Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Ok, how do I start self-hosting? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I'm still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just "install this distro and click these buttons"? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I'm not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from "you can check your IP address using ip a" would be appreciated.

More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I'll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don't mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I'm able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that's step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they're either too simplistic (no I don't want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don't know how DHCP works).

Thanks in advance

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I'm not familiar with networking at all.

Actually the networking stuff is terribly important for selfhosting.

I recommend a different approach than most other commenters: buy two small WiFi routers and install openwrt there. Check here that the new devices support openwrt: https://openwrt.org/toh/start

Then go through some of the tutorials and forum examples about openwrt. Most of them are very good. You are going to learn the basics as well as some fun things you can do with networking/routing, and also much about network security.

Your selfhosting will become so much easier then.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh I've never heard about openwrt, but it sounds interesting. I'll check it out, thanks!