Man, I love self-hosting (a small appreciation post)

Man, I love self-hosting. Been running my whole stack at home for two years now and I genuinely dont understand why anyone pays for managed services when you can just spin up a container and call it a day.

Right now Ive got Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, a Matrix server, two different analytics dashboards I dont even use, and a personal wiki I update maybe twice a year. All behind nginx reverse proxy with letsencrypt. Docker compose makes it trivial. Why pay for streaming services when you can self-host your media? Why pay for password managers when you can self-host Vaultwarden? The control is unreal.

My electricity bill went up maybe $15 a month running an old Dell Optiplex I pulled from a recycling pile. Thats less than any VPS provider charges for 4GB RAM. Sure its not redundant but I have cron jobs running restarts and health checks. Its beautiful. Everyone should try this.

This rules. I started with a fun little project on a €4/month NAT VPS from OVHcloud, just a tiny 128MB box running wireguard and a pi-hole. It actually works way better than it has any right to.

Now Ive got three of those NAT boxes plus the home optiplex and they all talk over wireguard mesh. The NAT ones handle public-facing stuff so I dont expose my home IP, home box does the heavy lifting. Best of both worlds really.

# my docker-compose.yml snippet for the OVHcloud box
services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy:alpine
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
      - "8443:443"
    volumes:
      - ./Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
  wireguard:
    image: linuxserver/wireguard
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN

The 128MB limit forces you to actually think about what youre running. Good discipline — https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/

Ran Apache, MySQL, PHPBB, the whole stack. They dont make them like that anymore, and honestly the hardware was more fun back then. You really had to optimize.

These days I still keep an old Xeon E3-1230v2 alive in the garage. 32GB DDR3 ECC I got for basically nothing. Runs Proxmox with a handful of VMs. Not as efficient as your Optiplex setup but theres something satisfying about keeping old enterprise gear alive. The fans are loud enough to hear from the driveway though. My wife has opinions about this.

She doesnt understand that this machine has stories. Pulled it from a liquidation auction in 2017, been humming ever since. Back then we had to fight for every megabyte of RAM. Now people throw containers at problems without thinking. Different era.

This is all wonderful to see but I have to ask — did you test your restore? 😊

I love the enthusiasm, I really do, but I have seen too many "my NAS died and I lost everything" posts. The 3-2-1 rule exists for a reason. Three copies, two different media, one offsite.

For home setups that means:

• Your live data
• A local backup (external drive, second machine)
• Something offsite (friend's house, cheap cold storage VPS, anything)

OVHcloud and RackNerd both have those tiny storage plans that are perfect for encrypted borg backups. $2-3/month for peace of mind. Test your restore process at least twice a year. Write it down. Make sure someone else in your household could follow those instructions if you were hit by a bus.

52 boxes and I still get tempted by threads like this

Did the math on my home server vs colo once. Ryzen 5 5600, 64gb, 2x4tb nvme. Draws about 85w idle. At 0.14/kwh thats ~$8.70/month just in power. Add internet upgrade for static IP, wear on drives, my time... honestly breaks even with a cheap dedi from Hetzner at €25/month if you value your time at zero.

But I still keep the home box for stuff I dont trust to the cloud. Plex with the linux iso collection. Private git repos. That one minecraft server from 2016 nobody plays but I cant delete.

My current breakdown:

• 37 vps across 6 providers
• 8 dedicated servers
• 4 nat boxes
• 3 home machines
• 0 sanity

The $/GB on spinning rust at home still wins for bulk storage though. 16TB external is like $0.015/GB now. Cant beat that anywhere.

Simple is better

One box. One purpose. No compose files that scroll for pages

The more you host the more you maintain

Just use Arch on a 10 year old thinkpad and call it a day

Seriously though the amount of people in here running docker on top of ubuntu on top of a dell optiplex with a 4TB usb drive hanging off a $5 pci sata card... the SKILL ISSUE is real

But fr though bella is right, test your backups. Lost a weeks worth of dotfiles once because I thought rsync was enough. It was not. Just use borg. Or dont. Im not your dad.

What happens during a power cut? Do you all have UPS units or does everything just go down

I only have a tiny VPS from GreenCloudVPS for my portfolio site so I never thought about this. Would love to self-host someday but I rent a room and my landlord probably wouldnt be cool with a server humming away. Plus our power goes out like twice a month

Also how do you handle cooling in summer? My laptop thermal throttles just running vscode I cant imagine a whole server in a closet

Thanks everyone this thread is so inspiring though!

I run a 2019 Essentials box for my family of four. Active Directory, file shares, automated backups to a Contabo storage VPS. The kids' accounts have time limits. Its genuinely stable and I spend maybe an hour a month on maintenance. To answer @sarahjey, I have a basic UPS that gives me about 20 minutes. Enough for graceful shutdown. In four years Ive needed it twice. I live in an area with reliable power. The noise and heat are real concerns though. My first server lived in a closet and the ambient temperature in there hit 95F one July. Had to move it to the basement. If youre renting a room, maybe stick with the GreenCloudVPS VPS until you have more space. Self-hosting will still be there later. The control is nice but I dont think everyone needs to self-ho

Which optiplex model is the home box