Selfhosted

My Self-Hosting Journey

I began my self-hosting journey in 2021 with the goal of hosting a game server for friends so they would not need to pay for external hosting. Through onsite IT work, I acquired several 6th and 8th generation i7 systems from companies that were downsizing or upgrading. After adding inexpensive NVMe storage and APC battery backups, the environment grew quickly.

What started as a single server eventually expanded to three dedicated game servers running 27/4, supporting up to 270 concurrent players at peak. These servers have been up for almost 4 years now.

Internet Connection

• ISP: Optimum Fiber (1 Gbps / 1 Gbps symmetrical) – $65/month
• ISP router configured in bridge mode if I return it they take away a discount.

Network Infrastructure

• Router: UDM Pro
• Switch: USW 16-Port PoE
• Access Point: AC Pro

Infrastructure Services

DNS Server

• Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM)
• DietPi OS
• Running Pi-hole for DNS filtering

Game Server Infrastructure

All game servers are connected to APC battery backups and maintain approximately 99% uptime, with downtime only occurring during scheduled maintenance. A custom watchdog script automatically restarts servers if a crash occurs.

• Game Server 1

  • i7 6th Gen
  • 24 GB RAM
  • 500 GB NVMe storage
  • Windows Server 2019

• Game Server 2

  • i7 8th Gen
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 500 GB NVMe storage
  • Windows Server 2019

• Game Server 3

  • i7 8th Gen
  • 28 GB RAM
  • 500 GB NVMe storage
  • Windows Server 2019

Virtualization / Homelab

Proxmox Server

• i7 12th Gen
• 40 GB RAM
• 1 TB NVMe storage
• External USB Media Drive – 22 TB (with backup)

Current Services

• Jellyfin – Replacing all commercial streaming services (currently LAN only, working on secure remote access)

Planned Additions

• NGINX – Reverse proxy for secure external access
• Apache Guacamole – Replace RemotePC for remote access
• Tailscale – Replace Surfshark for private networking
• Vaultwarden – Replace RoboForm for password management

If you think there are better options please let me know so I can do my research!

@devve

- Nextcloud
- Miniflux
- Gitlab
- HomeAssistant
- Wallabag
- Ghost (for my personal blog)
- Umami analytics
- Searx NG
- OnlyOffice document server
- ntfy
- Lychee
- LAMP Stack
- TheLounge (IRC web client)
- Cockpit (server manager)
- RSSHub
- Jellyfin
- Adguard

On an Intel NUC in my closet.

vSphere cluster on 3 HP Mini EliteDesks:

• 2x PiHole servers with local unbound resolver; synced with Gravity Sync
• 3x Active Directory DCs
• Homebridge Instance
• Jenkins Instance
• Portainer Instance Hosting:
  • Authelia
  • Code Server
  • CyberChef
  • Guacamole
  • NGINX Proxy Manager
  • PairDrop
  • SMEE Client
  • Your Spotify
  • Docker-SMTP
  • Vaultwarden
  • A couple of personal websites using NGINX
• Kubernetes (k3s) (3 Managers, 6 Workers) Hosting:
  • ArgoCD
  • AWX
  • Rook Ceph
  • Cloudflared
  • My main personal website using a container image built with Jenkins and deployed with ArgoCD.

Standalone Lenovo TS140:

• Plex (GTX 1650 Super for Transcoding)
• SABnzbd
• Radarr
• Sonarr
• Ombi
• Tautulli
• MP4 Automator
• Veeam B&R for backing up vSphere hosts.

Synology DS1821+:

• 64TB Raw, 2TB NVMe Cache
• MeTube
• Backup Sync to Google Drive

Misc:

• RIPE Atlas Probe
• All networking gear is Unifi. UDM Pro, USW Aggregation, USW Pro 48 PoE, U6 Pro, U6 In-Wall, 3 USW Flex Minis. 10G SFP+ connections between UDM Pro and switches.

Host all the things!

Wordpress, SMTP/IMAP, tor, bittorrent, Nextcloud, Plex, NTP, photo galleries, DoT...

I even started hosting the website for my local Italian restaurant and they haven't even realised it yet.

I have a used Lenovo Thinkcentre mini with an i3-7100T and 16gb RAM. I have Ubuntu server LTS installed on it and I run everything in docker containers.

I host:

• jellyfin server for my friends and family
• qbittorrent to download for the JF server(behind a VPN)
• Jellyseerr for requests
• Jackett, Sonarr, and Radarr for downloads
• a Minecraft server

Hello

Let's have a look at the inventory

• RPI 4B

  • OpenHab (Openhabian actually, so some additional services like Zigbee2MQTT or Grafana)

• HP EliteDesk 800 G2 i5-6500T, 8GiB RAM - this one is currently the mainstay of my lab, running containers with docker-compose

  • Nginx as reverse proxy (+ fail2ban, letsencrypt)
  • Paperless-ngx (+ Redis, Tika, Gotenberg)
  • Jellyfin
  • Minecraft server (+ Mapcrafter)
  • ddclient
  • Heimdall

• Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro i7-8700T 32GiB RAM

  • I've gotten this one fairly recently. A real bargain - costed as much as the CPU alone and was in pristine condition. I will be migrating the workload from EliteDesk to this one. I decided to try ProxMox this time though, so I need to learn a bit first. Also perhaps add a second SSD

I will go first 😌

I selfhost codimd, vaultwarden, kuma, immich, home assistant, trilium, hugo, gotify, wakapi and umami. I have one VPS and one custom built NAS at home.

I read you 👀🦎

I have been self hosting things for over 15 years. I now host on 7 computers. I'm proud of the fact that I stay under 100W idle, including 3 Omada WLAN APs and network technology (all via PoE and all is on a UPS). For most of the services i normally used the helper scripts. i'm currently in the process of moving everything to komodo. there should be an lxc for each service or service group, komodo pulls the compose files from gitea and deploys everything.

Proxmox pve0: M910x i5.7500 4x3,4GHz, 32 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe

• OPNSense (VM)
• Omada (LXC/komodo-server - control for 3 WLAN-APs)
• apt-cacher-ng (LXC/komodo-server - cache for debian-updates)
• searxng (LXC/komodo-server - my standard google-alternative)
• technitium (LXC/komodo-server - DNS, Adblock)
• nginx (LXC/komodo-server - own ssl-domain over cloudflare, no ports open to the www, my devices connect only via tailscale)

UNRAID-NAS - odroid h2+ Intel J4115 4x1,8 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 2x24GB HDD - fileserver)

Proxmox Backup Server (M90n-1: i5-8265U, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe, 2TB SSD)

Proxmox pve1 (M90n-1: i5-8265U, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe)

• bifrost (LXC/komodo-server - hue emulator)
• paperless (LXC/komodo-server - DMS)
• paperless-ai (LXC/komodo-server - tagging DMS)
• mosquitto (LXC/komodo-server - mqtt broker)
• zigbee2mqtt (LXC/komodo-server - mqtt-zigbee bridge)
• snowflake (LXC/komodo-server - tor relais)
• RaspberryMatic (VM - Homematic)

Proxmox pve2 (M90n-1: i5-8265U, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe)

• ghost (LXC comm-script, business soltion, wanna play around)
• hoarder (LXC/komodo-server - bookmarks with AI tagging)
• memos (LXC/komodo-server - notes - I play around)
• obsidian-sync (LXC/komodo-server - notes, but I hate the need of action for this)
• vaultwarden (LXC/komodo-server - password manager backup for my payed bitwarden instance)
• gitea (LXC/komodo-server - hoe to, IP-addresses, compose-files)
• komodo-management (LXC/komodo-server - komodo main-server to manage all the servers)
• firefly-iii (LXC/komodo-server - finance - I'm looking for an alternaticve for actualbudget )
• actual-budged (LXC/komodo-server - finance with AI tagging)
• investbrain (LXC/komodo-server - stock management, but only in USD, I wait for other currencies)

Proxmox pve3 (M920x: i7-8700, 64 GB RAM, 250 GB NVMe, 2 TB NVMe)

• ollama+open webui (LXC/komodo-server - AI)
• immich (LXC/komodo-server - photo backup for my ios-photos)
• iobroker (LXC/komodo-server - smarthome for some tricky scripts)
• home assistant (VM - smarthome - for UI, its stupid for scripts)
• nextcloud (LXC/alpine - Im using it for documents, but Im looking for an alternative)
• plex/jellyfin/management (LXC/komodo-server - multimedia)

*raspberry pi 5

• venus OS (solar/accu management software)

i'm happy to have found an entry point and an alternative to reddit here, even though my second post (question about suitable hardware with 32 answers) has already been deleted. hello everyone!

Proxmox on a self-built rackserver (Will be building a second one for a proxmox cluster):

• Pi-Hole (primary)
• Home Assistant
• 2 Docker Hosts (One for Eval, one for Prod)

Raspberry Pi Zero for Pi-Hole (secondary)

On my Docker Host (All in docker-compose):

• Heimdall (Personal Dashboard)
• Portainer (Docker GUI)
• baikal (CAL & CADdav)
• vaultwarden (Password Manager)
• bookstack (Documentation, kinda abandoned because im lazy)
• changedetection(.)io (Monitoring Websites for Changes, useful for changelogs or price monitoring)
• cloudflare-ddns (DDNS because dynamic IP Adresses...)
• Grafana & InfluxDB (Dashboard and Database for Stats)
• linkding (Bookmarks aka "Have to read someday")
• mealie (Reciepe manager)
• neko (Watch2gether but in selfhosted and more capable imo)
• nginx proxy manager (Reverse Proxy with GUI)
• paperless-ngx (Document manager with OCR)
• semaphore ui (Ansible GUI with sheduled tasks)
• Uptime Kuma (Status Monitoring)
• watchtower (Automatic updates of my docker containers because im lazy)

A Synology DS220+ for local Storage

A 5TB Hetzner Storage Box for Backups (encrypted)

A Rootserver for Games and some testing in the wild (Currently Windows, will be switched to ubuntu)

Hetzner Cloud Server with mailcow on it

Running Tipi on a five year old chrome box with tailscale as the VPN. Has been running great! Now I'm self hosting

1. Adguard: adblocking inside tailnet & for DNS rewrites
2. Barrage: Nice deluge UI
3. Beszel: Clean & simple server monitoring. I monitor two of my instances & the self hosted setup on this.
4. Beszel Agent: Agent for collecting data for Baszel
5. Deluge: Torrenting
6. Duplicati: Backups with a great UI
7. File Browser: for quick ops
8. Flowise AI: Great drag and drop LLM chat apps builder
9. Immich: The absolute best way to manage pictures
10. Jackett: For the arr stack
11. Jellyfin: Media streaming solution with apps on my phone, TV & laptops
12. Open WebUI: My default LLM chat client now, I no longer pay 20$ for chatGPT but just pay as I go with open webui and chatgpt api key
13. Radarr
14. Sonarr
15. Uptime Kuma: Uptime monitoring for everything
16. Wallos: Subscription management

Tipi is pretty awesome. If you haven't already, check it out!

I joined to learn, still not self-hosting anything, but I intend to use an 11yo Compaq laptop (i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD) as a server while I'm still practicing. I intend to self-host a lemmy instance and a nextcloud server.

Thanks for everything you guys have been sharing I've already got some good leads, gonna try out YunoHost for starters

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

[Thread #292 for this sub, first seen 21st Nov 2023, 13:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Hey all, I've been slowly building services on my server over many many years, starting with running a minecraft ftb server, to where I am now, which is 1 primary system(providing the network filesystem) and 2 auxiliary minipc systems my brother in law recently donated. I moved from Docker to Docker Swarm after getting those MiniPC's and enjoying the added compute. Currently my swarm is running:

• PiHole x2 - AdBlocking and Local DNS Management
• Wg-easy - for Wireguard VPN Management
• nginx - for reverse proxy servicing
• authentik - for Authentication and SSO
• Duplicati - for cloud backups(pointing at backblaze buckets)
• Guacamole - for RDP services
• Grafana+Prometheus+Node-Exporter+Cadvisor+AlertManager - for aggregation and system monitoring
• Gatus - single pane of glass monitoring of services(might remove it now that I've started using Grafana)
• diun - monitoring docker image versions and notification
• Bookstack - Personal Knowledge Base system
• Linkwarden - Collaborative Link Sharing and archiving
• Fasten Health - Local Health Records Storage
• SnipeIT - personal asset management
• Affine - self hosted cloud notebook
• Actual - Budgeting Software
• it-tools - for swiss army knife utilities
• kitchenowl - recipes and grocery lists
• Reactive resume - for resume building with AI empowered editing
• Onetimesecret - for burn after reading secret sharing(using it for distributing credentials to my family)
• Searxng - Local Search Aggregation
• Homarr - Personal Dashboarding
• Home Assistant - Smart Home Management
• N8n - Automating codeless workflows
• Ollama and Open-WebUI - personal Agentic AI
• AudioBookshelf - Audiobook streaming and Management
• OwnCloud - local file sharing and storage
• Plex - Video Streaming
• BitMagnet - DHT network sniffer
• syncthing - for transporting data between local and remote systems
• the *Arrs - for acquiring content
• Docspell - for digitizing and storing important documents
• picsur - for local meme storage
• Calibre+Calibre-web - for Ebook management
• Crafty Controller - for Minecraft Server Management
• RomM - For Emulation and ROM Management.

As I go about my day I'm always looking for new and interesting containers to run, and then scrutinizing if they fill a need, replace an existing service with a better version of the same service, or if it's better off not implementing, then I pull them down. this has been a great experience in devops learning and the longer I work on the server the more best practices I put in place and the more I understand why corporate clouds have some of the practices they have. I look forward to poking around in this community looking to help and to find new containers to accrete into my platform.

Hey fellow self-hosters! I'm just starting but I'm now running my own instances of Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Readeck and Kitchen Owl. It's really a great feeling to know the data is safe with me!

Hosting a whole bunch of stuff for myself, the family and also the public. For the larger family I'm hosting eMail but using a managed service offering for that (Hetzner). Too old to run my own IMAP/SMTP infrastructure ;)

For a few private societies I'm hosting:

• Mattermost
• NextCloud
• WordPress https://www.uckermark-blog.de/

For the public I host:

• Mastodon at https://hub.uckermark.social
• Mastodon at https://tetrax.de/
• BookWyrm at https://books.mxhdr.net/
• Mobilizon at https://termine.uckermark.social/
• MatrixChat at https://matrix.mxhdr.net
• Element WebUI for Matrix at https://element-web.explain-it.org/

Mostly formyself, but not restricted I'm hosting:

• Pixelfed
• LinkDing for Bookmarks
• Excalidraw
• Grafana
• OverLeaf
• StandardNotes Server
• PiHole
• GitTea
• FreshRSS
• Minio S3-kompatible Object Storage as Backend for Mastodon & Pixelfed (on an old Dell Optiplex at home over my DSL Line)
• GoToSocial Fediverse Client (On a RaspberryPi at home)
• PeerTube for public projects (on the same old Dell OptiPlex)
• PeerTube as private Video Streaming platform (on a Dell Precision 3500 tower)

Most services run in Docker Containers on some VPS at Hetzner. Some stuff runs in Docker Containers on old spare hardware at home.

I have a rented server with 8 Xeon E3-1246 and 64GB at Hetzner where I host:

• Vaultwarden
• Gitlab (git repo, container registry, static blog (pages with Hugo))
• Drawio (Diagrams)
• Kroki (for Gitlab)
• Gitlab runner
• FreshRSS
• Nextcloud
• Redis
• Headscale (Tailscale server)
• Keycloak
• MariaDB
• PostgreSQL
• Plex
• Privacybin
• Wallabag
• Hedgedoc

It's all behind a Traefik instance handling Let's Encrypt and using the Docker socket to route traffic based on labels in docker-compose.yml. Behind these I also run k3s and from time to time some VMs. I also have a 1TB storage pod at Hetzner where I use restic to back everything up from this instance as well as from my home system and laptops.

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.

Feel free to take it as a chance to present yourself to the community!

Hello, my name is Zingo and I have a selfhosting addition going back to 2016 when I bought my first NAS with docker capabilities.

Community: Hi Zingo! Welcome!

Thank you.

Currently struggling more than even as it starts to take over my life. I have tried over hundreds of services.

I'll try to find strength to list some at a later stage in this healing process. Sorry no bonus points. Maybe in the next session.

Thank you all for this awesome support. I would be lost without you. 💓

(I'll add links / descriptions later)

I host the following fediverse stuff:

• Lemmy (you're looking at it)
• Mastodon (3 instances)
• Calckey oh sorry, now FireFish
• Pixelfed
• Misskey
• Writefreely
• Funkwhale
• Akkoma (2 instances)
• Peertube

And these are other things I host:

• Kimai2
• Matrix/Synapse
• Silver Bullet
• XWiki (3 instances)
• Cryptpad (2 instances)
• Gitea
• Grafana
• Hedgedoc
• Minecraft
• Nextcloud
• Nginx Proxy Manager
• Paperless-ngx
• TheLounge
• Vaultwarden
• Zabbix
• Zammad

Just testing from selfhosted instance!

Available from internet:

• jellyfin
• jellyseerr
• immich
• paperless-ngx
• owncloud ocis
• traefik
• homarr

Available only from local:

• the *arr stack
• qbittorrent
• jackett
• watchtower
• apprise
• netdata (kinda new, still have to fully understand how it works)
• portainer
• speedtest-tracker
• homepage

Security

All the services available from internet, just goes through traefik to terminate https, I rely on the build in authentication of each service. To add another layer of security, I have fail2ban active on all those services.

I have a public IP, and I have open on my router ports 80, 443, a random port for ssh and vpn.

Hardware:

Memory:
  System RAM: total: 8 GiB available: 7.73 GiB used: 4.46 GiB (57.7%)
  Report: arrays: 1 slots: 4 modules: 2 type: DDR3
CPU:
  Info: 6-core model: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T bits: 64 type: MCP cache: L2: 3 MiB
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] driver: nvidia v: 535.98

docker compose files

All the docker compose files + how I configured everything is available at: https://github.com/simone-viozzi/my-server

Bonus:

Since I like the ability of btrfs to do snapshots, I created all important docker volumes as btrfs subvolumes. Then I created a backup script that literally sends the subvolume (encrypted) to an external cloud. This does not allow incremental backups and most likely is not the best backup solution... but it works... the repo is: https://github.com/simone-viozzi/btrfs2cloud-backup

I welcome any advice / criticism!

Can't ask too much off my little laptop, but here it is

• HomeAssistant
• Frigate NVR
• PiHole
• Wireguard VPN

I’m new to self-hosting world, for starting I subscribed to a VPS with 240GB of storage with Debian installed on so I could run my Yunohost server

I’m trying it out mostly for streaming music with Navidrome and run Fresh RSS. Also I use RSS Bridge so I can stay updated with some Instagram accounts

I've got a couple VPSes, hosting

• Mailcow, because email is identity.
• Asterisk, because phone #s are also identity.
• Matrix-Synapse, for personal messaging even though XMPP is probably better.
• ttrss, even though it's junk software with a jerk developer.
• A bunch of self-developed web apps

Self hosting email is obnoxious, but it's also one of the only remnants of the traditional distributed internet that's still broadly accepted.

Two "servers"

Pi4-8gb; 1TB SSD:

External-facing

• Pi-hole
• home assistant
• web server
• Calibre
• Simple games like Minecraft

Dual Xeon; 96Gb Ram; 50TB; bound NICs:

Internal, mostly

• media: Jellyfin, -arrs
• Sabnzbd
• Steam games server (these are external containers)
• Looking to add cloud files access; just haven't decided what and how, yet

I might be the only person self hosting a gopher server. Its running on a Raspi 4 on my home network, using Flask Gopher.

I had a small X.25 network as combination coffee-table and space-heater at one point; this was before most homes had internet. It almost cost me a divorce.

Presently, my Fediverse presence is mostly self-hosted by one definition or another. This Lemmy instance lives on my server, and my Masto is hosted by a company dedicated to exactly that because it's dirty cheap and one fewer thing for me to worry about.

Looking to add to the list.

I'm hosting Trillium Note for my personal note taking.

• jellyfin and Plex (in the process of migrating)
• radarr/sonarr
• jackett and deluge
• nextcloud

I've had new hardware in the basement now for a while, going to slap it together and build a k8s cluster on top of rancher/harvester