100g in the mountains? Where is this mythical place?

no

I am not sure some stamped tin and a few circuit boards are worth $1000.

IMHO this is just a $150 Rosewill RSV-R4200U with backplanes, so maybe $300 max.

I would MAYBE think about this if it came fully function certified system for $1000 that I could just drop drives into, but even then that is out of the typical homelab price point and entering the SHO market.

This is like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don’t really need to involve other people in my life.

next up… docker containers start reporting user data

Never buy into a platform, they tend to waste a lot of my time on changing things to upgrade versions that have no point except to change the whole platform, and the things you like to use get deprecated. Or they never get to where you want to be. Your vision is not the maintainers vision. Learn to roll your own…everything.

Wow that is a lot of reading, which means you did a lot of work researching, planning, testing and writing. Thank you for publishing this.

A cursory look seems like the software you are using could benefit from a more powerful machine. I know power is a concern for some, but for me it is irritating waiting around for things to load. A Dell Optiplex 7070 SFF i7-9700 @ 3.00GHz 16GB RAM 256GB SSD is only $56 on ebay and would be significantly faster than an orange pi. Thoughts?

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-chapin-rfc2606bis-00

I use .host because .internal is too long to type and .local is a pita, but mostly because the browser actually tries to go there instead of some stupid search engine that tracks that kind of info and I don’t have to remember to put a slash at the end.

I think the issue is here: “I can’t remember reading a good explanation of why.” One can make any number of excuses for why or why not to do things, it really is what you want to do.

I use Windows Core solely for my file storage. I have thought about moving to a solution like TrueNas but didn’t find that as simple as my current solution. I found windows core runs hdsentinel and ssh/iscsi/nfs/samba easily and the uptime is well over 3 years. I block outside access and never do updates. Since I have a mixture of Windows and Linux/BSD/Arm/Apple products in my home the file server is dedicated to file storage and does nothing else. Windows core is stable and always up.

I only use ReFS because I did have corruption with NTFS and it has been super stable. I know people love ZFS, but for me it was an unmitigated shit show of mismatched utilities and documentation, and losing containers on reboot with proxmox was a PITA getting them back. Since I have 20tb drives, I don’t do any raid or anything like that, just straight drive presentation.

LOL

Is self hosted really meant for business? Do you mean like a coffee shop environment that people can spin up servers for themselves or what is the point? All the apps you pointed out work fine for selfhosted home and lanparty environments Most people that host servers want os compatibility and hardware speed. Docker isn’t really known for its Windows compatibility that a lot of game servers need. Linux servers are more popular but a lot of the games people play have their servers on lockdown so this is really a niche market anymore.

Can I install Steam on it?