Ask HN: What do you self-host?

[aeleos]

I know this is has been posted before but that was a few years ago so I wanted to restart the discussion, as I love hearing about what people host at home.

I am currently running an Unraid server with some docker containers, here are a few of them: Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Ombi, NZBGet, Bitwarden, Storj, Hyrda, Nextcloud, NginxProxyManager, Unifi, Pihole, OpenVPN, InfluxDB, Grafana.

[mavidser]

I reworked my servers a while ago to host literally everything through docker, managed via terraform.

All web-services are reverse-proxied through traefik

At home:

    loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
    syncthing
    tinc vpn server
    jackett + radarr + sonarr + transmission
    jellyfin
    samba server
    calibre server

On a remote server:

    loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
    syncthing
    tinc vpn server
    dokuwiki
    firefox-sync
    firefox-send
    vscode server
    bitwarden
    freshrss
    znc bouncer + lounge irc client + bitlbee
    an httptunnel server (like ngrok)
    firefly iii
    monicahq
    kanboard
    radicale
    syncthing
    wallabag
    tmate-server

[tnsittpsif]

How much do you spend on the remote server on a monthly basis? Also, what's the hardware you use for the home server?

[nerdponx]

Was it hard to set up Firefox-Sync/Send? Last I checked, self-hosting these was undocumented and difficult.

[teddyh]

“Self-host” is such a weird word. Having your own stuff yourself should be the default, should it not? I mean, you don’t “self-drive” your car, nor “self-work” your job. The corresponding words instead exists for the opposites: You can have a chauffeur and you can outsource your job.

I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then have your own server at home, you are forced to have it elsewhere with sensible internet connections.

It’s as if, in an alternate reality, no private residences had parking space for cars; no garages, no street parking. Everyone would be forced to either use public transport, taxis and chauffeur services to get anywhere. Having a private vehicle would be an expensive hobby for the rich and/or enthusiasts, just like having a personal server is in our world.

[IanCal]

Hmm. I get other people to build my car, grow my food, generate my electricity, extract and refine my petrol, clean my water, I've rented cars, I get others to fly planes for me that I don't own, I use trains others drive and own.

I do everything for little to nothing in my life, and there's no reasonable default as to where the line is other than a cost/benefit comparison.

For my for many years owning a car was far more expensive than renting or getting taxis when needed. Owning a car absolutely would have been an expensive hobby, and the same is true for many in cities.

Having a personal server is exceptionally cheap. I had a VPS unnoticed recently I'd forgotten to cancel which cost about 10 dollars per year. That's about one minimum wage hour where I live. If you mean literally a personal server a raspberry pi can easily run a bunch of things and can cost about the same as a one off.

It's time, and upfront costs of software. If I want updates, and I do (security at least) I need some ongoing payments for those, and then I need to manage a machine. That management is better done by people other than me (as even if they earned the same as me they'd be faster and better) and they can manage more machines without a linear increase in their time.

So why self host? Sometimes it'll make sense, but the idea it should be the default to me doesn't hold. Little needs to be 100% in house, and sharing things can often be far more efficient. Software just happens to be incredibly easy to share.

[bhauer]

> I think the problem is entirely caused by the US having absolutely abysmal private internet speeds and capacity. Since you can’t then have your own server at home, you are forced to have it elsewhere with sensible internet connections.

The trend definitely traces to the advent and eventual domination of asymmetric Internet connectivity. My first DSL connection was symmetric, so peer-to-peer networking and running servers ("self-hosting") were just natural. Since then, asymmetric bandwidth has ruled the US.

It's not so much that connectivity technology in the US is strictly poor—many cities have options providing hundreds of megabits or a gigabit or more of aggregate bandwidth. It's that the capacity allocation of some shared delivery platforms (e.g., cable) is dramatically biased toward download/consumption, and against upload/share/host. And there's no way for consumers to opt for a different balance. I'd gladly take 500/500 versus 1000/50. Even business accounts, which for their greatly increased costs are a refuge of symmetric connectivity and static IPs, are more commonly asymmetric today.

I think that this capacity imbalance and bias toward consumption snowballs and reinforces the broader assumptions of consumption at the edge (why make a product you self-host when most people don't have the proper connectivity?). This in turn means more centralization of services, applications, and data.

Nevertheless, even with mediocre upload speeds (measured in mere tens of megabits), I insist on self-hosting data and applications as much as I can muster. All of my devices are on my VPN (using the original notion of "VPN," meaning quite literally a virtual private network; not the more modern use of VPN to mean "encrypted tunnel to an Internet browsing egress node located in a data center"). For example, why would I use Dropbox when I can just access my network file system from anywhere? To me, it's a matter of simplicity. Everything I use understands a simple file system.

[cyphar]

I self-host the following at home. Everything is running under LXD (and I have all of the scripts to set it up here[1]):

  * nginx to reverse-proxy each of the services.
  * NextCloud.
  * Matrix Homeserver (synapse).
  * My website (dumb Flask webapp).
  * Tor (non-exit) relay.
  * Tor onion service for my website.
  * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously).

All running on an openSUSE Leap box, with ZFS as the filesystem for my drives (simple stripe over 2-way mirrors of 4TB drives).

It also acts as an NFS server for my media center (Kodi -- though I really am not a huge fan of LibreELEC) to pull videos, music, and audiobooks from. Backups are done using restic (and ZFS snapshots to ensure they're atomic) and are pushed to BackBlaze B2.

I used to run an IRC bouncer but Matrix fills that need these days. I might end up running my own Gitea (or gitweb) server one day though -- I don't really like that I host everything on GitHub. I have considered hosting my own email server, but since this is all done from a home ISP connection that probably isn't such a brilliant idea. I just use Mailbox.org.

[1]: https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com/tree/master/srv

[douglascoding]

> * Wireguard VPN (not running in a container, obviously).

I plan to use Wireguard too, so I shouldn't run on containers? Can you elaborate on that?

[mwcampbell]

> It also acts as an NFS server for my media center [...] to pull videos, music, and audiobooks from.

This is a bit tangential, but to clarify, do you mean that you listen to audiobooks on your TV using Kodi? Do you also have a way of syncing them to a more portable device, like your phone?

[sdan]

I host a bunch of docker containers plus Traefik to route everything. It runs on a cheap GCP instance (more on this here: https://sdan.xyz/sd2)

Overleaf: https://sdan.xyz/latex

A URL Shortener: https://sdan.xyz

All my websites (https://sdan.xyz/drf, https://sdan.xyz/surya, etc.)

My blog(s) (https://sdan.xyz/blog, https://sdan.xyz/essays)

Commento commenting server (I don't like disqus)

Monitoring (https://sdan.xyz/monitoring, etc.)

Analytics (using Fathom Analytics) and some more stuff!

[djsumdog]

I run netdata too, but I keep that behind my VPN. I'd suggest the same for you. No reason to have that exposed to the entire world.

I wrote this to setup my web server, mail server and VPN server, and auto-generate all my VPN keys.

https://github.com/sumdog/bee2

[RulerOf]

It’s a relatively popular choice but I’ll ask you about it...

I see a lot of people putting their home stuff behind CloudFlare, but when I reviewed their free tier, I didn’t actually see any security benefit to outweigh the privacy loss, and I didn’t see that covered on your blog post.

[whalesalad]

Bums me out when I see people putting so many resources into running/building elaborate piracy machines. Plex, radarr, sonarr, etc... (you note some of these services but /r/homelab is notorious for this)

Here’s my home lab: https://imgur.com/a/aOAmGq8

I don’t self host anything of value. It’s not cost effective and network performance isn’t the best. Google handles my mail. GitHub can’t be beat. I use Trello and Notion for tracking knowledge and work, whether personal or professional. Anything else is on AWS. I do have a VPN though so I can access all of this when I’m not home.

The NAS is for backing up critical data. R720 was bought to experiment with Amazon Firecracker. It’s usually off at this point. Was running ESXI, now running Windows Server evaluation.

The desktop on the left is the new toy. I’m learning AD and immersing myself 100% in the Microsoft stack. Currently getting an idiomatic hybrid local/azure/o365 setup going. The worst part about planning a MS deployment is having to account for software licensing that is done on a per-cpu-core basis.

[Marsymars]

It bums me out when I see corporations putting so many resources into monopolizing copyright and preventing media from entering the public domain, which leads to consumers putting resources into purchasing media that would otherwise be in the public domain.

The status quo is radically anti-consumer, IMO, as radical as abolition of all copyright would be.

[LeoPanthera]

I use Plex. It virtually exclusively contains rips of blu-rays and DVDs that I have bought. I do not consider this piracy. I do not think format shifting is unethical. I do think DRM is unethical.

[tbyehl]

In colo:

  nginx
  Plex
  Radarr / Sonarr / SABnzbd / qBittorrent / ZeroTier -> online.net server
  FreeNAS x2
  Active Directory

At home:

  nginx
  vCenter
  urbackup
  UniFi SDN, Protect
  Portainer / unms / Bitwarden
  Wordpress (isolated)
  Guacamole
  PiHole
  InfluxDB / grafana
  Active Directory
  Windows 10 VM for Java things
  L2TP on my router

Everything I expose to the world goes through CloudFlare and nginx with Authenticated Origin Pulls [0], firewalled to CF's IPs [1], and forced SSL using CF's self-signed certs. I'm invisible to Shodan / port scans.

Have been meaning to move more to colo, especially my Wordpress install and some Wordpress.com-hosted sites, but inertia.

[0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/204899617-A...

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/

[NewDimension]

Do you have a static IP at home? How does your cloudflare setup work?

[Pmop]

Wait. What? Windows VM for Java?

[zelly]

SSH: for git and tunneling literally everything: VNC, sftp, Emacs server, tmux, ....

Docker running random stuff

Used to run Pihole until I got an Android and rooted it. Used to mess with WebDAV and CalDAV. Nextcloud is a mess; plain SFTP fuse mounts work better for me. My approach has gone from trying to replicate cloud services to straight up remoting over SSH (VNC or terminal/mosh depending connectivity) to my home computer when I want to do something. It's simple and near unexploitable.

This is the way it should always have been done from the start of the internet. When you want to edit your calendar, for example, you should be able to do it on your phone/laptop/whatever as a proxy to your home computer, actually locking the file on your home computer. Instead we got the prolifetation of cloud SaaSes to compensate for this. For every program on your computer, you now need >1 analogous but incompatible program for every other device you use. Your watch needs a different calendar program than your gaming PC than your smart fridge, but you want a calendar on all of them. M×N programs where you could have just N, those on your home computer, if you could remote easily. (Really it's one dimension more than M×N when you consider all the backend services behind every SaaS app. What a waste of human effort and compute.)

[dmos62]

I sympathize. My meditations about this lead me to thinking about waste as well.

Why computer at home though? For someone who moves around a lot and doesn't invest into "a home", this would be bothersome. Not to mention it's more expensive, in terms of energy and money. I think third-party data centers are fine for self-hosting.

[oarsinsync]

I like to be able to view and edit my calendar when I’m offline. This is remarkably often, regardless of whether I’m in London (UK), New York (USA), or some other country entirely.

[ricardbejarano]

On my home server (refurbished ThinkPad X201 with a Core i5-520M, 8GB of memory, 1TB internal SSD sync'd nightly to an external 1TB HDD) I run a single-node Kubernetes cluster with the following stuff:

* MinIO: for access to my storage over the S3 API, I use it with restic for device backups and to share files with friends and family

* CoreDNS: DNS cache with blacklisted domains (like Pihole), gives DNS-over-TLS to the home network and to my phone when I'm outside

* A backup of my S3-hosted sites, just in case (bejarano.io, blog.bejarano.io, mta-sts.bejarano.io and prefers-color-scheme.bejarano.io)

* https://ideas.bejarano.io, a simple "pick-one-at-random" site for 20,000 startup ideas (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21112345)

* MediaWiki instance for systems administration stuff

* An internal (only accessible from my home network) picture gallery for family pictures

* TeamSpeak server

* Cron jobs: dynamic DNS, updating the domain blacklist nightly, recursively checking my websites for broken links, keeping an eye on any new release of a bunch of software packages I use

* Prometheus stack + a bunch of exporters for all the stuff above

* IPsec/L2TP VPN for remote access to internal services (picture gallery and Prometheus)

* And a bunch of internal Kubernetes stuff for monitoring and such

I still have to figure out log aggregation (probably going to use fluentd), I want to add some web-based automation framework like NodeRED or n8n.io for random stuff. I'd also like to host some password manager but I still have to study that.

I also plan on rewriting wormhol.org into supporting any S3 backend, so that I can bind it's storage with MinIO.

And finally, I'd like to move off single-disk storage and get a decent RAID solution to provide NFS for my cluster, as well as a couple more nodes to add redundancy and more compute.

Edit: formatting.

[whycombagator]

> * CoreDNS: DNS cache with blacklisted domains (like Pihole), gives DNS-over-TLS to the home network and to my phone when I'm outside

I would be _very_ interested in a write up/explanation of this set up

[devthane]

You might take a look at https://github.com/grafana/loki if you haven’t seen it yet for logs. It’s still really new but it’s been working for me great.

[itm]

I eat my own food:

https://github.com/epoupon/lms for music

https://github.com/epoupon/fileshelter to share files

Eveything is packaged on debian buster (amd64 and armhf) and run behind a reverse proxy.

[djsumdog]

Huh, interesting. I usually have full copies of my music collection where I need them (512gb microsd in my phone and on the work laptop) but it would be nice to just have a web interface if I'm at someone's house or so they can play off their phone. I think I was using subsonic until they changed all their licensing.

One UI question? Is there a reason you left off volume controls? That's something that always annoys me still about Bandcamp and I had submitted a patch to Mastodon to create a volume control for their video component.

[EvanAnderson]

Both of those projects look great! I could definitely see using both of them. I've been thinking about writing something similar to lms for awhile now.

[kstenerud]

Everything I run is in a deterministic, rebuildable LXC container or KVM virtual machine.

I have around 10 desktops that run in containers in various places for various common tasks I do. Each one has a backed up homedir, and then I have a ZFS-backed fileserver for centralized data. I connect to them using chrome remote desktop or x2go. I've had my work machine die one time too many, so with these scripts I can go from a blank work machine to exactly where I left off before the old one died, in a little over an hour. None of my files are stuck to a particular machine, so I can run on a home server, and then when I need to travel, transfer the desktop to a laptop, then transfer it back again when I get home. Takes about 10 minutes to transfer it.

https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

I also run most of my server apps this way:

https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders/tree/master/ma...

[letstrynvm]

I have a cheap dedicated server with outgoing Postfix mail forwarding with sasl auth, nsd for the domains, a few web services over tls. Git server via gitolite + git-daemon. Mailman.

Incoming mail points directly to an RPi at home on dsl... Postfix + Dovecot IMAP. It's externally accessible, my dedicated server does the dynamic dns to point to the RPi; the domain MX points to that. Outgoing mail forwards through the dedicated server, which has an IP with good reputation and DKIM.

This gets me a nice result that my current and historical email is delivered directly to, and stays at, home, and my outgoing mail is still universally accepted. There's no dependency on google or github. There's no virtualization, no docker, no containers, just Linux on the server and on the rpi to keep up to date. It uses OS packages for everything so it stays up to date with security updates.

[rolleiflex]

I’m pretty vanilla compared to most people here, I just host my own email and I have a Synology box that provides a few utilities like an Evernote replacement.

I also host Aether P2P (https://getaether.net) on a Raspberry Pi-like device, so it helps the P2P network. But I’m biased on that last one, it’s my own software.

[thegeekbin]

I changed my hardware around recently, I used to have 5u colo that I’ve now downsized for financial reasons, I migrated all into one box called Poof, on poof I’m running:

    - matrix home server
    - xmpp server
    - websites for wife and I (Cloudlinux, Plesk, Imunify360)
    - nextcloud
    - jellyfin + jackett + sonarr + radarr
    - rutorrent
    - CDN origin server (bunnycdn pulls files from this)
    - znc bouncer
    - freeipa server
    - Portainer with pihole, Prometheus, grafana and some microservices on them
    - Gitea server
    - spare web server I use as staging environment

All of this is behind a firewall, I’ve been fortunate enough I’ve got /27 assigned to me, so more than enough IP addresses available to me, I’m using all but about 5 or 6 of them, but plan to change that soon. I’m going to be assigning dedicated IPs to every site I host (3 total), put my XMPP server on its own vm instead of sharing it with Matrix and giving it its own IP.

I blog about this stuff if anyone’s interested: https://thegeekbin.com/

[Youden]

I used to have things in a colo but now I have fiber at home, just about everything is on a single giant machine, complete with graphics card for a gaming VM:

  VM management: libvirt (used to host gaming PC and financial applications)
  Container management: Docker (used to be k8s but gave up)
  Photo gallery: Koken, Piwigo, Lychee
  Media acquisition: Radarr, Sonarr, NZBGet, NZBHydra
  Media access: Plex
  Monitoring: InfluxDB, Grafana, cAdvisor, Piwik, SmartD, SmokePing, Prometheus
  Remote data access: Nextcloud
  Local data access: Samba, NFS
  Data sync: Syncthing
  WireGuard
  Unifi server
  IRC: irssi, WeeChat, Glowing Bear, Sopel (runs a few bots)
  Finance: beancount-import, fava
  Chat: Riot, Synapse (both Matrix)
  Databases: Postgres, MariaDB, Redis
  Speed test: IPerf3

I also have a seedbox for high-bandwidth applications.

[h1d]

Just an advice but I suggest you host publicly facing services and privately hosted services on different instances.

You don't want less tested web app to expose some security hole for someone to start snooping on your traffic toward BitWarden after SSL termination.

If you don't want an extra box at home, you can always get a $5/mo cloud instance for public stuff, where you don't have to worry about increased electricity bill from DDoS having CPU spiked or choking your home network.

[DominoTree]

I self-host a fairly big Plex and several personal websites along with a NextCloud instance to sync calendars/reminders/etc across devices. Pretty much everything forward-facing is behind CloudFlare.

On the front end I have two 1Gbit circuits (AT&T and Google) going into an OPNSense instance doing load-balancing and IPS running on a Dell R320 with a 12-thread Xeon and 24GB of RAM

Services are hosted on a Dell R520 with 48GB RAM and two 12-thread Xeons running Ubuntu and an up-to-date ZFS on Linux build.

Media storage handled by two Dell PowerVault 1200 SAS arrays.

Back-end is handled by a Cisco 5548UP and my whole apartment is plumbed for 10Gbit.

[Havoc]

>On the front end I have two 1Gbit circuits (AT&T and Google)

Holy hell. How did that come about?

[menssen]

Nothing. I self-host nothing. My entire home networking infrastructure consists of a more powerful WiFi router than the one built into the modem that the cable company provides so that it reaches to the back of my apartment. I pay money for GitHub, Dropbox, iCloud, Apple Music, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, a VPN to spoof my location occasionally, and Google Apps (or I would, if I were not grandfathered into the free tier). When I want to spin up a personal project, I do it on Heroku.

I live in a stable first-world democracy. Or, since it seems to be getting less stable recently, maybe a better way to put it is: I participate in a stable global economy. If "the cloud" catastrophically fails to the point where I lose all of the above without warning, I will likely have bigger problems than never being able to watch a favorite tv show again.

I wonder if this exposes two kinds of people: those who value mobility, and are more comfortable limiting the things that are important to them to a laptop and a bug-out bag, and those who value stability, and are inclined to build self-sufficient infrastructure in their castles.

[elagost]

There's a third kind of person - one who doesn't want their personal data beholden to a bunch of faceless for-profit companies who have proven they care less about security and privacy than they do about money.

I don't self host a lot of services (and the ones that do could go away tomorrow without hurting me much) but I only have one cloud resource - email. It kind of has to be that way for various reasons; I'd self host if I could reasonably do so. I also think I value my $75/mo more than I value an endless stream of entertainment.

(edit: just wanted to say, thanks for posting this. It is a valuable discussion point.)

[olalonde]

I recently installed docker-simple-mail-forwarder[0] to use a custom domain name email with Gmail. It's a one line install.

[0] https://github.com/huan/docker-simple-mail-forwarder

[folkhack]

I'll bite because I love threads like this! I run an Intel NUC with an i5, 8G RAM, a OS SSD, and an external USB3 4TB RAID attached. OS is Debian 9. I've always ran a "general utility" Debian server at home due to projects and SSH tunneling (yeah yeah I should setup a proper VPN I know ha).

* It's a target for my rsync backups for all my client systems (most critical use); Docker TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) which monitors my rackmount APC UPS, my Ubiquiti network hardware, Docker, and just general system stats; Docker Plex; Docker Transmission w/VPN; Docker Unifi; A custom network monitor I built that just pings/netcats certain internal and external hosts (not used too seriously but it comes in handy); and finally a neglected Minecraft server.

I went for low power consumption since it's an always-on device and power comes at a premium here + fanless. I highly suggest the NUC as it's a highly capable device and with plenty of power if upgraded a bit!

[ekianjo]

I guess this is a recent i5? In case you want a low consumption alternative, an older Celeron-based NUC is also a very capable machine (much better than a Raspberry Pi 4 for about the same price used nowadays) and remains idle at a few dozens of watts.

[kissgyorgy]

Wallabag! It changed my reading habits: https://wallabag.org/en

[mackrevinack]

ive been eyeing that up for quite a while now. being able to it run on an eink reader seems like a great idea. ive set up the email-an-article-to-your-kindle thing a few years ago but it's still too much effort.

[yankcrime]

In colo (a former nuclear bunker, no less!) I have a small OpenStack 'cloud' deployment cobbled together from spare hardware, pieced together in partnership with a friend of mine. I wrote a bit about it here if anyone's interested:

https://dischord.org/2019/07/23/inside-the-sausage-factory/

At home I have:

  A Synology DS412+ with 4 x 4TB drives
  An ancient HP Microserver N36L with 16GB RAM and 4 x 4TB drives running FreeBSD
  Ubiqiuti UniFi SG + CloudKey + AP
  An OG Pi running PiHole

The DS412+ is my main network storage device, with various things backed up to the Microserver. Aside from the OEM services it also runs Minio (I use this for local backups from Arq), nzbget, and Syncthing in Docker containers.

[Mister_Snuggles]

At home I have:

FreeBSD server running various things:

* Home Assistant, Node-RED, and some other home automation utilities running in a FreeBSD Jail.

* UniFi controller in a Debian VM.

* Pi-Hole in a CentOS VM.

* StrongSwan in a FreeBSD VM.

* ElasticSearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Grafana running in a Debian VM.

* PostgreSQL on bare metal.

* Nginx on bare metal, this acts as a front-end to all of my applications.

I also have:

* Blue Iris on a dedicated Windows box. This was a refurbished business desktop and works well, but my needs are starting to outgrow it.

* A QNAP NAS for general storage needs.

Future plans are always interesting, so in that vein here are my future plans:

Short term:

* Move my home automation stuff out of the FreeBSD Jail into a Linux VM. The entire Home Assistant ecosystem is fairly Linux-centric and even though it works on FreeBSD, it's more pain than I'd really like. Managing VMs is also somewhat easier than managing Jails, though I'm sure part of this is that I'm using ezjail instead of something more modern like iocage.

* Get Mayan-EDMS up and running. I hate paper files, this will be a good way to wrangle all of them. I've used it before, but didn't get too deep into it. This time I'm going all-in.

Medium term:

* Replace my older cameras with newer models.

* Possibly upgrade my Blue Iris machine to a more powerful refurbished one.

* Create a 'container VM', which will basically be a Linux VM used for me to learn about containers.

Long term:

* Replace my FreeBSD server with new hardware running a proper hypervisor (e.g., Proxmox, VMware ESXi). This plan is nebulous as what I have meets my needs, this is more about learning new tools and ways of doing things.

[boredpenguin]

Currently not much. On the home server:

• Apache: hosting a few websites and a personal (private) wiki.

• Transmission: well, as an always-on torrent client. Usually I add a torrent here, wait for it to download and then transfer it via SFTP to my laptop.

• Gitea: mostly to mirror third party repos I need or find useful.

• Wireguard: as a VPN server for all my devices and VPS, mostly so I don't need to expose SSH to the internet. Was really easy to setup and it's been painless so far.

[0x0aff374668]

Why are so many folks here running media servers? Are you really streaming your own video / audio libraries, or is there something else it is useful for? I'd be rather shocked to learn people still store digitally media locally.

[stiray]

I am a bit old school but this fills all my needs.

- httpd

- nextcloud (mostly for android syncing, for normal file operations I prefer sftp). Nextcloud is great but the whole js/html/browser is clumsy.

- roundcube (again mostly imap but just to have alternative when phone isnt available - I havent used it for ages)

- postfix

- dovecot

- squid on separate fib with paid vpn (mitming all the traffic, removing all internet "junk" from my connections, all my devices, including android are using it over ssh tunnel).

- transmission, donating my bandwidth to some OSS projects

- gitolite, all my code goes there

I think this is it.

Everything is running on mitx board, with 16gb of ram, 3x 3tb toshiba hdds in zraid and additional 10tb hitachi disk. FreeBSD. 33 watts.

[jasonkester]

S3stat, Twiddla, Unwaffle, the Expat site, and a dozen other old projects all still run on a single box in a Colo.

it costs about $800/month for the half cage and all the hardware in it, when you amortise it out. And there's plenty of performance overhead for when one project gets a lot of attention or I want to ad something new.

Pretty much the only thing I use cloud computing for is the nightly job for S3stat, because it fits the workload pattern that EC2 was designed for. Namely, it needs to run 70 odd hours of computing every day, and gets 3 hours to do it in.

For SaaS sized web stuff, self hosting still makes the most sense.

[kemenaran]

I like self hosting, but I want it to work without having to do sysadmin work. Especially the upgrades–most hosting providers will have one-click tools to install self hosted instances of something; but very few have working upgrade scripts to keep up with the new versions.

So I set up Yunohost [0] on a small box, and now I install self hosted services whenever I need them. Installing a new service is a breeze–but more importantly, upgrading them is a breeze to.

For now I self host Mattermost, Nextcloud, Transmission.

[0] https://yunohost.org

[hendry]

FreeNAS + voidlinux nuc running grafana + prometheus.

Tbh I run hot and cold about self hosting since after work, I really really want to be able relax at home.

Not wonder why the hell my nuc hasn't come up after a reboot. Or why is it so hard to increase the disk space on my FreeNAS https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/upgrading-storag...

[dcchambers]

A household wiki. Contains all kinds of information about our house and lives. We used to track stuff like this in a google doc but it was getting unwieldy.

I wasn't happy with any of the free wiki hosting solutions available so I ended up self-hosting a mediawiki site. It's been...challenging...to convince my wife and family to adapt and use wiki markup.

I've been considering switching to something that uses standard markdown instead since it's easier to write with.

[Jaruzel]

Hyper-V host:

    Active Directory (x2)
    Exchange Server 2013
    MS SQL 
    Various Single Purpose VMs providing automation
    Debian for SpamAssassion
    Debian for my web domains
    Custom SMTP MTA thats in front of SpamAssassin and Exchange

Raspberry Pis:

    TVHeadEnd
    Remote Cameras

Plus a Windows Server hosting all my files/media.

I used to self-host a lot more, but have been paring back recently.

[canada_dry]

Calendar: (https://radicale.org)

Home automation/security system + 'Alexa': completely home grown using python + android + arduino + rpi + esp32

[dnate]

I self host a flask app on my raspberry pi, soldered to the garage door opener.

I have hosted media folders/streaming applications for friends and family, but this has been by far my most used and most useful hack.

[Macha]

So far I have a home server with:

* Unbound for dns-over-tls and single point of config hostnames for my home network

* Syncthing for file sync

* offlineimap to backup my email accounts

* Samba for a home media library

* cron jobs to backup my shares

* Unifi controller

On my todo list:

* Scheduled offsite backup (borg + rsync.net being the top contender currently)

* Something a bit more dedicated to media streaming than smb. some clients like vlc handle it fine, others do not.

* Pull logs for my various websites locally

[vermilingua]

On a bit of a tangent, hopefully not an inappropriate question:

What do you all spend on this sort of thing? Whether hosting remotely or on local hardware, what would you say is the rough monthly/annual cost to move your Netflix/Spotify/etc equiv to a self-hosted setup (excluding own labor)?

[chrissnell]

At home, I run:

- A weather station that lives on a pole on the yard. Powered by GopherWX https://github.com/chrissnell/gopherwx

- InfluxDB for weather station

- Heatermeter Barbecue controller

- oauth2_proxy, fronted by Okta, to securely access the BBQ controller while I'm away. This proxy is something that everyone with applications hosted on their home network should look into. Combined with Okta, it's much easier than running VPN.

In the public cloud, I host nginx, which runs a gRPC proxy to the gopherwx at home. I wrote an app to stream live weather from my home station to my desktops and laptops and show it in a toolbar.

nginx in the cloud also hosts a public website displaying my live weather, pulled as JSON over HTTPS from gopherwx at home.

[ohiovr]

I'm testing some self hosted apps including Nginx reverse proxy with letsencrypt, nextcloud with either onlyoffice document server or collabora, onlyoffice community server with mail, gitea, lychee, osclass, guacamole, wireguard vpn, searx, and a few others.

[dmclamb]

Boring and predictable, but openvpn and pihole on a raspberry pi.

I have a second raspberry pi running a version of Kali Linux. I only hack my own stuff for learning.

Once upon a time I ran a public facing website and quake server, and published player stats. No time these days for much play.

[zzo38computer]

On my computer I host HTTP (with Apache), SMTP (with Exim), NNTP (with sqlnetnews), QOTD (TCP only, no UDP), and Gopher. I might add others later, too (e.g. IRC, Viewdata, Telnet, Finger, etc). And on the HTTP server I host several Fossil repositories.

[geek_at]

Open Trashmail so I can use throwaway emails with my own (sub)domains and keep my data private

https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/opentrashmail

[hanklazard]

- raspi running pi-hole - synology NAS for storage and backups, and it runs an Ubuntu VM for a wireguard vpn server - for music, Volumio on a raspi as a server with snapcast; 4 other amped raspi’s with speakers in other parts of the house as clients, synced up via snapcast (check out hifiberry amp if you’re interested in this sort of thing) - an older Mac mini now running an Ubuntu server with hassio virtualized. Lights, hvac, music controls, etc, controlled through hassio front end - print server on a pi zero

(I guess these may not really be “self-hosted” since I don’t make them publically accessible through ports ... just vpn in to my home network)

[yogsototh]

On a scaleway (about 20€/month):

- my websites with nginx

- IRC (ngircd)

- ZNC

- espial for bookmarks and notes

- node-red to automate RSS -> twitter and espial -> pinboard

- transmission

- some reddit bots manager I’ve written in Haskell+Purescript.

- some private file upload system mostly to share images in IRC in our team

- goaccess to self host privacy respecting analytics

At home, Plex.

[moutansos]

Raspberry PI 3: OpenVPN Dell Poweredge R720 running VMware ESXi With - Ubuntu Docker Host - - Plex - - Blog Site - - TeamCity - - Minecraft Servers (Java and Bedrock) - - Gitlab - - ElasticSearch - - Kibana - - Resilio Sync - - PostgreSql - Manjaro Linux VM - Windows Server 2019 VM - 3 Node Kubernetes Cluster - - Couple of Side Projects Running on It

Basically all the stuff I don't want to pay a cloud provider to host.

Overall the R720 with 48GB of ram has been one of my best buys hands down. down the road I plan on grabbing a second server and a proper NAS or unraid setup.

[nilsandrey]

- Syncthing (folders across devices)

- docker (just dev env with a lot of images, almost everything I can is tested in there, and maybe used there too. Just on VM if is a desktop gadget or app)

  - generic web

  - some stacks, Rails, nodejs, php.
 
 - ...

- Calibre

- Windows Media share feature for remote videos on devices and TV (, don't like it really, mess with subtitles and really will look for a docker oss alternative)

Wish list:

- wallabag

- firefox-sync (stuck on Chrome yet, no alternative on this found)

- email sync

It's not so great for now. Looking on this thread for contacts and calendar (currently used from the cloud classic providers)

[ehnto]

Edit: sorry, I misunderstood the question. The below is referring to software development.

Everything. I keep infrastructure simple as I found as a developer, infrastructure configuration, dependency issues and updates took an extraordinary amount of time while providing zero benefit for products of a small to medium size. I do have a plan in place should I need to scale, but it is not worth maintaining an entirely different stack full of dependencies for the off chance I get a burst in traffic I can't handle.

[notinventedhear]

# 2GB linode instance ($10/month)

  nginx
  mailinabox (email, nextcloud)
  gogs
  6 static websites
  3 (dumb) little personal web-projects
  selfoss
  mumble
  openvpn

# rpi-3 at home

  osmc (kodi) + 8TB of raided HDDs
  nginx
  chorus-2 in kodi publicly available (behind htpasswd) updated w/ dynamic DNS
  a nightly cron job rsyncs the from the linode instance

# another rpi-3 in garden shed

  8TB of raided HDDs
  nightly cron of the other rpi-3

[k_sze]

On a Linode instance (OS being Ubuntu Server 18.04):

- mail server in Docker container

- ZNC in Docker container

- Shadowsocks server

- Wekan as a Snap

- My blog, statically generated using Pelican, served from nginx

At home, I only have a Synology NAS that is exposed to the internet.

[munmaek]

On my FreeNAS server: gitea, plex, openvpn (w/ ExpressVpn), Mayan EDMS

I am unhappy with the complexity of Mayan EDMS. I'm debating moving to Paperless. All I want is a digital file system that 1) looks at directories and automatically handles files 2) has user permissions/personal files so I can let my family use it 3) has a web form for uploads.

I am planning to change gitea to sourcehut- the git service as well as builds.

Any ideas for things a raspberry pi 3 & 4 could be useful for?

[Fiahil]

Like most folks here, I'm running the pihole/media/torrent suite. Hardware is a Rock64 soon to be colocated with a few Raspberry pi 4. Everything is dockerized and scheduled on k3s. Using kubernetes is a real life changer. I can unplug one of the SBCs and things are automatically balanced and rescheduled. It also makes the whole setup completely portable.

I use NFS on the NAS for the storage unit. It's the only thing I need to backup.

[bob1029]

Nothing right now, but I am looking at spinning my own stack back up either "on-prem" (aka at home), and/or in some bare-metal hosting provider.

Relying on streaming providers, cloud email services, etc., has left me in a very foul mood lately and I feel like I need to take back control. My biggest trigger was when I purchased an actual physical audio CD (this year; because NONE of the popular streaming providers offer the album), ripped it to FLAC, and then realized I had no reliable/convenient way to expose this to my personal devices. I used to have a very elaborate setup with subsonic doing music hosting duty, and all of my personal devices were looped in on it. This was vastly superior to Spotify, et. al., but the time it takes to maintain the collection and services was perceived to be not worth it. From where I am sitting now, its looking like its worth it again.

How long until media we used to enjoy is squeezed completely out of existence because a handful of incumbent providers feel its no longer "appropriate" for whatever money-grabbing reasons?

[kixiQu]

I selfhost stuff for fun! Which I'm counting my EC2 instance as.

* Pleroma/Mastodon - I had been using Pleroma, but I'm not happy about a few things, so I bit the bullet to upgrade to a t3.small and am now running Mastodon. I love all the concepts of the fediverse, though the social norms are still being ironed out.

* Write Freely (https://writefreely.org/) at https://lesser.occult.institute for my blog (right now mostly holds hidden drafts)

* Matrix (Synapse) and the Riot.im frontend for a group chat. I'm a little conflicted, because right now the experience around enabling E2EE is very alarming for low-tech users and a pain for anyone who signs in from many places, and if it isn't enabled I have better security just messaging my friends with LINE. That said, I really want to write some bots for it. Group chats are the future of social networking, they all say...

[greenyouse]

I'm just starting out with building a virtual workstation system for myself with Eclipse Che. My home desktop has always been much more powerful than my laptop so I've always thought it would be ideal to have mainframe style development. I learned about Che 7 this week and figured that it was worth a shot. Using containers for everything sounds like an interesting idea to try out too!

Surprisingly (at least to me), there are some really big companies like Microsoft, IBM/RedHat, and others pushing this workflow. The editor is supposed to basically be VSCode in browser and compatible with most extensions.

I'm using my RPi as a jump box and have some commands to turn on my home desktop + mount the file system and that kind of stuff when connecting. I've used it in the past and it's worked nicely.

I got k8s running but got blocked by some bugs when installing Che. Looks neat though. It would be cool to have a 2007 macbook with the computing power of a 2990WX workstation :).

[winrid]

I wrote my own orchestrator that I deploy my personal projects (pixmap, watch.ly, etc) with.

The orchestrator can now deploy itself! All declarative service configuration with autoscaling etc. It manages the infra and service deployment for me. Thinking about open sourcing.

Nginx/nchan, NodeJS, static sites (vanilla/angular/react deployments), nfs, MongoDB, Redis

[pjc50]

I used to host email and a blog. I even had a server in a rack on which I let people have shell accounts.

I still have the email domain, because it's easier to run it forever than migrate all the things you signed up for. But actually running my own email is too much of an obligation and need to keep up on all the anti spam measures.

[john61]

Freedombox, Apache, Exim4, prosody (XMPP), rsync, rsnapshot, ssh all on 2 identical, redundant, interchangeable Olimex A20 Mini Server with ssd (1 at home, 1 colo) and one more powerful x86 separate X2Go (Desktop usage) & File (sftp) Server at home. Everything on pure, plain Debian stable and unattended-upgrades.

[bluedino]

I bought a used Lenovo P50 for $450, added another SSD, it has 48GB and an i7 so it's overkill.

VMware ESXi, with VM's for Squid, DNS, MySQL, Nginx, Apache, basic file server, Gitlab, and one that's basically for IRSSI

Strongly considering just moving everything to Debian with containers for everything, easier to manage than VM's.

[minimaul]

As much as I can, currently:

On colo’d hardware:

- off-site backup server (Borg backup on top of zfs) - this is a dedicated box

- a mix of VMs and docker containers - mostly custom web apps

- email (it’s easier than you think)

At home:

- file server using zfs

- Nextcloud

- more custom web apps

- tvheadend

- VPN for remote access (IKEv2)

- gitlab

- gitlab ci

Also run an IPSec mesh between sites for secure remote access to servers etc

While my workplace uses AWS a massive amount, I still prefer to run my own hardware and software. Cloud services are not for me.

[fractalf]

Gitea for an easy gui git access to repos with personal/sensitive data and Resilio for backing up my phone

[harlanji]

I built a setup called TinyDataCenter on a RasPi and run it hybrid with AWS and S3FS for unlimited media storage. On it I built iSpooge Live to host and syndicate my livestreams to YouTube and Twitch, and built some ffmpeg scripts to turn videos into HLS and playback with adaptive rate via VidroJS. Also on it is my portfolio site and in progress are imported copies of all my social media archives like Twitter and IG. Auth happens via JWTs from Auth0 but I’ve an email magic link system to bolt in soon. There’s an xmpp server that isn’t integrated yet. Email is hosted 3rd party but I may try email in a box. The theme is decentralized with syndication. This has been going on and live streamed to regularly for about 2 years. All mybdcripts are open source, same username on GitHub.

[mmcnl]

Besides some self-hosted applications, this is some stuff that is very useful to me:

* Nextcloud - your own Dropbox! Amazing stuff.

* VPN - simple Docker service that is super reliable and easy to set up (docker-ipsec-vpn-server)

* Ghost - a very nice lean and mean blogging CMS

* MQTT broker for temperature sensors

* Samba server

* Deluge - Torrent client for local use

* Sabnzbd - NZB client

* Gitea - my own Git server

* Mail forwarder - very handy if you just want to be able to receive email on certain addresses without setting up a mailbox

* Pihole - DNS ad-blocking

* Jellyfin - self-hosted Netflix

It's become sort of my hobby to self-host these kind of things. I use all of these services almost daily and it's very rewarding to be able to fully self-host it. I also really love Docker, self-hosting truly entered a new era thanks to readily avaibable Docker images that make it very easy to experiment and run things in production without having to worry about breaking stuff.

[conradfr]

I actually self-host a Phoenix LiveView silly game at work on my MacBook Pro, I'm not sure you can self-host more than that ;) For the anecdote the devops tried to ddos it but the app was working like it wasn't flooded by requests.

Of course you can't even tell Macos to not suspend wifi or whatever if you close the lid while on battery so now I'm trying to move it to a Raspberry Pi 4 but I've got an obscure ssl error with OTP22 on it while querying an api, so I'm trying to debug that instead ... oh the joy.

All my side projects and some clients are hosted old school style in a dedicated servers. I do overpay because that's the same price and machine since 2013 and yet it's still way cheaper than any cloud offering, especially because of the hosted databases pricings.

[CarelessExpert]

At home:

TT-RSS + mercury-parser + rss-bridge + Wallabag to replace Feedly and Pocket.

Syncthing + restic + rclone and some home grown scripting for backups.

Motion + MotionEye for home security.

Deluge + flexget + OpenVPN + Transdroid.

Huginn + Gotify for automation and push notifications.

Apache for hosting content and reverse proxying.

Running on a NUC using a mix of qemu/kvm and docker containers.

[ekianjo]

many things:

- Nginx

- Nextcloud (with Calendar/Contacts on it)

- IRC client (thelounge)

- IRC server

- DLNA server

- Ampache server

- video and photo library thru NFS (locally only)

- OpenVPN

- Shiori for bookmarks

- Gitea for private projects

- Syncthing (to keep a folder synchronized across my devices)

- Jenkins

[Spivak]

Plex, Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Unifi, Pihole, OpenVPN, IPSec VPN, Gitea, OpenLDAP, Portainer, My Personal Site, Cloud Torrent, TTRSS, Grafana, Loki, FreeRADIUS, Kanboard, Dokuwiki, SMTP, Goitfy, php*Admin, Container Registry, Python registry, Matomo, PXE Server.

[Zash]

  * Email (postfix + dovecot)
  * XMPP (prosody + biboumi for IRC gateway)
  * Static websites
  * Mercurial code hosting (mercurial-server + hgweb)
  * File storage (sftp, mostly accessed via sshfs)

Some on a HP microserver somewhere, some on a VPS.

[gargron]

I don't host anything at home, but I think it still counts as self-hosting if you run an independent service. In that sense, I self-host Mastodon: https://mastodon.social

[platz]

For my bookmarks, I self-host Espial, an open-source, web-based bookmarking server. https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

[theshrike79]

Fastmail handles my mail, Newsblur for RSS, iCloud for calendar. My blog is hosted on Netlify.

The only things I host are either just hobbies or non-essentials:

At home: - Node-red for home automation - PiHole for ad filtering on the local network - Plex on my NAS for videos - A Raspi for reading my Ruuvitags and pushing the info to MQTT On Upcloud and DigitalOcean and a third place: - Unifi NVR (remote storage for security cameras) - Flexget + Deluge for torrents - InfluxDB + Grafana for visualizing all kinds of stuff I measure - Mosquitto for MQTT

[_b8r0]

Online:

- Nextcloud

- Mailu.io

- Huginn

- Gotify

- Airsonic

- Gitea

All on a dedicated box. Planning to add password sync, wallabag, syncthing a VPN and a few other features. Other boxes I have run various things from DNS to backup MXes and a WriteFreely instance on OpenBSD.

Internally I host a ton of stuff, mostly linked to a Plex instance.

[algaeontoast]

File server and plex, that’s about it. I have another server I’ll occasionally run a Kubernetes cluster on, otherwise I don’t really bother with self hosting - I hate dev ops shit for a reason...

[apple4ever]

In DO:

4 Ubuntu 16.04 servers:

- Nginx/PHP for Wordpress - MySQL - Redis - Mail

Planning to expand the the Nginx/PHP servers to at least two, and add load balancers. All certs are provided by an Ansible script using Lets Encrypt (yuck).

At home:

Proxmox running on two homebuilt AMD FX 8320 servers with 32GB each, with drives provided by FreeNAS on a homebuilt Supermicro server with about 10TB of usable space (on both HDDs and SSDs)

Ubuntu 16.04 Servers:

- 2x DNS - 2x DHCP - GitLab - Nagios - Grafana - InfluxDB - Redmine - Reposado - MySQL

Other:

- Sipecs

All set up via Ansible.

Next will set up a Kubernetes cluster (probably as far as I’ll get with containers).

[DrAwdeOccarim]

I host everything internal where if I need the resource I VPN in from outside. They all run on Raspberry Pis.

> Resilio Sync for iPhone pictures backups and "drop box" file access

> Transmission server

> SMB share of NAS to supply OSMC boxes on every TV

> Nighthawk N7000 running dd-wrt with a 500gb flash drive attached as storage for my Amcrest wifi cameras

> Edgerouter Lite running VPN server

> Hassbian for my zwave home automation stuff

> A pi with cheap speakers that I can log into and play a phone ringing sound so my wife will look at her phone!

[HellfireHD]

I wasn't going to post mine until I realized that I'm hosting some stuff that I haven't seen mentioned yet.

    Appveyor
    Gitea
    Graylog + Elastic Search
    Minecraft/Pixelmon
    Nodered
    ruTorrent
    Taiga
    Tiny Tiny RSS
    Ubooquity* 
    WikiJS
    Zulip (chat/IM)
    

*I hate it, but haven't found something better

Also, kudos to those brave souls who are running Tor exit nodes!

Edit: Forgot a bunch

[preid24]

Intel NUC7i5BNK with coreos running the following in a single node docker swarm:

  - Traefik (reverse proxy)
  - Git Annex
  - Gitea
  - Drone (CI)
  - Docker Registry
  - Clair (security scanning for docker images)
  - Selfoss (RSS reader)
  - Grafana / Prometheus / Alertmanager (overkill really)
  - A few custom applications...

Turris Omnia running transmission under lxc

[lostmsu]

I tried to host OwnCloud, but could not figure out how to make fully automatic updates to function (including host OS - e.g. Ubuntu).

Now I only host my own project: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/

Also regular Windows file sharing which I use for media server and backups.

Though I'd like to expand that. Maybe a hosted GitLab.