Welcome to [email protected] - What do you selfhost?
(lemmy.world)
I've been selfhosting various things for almost 25 years now. Started with email/web, but now I've got the following (in no particular order):
- email (postfix/dovecot)
- web (nginx)
- shared notes (obsidian, but also through dovecot)
- calendar (davical)
- telephony (asterisk)
- replicated storage (syncthing)
- media server (plex)
- home automation (homeassistant, mosquitto, grafana, influxdb)
- power monitoring (empora device on the breaker panel + a few smart outlets talking to homeassistant)
- security cameras (securityspy)
- irrigation (a controller of my own design, adding OpenSprinkler support this year)
- offsite backups (duplicity + rclone)
- project management/issue tracking (redmine)
- social media (gnu-social + lemmy, but also testing mbin)
- bookmark management (karakeep)
- local copies of web stuff (yt-dlp, hamsterbase, singlefile)
- VPN (openvpn)
Virtualization is mostly docker containers, but also some ESXi/VMWare Fusion. I also have Obsidian in the mix but that's not really a self-host but more of a way to organize/access my data. I have also been doing a (very!) little bit of experimentation with local LLMs, but it's all on ARM, using either the GPU or the NPU available on the RK3588.
This stuff either exists on an OVH VPS for the "internet facing" stuff or on an old Dell C6100 blade server. ESXi uses one blade and another blade runs Debian and talks to an old SATA/SAS disk shelf I got for $50 to see if I could make it work (it was super straightforward). I have a bunch of 2T and 4T "spinning rust" drives in two RAID6 arrays (mdadm) and then carve out storage for various things using LVM. I am experimenting with zfs on the VPS but am not a big fan of it. I used to run OpnSense on another blade since I couldn't find a router which would properly shape gigabit internet traffic, but now I'm using an ER605 and it seems to be doing quite well. I have a tiny KeepConnect device which will physically cut power to the cable modem if it can't see the internet which is very helpful since the biggest source of trouble for me has always been the damn internet service doing weird things when I'm not at home.
I've even been working toward "self hosting" my own educational electronics stuff for my kids using https://microblocks.fun/ (the actual project is called smallvm) - think scratch running completely in the browser and executing code on a "vm" which is actually running on a microcontroller over BLE or serial.
This sounds like a shitload of work and sometimes it can be, but one of the best parts of self hosting is that once it's set up, it hardly ever has to be updated/changed. Security updates are the biggest reason of course, but a LOT of this is not on the open internet so I can be more lenient about keeping things up to date. I also try to keep everything that needs a database to use ONE database (postgres), which also makes it easier to back up or use data from several tools in a new way. Honestly it's largely fire and forget these days. I add more space or replace drives as needed and try not to touch things otherwise. I keep a set of notes to help me remember not only the how but the WHY I set things up in a particular way, and those notes are accessible 100% offline. (After all, what good are notes on how things are set up if the thing you've stored them on isn't working?)
My infrastructure at home (C6100, SAS shelf, switch, etc.) consumes about 700W 24/7 which is not awesome but I figure the power bill saves a lot of service costs. The VPS runs me about $30/mo.