home over wireguard. I also use this vps also to enable my parents to use the server from their home (also over wireguard).
An added benefit is that my ISP does not see that Im hosting anything, although I never had issues befoe this setup.
I started with a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB running Home Assistant with a bunch of add-ons. Moved on to a mini PC running Proxmox with some VMs (one for Home Assistant) and LXCs (NGINX Proxy Manager, Docker, AdGuard Home, Jellyfin and more). With a 4-core 8-thread Intel CPU and 16GB of RAM, it’s got enough power for my usage so far.
My router is a regular consumer-grade router, but it’s been pretty good at reassigning the same IP address to each of my services. My ISP doesn’t restrict my uploads and hasn’t complained about my self-hosted services, but there’s not much traffic as I’m the only one using them.
I’m also adding a NAS to the mix soon for more storage!
