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The Stoned Hacker @lemmy.world

What do you prefer to selfhost?

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?

70 comments

  • 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.
    • Webcheck - All-in-one OSINT tool for analyzing any website https://web-check.xyz/ is their demo site. :)
    • Stirling PDF - Kind of like a Swiss-army knife for PDF's. :)
    • Dozzle - For those times with you really need to see what your Docker logs and too lazy do run a docker logs -follow command.

    I still use Portainer-CE and am happy there, I may try Dockage or the others, but it's fine for what I need it for (It's also protected by OIDC)

    I'm sure I may have missed a few, but this post has gone on long enough. :)

    • A bunch of people recommend dozzle in this thread.. I've been using Dockge. I wonder how they compare. I'll have to check that out later.

      • 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.

    • IT-Tools - hands down one of the coolest self hosted tool sets you can use.

      Looks similar to Cyberchef. Any reason to use that one over Cyberchef?

      • Cyberchef, I've looked at but honestly for me, IT Tools works best for my needs so it's all good on my end.

  • Masochism, paranoia.

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  • 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.

  • It started with Emby and pihole. I'm now up to about 30 different services from Vault, email, 3CX, home assistant, firefox, podgrab etc.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The main things for me are: Wireguard, NextCloud and an NFS/SMB share and a torrent client (Deluge)

  • Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

    Fewer LettersMore Letters
    DHCPDynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network
    DNSDomain Name Service/System
    GitPopular version control system, primarily for code
    HTTPHypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
    HTTPSHTTP over SSL
    IMAPInternet Message Access Protocol for email
    IPInternet Protocol
    LAMPLinux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting
    NASNetwork-Attached Storage
    NFSNetwork File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency
    NVRNetwork Video Recorder (generally for CCTV)
    PiHoleNetwork-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
    PlexBrand of media server package
    SMBServer Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native
    SSDSolid State Drive mass storage
    SSLSecure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
    SSOSingle Sign-On
    UnifiUbiquiti WiFi hardware brand
    VPNVirtual Private Network
    VPSVirtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
    XMPPExtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging
    k8sKubernetes container management package
    nginxPopular HTTP server

    23 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

    [Thread #871 for this sub, first seen 15th Jul 2024, 16:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

70 comments