For me, it was PhotoPrism. I used to be an idiot, and used Google Photos as my gallery. I knew that it was terrible for privacy but was too lazy to do anything about it. When Google limited storage for free accounts, I started looking for alternatives. Tried out a lot of stuff, but ended up settling on PhotoPrism.
It does most things that I need, except for multiple user support (it’s there in the sponsored version now). It made me learn a bit about Docker. Eventually, I learned how to access it from outside of my home network over Cloudflare tunnel. I’m happy that I can send pics/albums to folks without sharing it to any third party. It’s as easy as sending a link.
Now I have around a dozen containers on a local mini pc, and a couple on a VPS. I still route most things through Cloudflare tunnels (lower latency), only the high bandwidth stuff like Jellyfin are routed through a wireguard tunnel through the VPS.
Anyway, how did you get into selfhosting? (The question is mostly meant for non-professionals. But if you’re a professional with something interesting to share, you’re welcome as well.)
Having own media library without having to use so many sub based services :)
- Privacy :)
Definitely started with Plex for me.
- Piracy :)
Piracy. I couldn’t live with 25%+ of my TV watching time being advertisements. Manually downloading episodes became too much trouble so I setup a Plex/sab/sonars/radarr config on a pi connected to a 4-bay external drive enclosure featuring refurbished HGST 2tb HDDs in an lvm raid-5 config.
Eventually I also substituted my radio with paid Spotify so about the only ads im served are product placements and billboards. Its amazing how much less you’ll spend without ads!
I avoid product placements using SponsorBlock and billboards by being a stubborn bastard who refuses to look at them.
Honestly? Probably boredom. Computer-related projects are addictive to me.
Haven’t ventured too far, but searxng was my first selfhosted service. It’s very easy, single container, no database.
A pihole. Given how much I’ve spent over the years on self hosting kit, few ‘cheap’ things have ended up costing me more than that first 30 quid raspberry pi
What do you spend on? For me, the only recurring expenditures are VPN, and VPS. I think I pay <$5 a month on all of it.
My home network is somewhat overkill ;p but so far, about £500 on compute to run VMs, >£1000 on a nas and various other offsite and local stoarage, a couple hundred quid on networking gear, and then the extra premium on smart home devices you pay for non-tracking versions of the hardware (e.g a ring video doorbell would have cost me £40 less than the reolink I ended up buying). I’ve also so far spent over £75 on smart light switches trying to find one that both works with home assistant and fits inside my really narrow back boxes without yet finding one that works, so the number is continuing to go up!
holy crap, that was … … … … 25 years ago???
I don’t honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I’d say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.
My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren’t always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem … and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn’t filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment … fix the typo and walk away slowly … wild west days!!
Heh, I did about same but on FreeBDS. Plus proxy server to share dialup connection around home.
Me too. I had a FreeBSD box that routed my dialup and ran a transparent caching squid proxy. Had a cronjob for scheduled downloads.
External? Apache and ftp. Once cable was available had an IPsec wan with a couple friends for file sharing and “lan” gaming. Used samba to span the subnets into a big windows workgroup called “biggroup”.
I used to tinker with php alot back then. Made sense to run my own web server.
Damn. I’m 25 years old lol.
1TB hard drives were on sale, and I wanted to digitize all my DVDs and stream them to my Xbox 360. That was 15 years ago.
Probably Apache? I’ve been running web servers since the early 2000’s.
Yeah. Probably Apache. Can’t remember what that I was doing, but it almost certainly ran on Apache, and I almost certainly spent 90% of my energy configuring Apache.
XAMPP? I started with that in Secondary School (equivalent to high school)
I was probably running some weird little Python web CGI dice roller or some such. I spent a lot of time teaching myself the HTTP stack the unnecessarily hard way, lol.
At the beginning of the pandemic I looked into ways to de-Google and found Nextcloud. It wasn’t the easiest thing to start with, especially for a novice, but I had the time and the hardware, and I’m the type to not mind jumping into something difficult if it means solving a specific problem. I then found out about Bitwarden and had a great experience setting that up. After that I was confident enough to try hosting anything I could find. It’s been good times ever since 😀
Plex, then Jellyfin, then it snowballed out of control.
2003 I had a custom built full ATX tower with some parts from work running RAID for disk storage, and three cable capture cards. The box ran MythTV to record and serve shows DVR style to my modded Xbox that I had loaded XBMC on. From there I moved over to Plex for watching the recorded shows and ripped my DVD and VHS collection.
I guess it would’ve been a bulletting board system that people used a 14k modem to connect to, one at a time, and it would completely block the phone line.
My parents weren’t thrilled, but hey, we had a message board and LORD running there.
I loved LORD, I used to spend hours playing that and Trade Wars on a local BBS.
Hi, lurker here: what is/was LORD?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=siCOQ3nV3PA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Jeez, I had forgotten all about LORD! Thanks for bringing back such good memories! I used to play it all the time back in the good ol’ days.
I like to tinker with things, and I had hardware lying around I wasn’t using. First thing I ever self-hosted was very basic: a Terraria server.
Then a Minecraft server.
And then a fully featured and defederated Matrix server with a fully functional telegram bridge, mostly as a test to see how feasible it was. Ran it for several months before shutting it down, deciding to wait for dendrite, since it’s supposed to be lighter.
Haven’t done anything since, but I’ll be looking to build a few more things in the near future.
Of all the things I have or am self-hosting the Matrix server was the biggest pain in the ass. I seriously hope they streamline that process because as it was it’s too much work for what it does.
Home Assistant was the first thing I self hosted. It wasn’t until now with Lemmy though that I am hooked. I’m looking into hosting a Matrix instance next. I tried Mastodon but it’s resource needs were much higher than I needed for my usage. I may give it a try again sometime. Peertube is also on the list.
For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).
I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I’m back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.
oh nice. somebody else who’s done internet radio!
Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!
That’s awesome :)
I started by self-hosting an autoDJ to pipe music into Second Life, later did a weekly show on a tiny internet radio station for maybe 18 months … trying to make a name in order to get a DJ spot on-air at a local community radio station that was indie/alt-rock format at the time. Sadly my life took a turn and the community station changed hands and changed formats, but it was a cool experience nonetheless!
Awesome! Dang, Second Life… we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣
Off topic but could you explain a little on how you use a VPS to access your internal services? There’s a few services I want to open up but I don’t trust cloudflare and I don’t want to port forward.
Basically what the other guy said. I have a wireguard tunnel set up between my home server and the VPS, with persistent keepalive. The public domain name points to the VPS, then I have it set up (simply using iptables) so that any traffic there in port 80 and 443 is sent back to my honeserver and there it’s handled by nginx reverse proxy, and sent to jellyfin.
So, the only ports I need to open are 80 and 443 on my VPS to make this setup work.
