Selfhosted

Tell us what you are hosting! Tell us now! Lol

I wouldn't recommend it personally

Sure, if that’s what you want to do. Though, you’ll probably find less references and expertise here. There is a reason that even Microsoft runs Linux on most of its own servers.

Now, let me be polemical here ....

(And this is to be read with a pinch of /s)

Selfhosting on windows and understanding what you do is so much better than selfhost on CasaOS/ZimaOS/FancyWebGui/Synology and just spin up containers randomly without even understand what a container is and how it does work at all ...

Now roast me :)

Yes, masochists are welcome.

Are posts about that welcome here?

Absolutely. The gate's open...come on in. It's been quite a while since I've had a Windows based server. I still run Windows 10 in the lab, plus Linux and Mac. I don't really discriminate. All OS's have their place imho.

So far its a blast!

That is one of the prime directives of selfhosting. I have a ton of fun learning about new stuff to do and how to do it. Tell us all about it man. What do you selfhost? Are you running any Docker containers? I'm all ears, which in reality isn't too far from the truth with my Jumbo ears. Share! Share!

Posts about self hosting are welcome, posts to strangers seeking external validation...? Maybe save for therapy.

I don't think that Linux is in the title or description of this community!

You pick your own poison ....

Mine is Gentoo Linux all the way, yours is Windows. Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us! We are kind of the two extreme of the spectrum....

Welcome!

Temporary becomes permanent. When I was experiencing severe long-term symptoms of Covid, I bought a refurbished computer to use as a NAS with Jellyfin, Sonarr, and indexers. I kept the installed Windows 10 because I simply did not have the energy to do more. Then, when I felt better, I told myself, "Let me add more services."

Now, it's a Frankenstein computer where Windows 10 acts as the hypervisor, running Caddy as my reverse proxy. Crowdsec protects my services, and my Flint 2's firewall acts as the Crowdsec bouncer. A VirtualBox VM runs in Windows 10 and hosts most of my Docker containers. Stablebits DrivePool manages my drive pool.

I've been running this setup for over a year, and I haven't had any issues. I know I should switch to Linux, but since it's been working great and I'm busy, I've been procrastinating.

I self hosted windows for many years, mostly because that is what I used at work. I liked it because it hid some of the low level details and worked most of the time.

The thing that finally made me switch was the exorbitant cost of licenses and the need to run services on older hardware.

DM me if you want some keys. I have a few copies of win10 and winIOT laying around that I'm not going to use.

Sure ! But... How !? I don't have even the first idea how you'd host... Almost anything on Windows 😅 and I would be concerned by the power consumption of any non-minimalist OS.

Hey! I started running a home server on Windows 10. It was a great easy way to get started. The only problem for me that I found with time was that Windows updates would take everything that I was running offline, which was a nuisance to log back in and open everything up.

You may find you gradually move towards Linux :P

/s

Always. Started on windows hypervisors and windows as they were relevant to my work and I was trying to skill up at the time. Since moved to a Linux stack as the lab grew in scope and my distaste for MS grew as well.

They better be! I've got a mix of proxmox running Windows and Linux machines, as well as a bare metal Windows machine for streaming gaming, as wells as Linux laptops to access all this.

... My only shame is using Windows server to host my DHCP server.

Linux is favored because the ecosystem is more open but you can also run it on low power devices which isn't really the case with Windows (and getting worse over time) and it's free with Windows, to be legal, you need to license the cores/VM. Now does anyone actually do that?! I wouldn't think so.

Sure are. I started self hosting with a VM on Hyper-V.

That’s just silly.

Self hosting is all about Digital Autonomy; that’s just not possible with a windows OS.

Apart from that it would just make your life harder, as the vast majority of documentation and tutorials and helper scripts are based on some linux like OS.

I’m not a windows hater per se, but I am for using the best tool for the job.

And in my opinion windows is not the best tool for self hosting. There are things windows does work well for that meshes well with self hosting and that’s docker. Honestly I’d focus on that for a lot of reasons but primarily because it’s a very easy to deploy self contained way to provide services. And the differences between docker on windows and Linux is almost negligible.

Many of us started running Windows Server and endpoints with Cisco PIX firewall (am I showing my age here?) but in my case, the cost and substandard tools turned me away. I was running A DLNA server and using WDS (yes, very overkill for home, but fun to learn for work), but then I found TrueNAS (then called FreeNAS) running on BSD. I now run a simple share from there and Kodi on my (Linux and Android) user endpoints. I don't bother with imaging anymore, and use dd for backups to my NAS. My Firewall runs OPNSense (BSD) and I run OpenWRT on two TrendNet WAPs.

I'll never go back to MS. It's just not a welcoming platform from my perspective. Don't even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry "redistributables" constantly required by every tool you try to use.