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.)
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! 🤣🤣
I started with gaming servers back in the quake 2 days, then got into doing web stuff, then I made a career out of Linux. Now I build systems for fun and for profit. I try and contribute to FOSS projects in any way I can and hope one day one of these stupid utilities I come up with is actually useful to someone.
I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.
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.
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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 😀
I also started with nextcloud because of my degoogle journey 😄
Are you still using it? I went through many deployments before I finally thought I had it settled.
Yeah, im still using it. Started on a digitalocean server installed hardmetal but now i got a small home server where i installed it with docker
Plex, then Jellyfin, then it snowballed out of control.
@[email protected] I wrote my own music player, after that I installed PiHole. After that I realized there were much better music players out there :-P
I do use a couple of containers written by myself. There are a probably better alternatives out there, but these do exactly what I want them to do, no bloat, and I know them inside out, so I keep using them.
Plex on my Pi 3
This is more or less how I started learning Linux too
My first Plex server was an old laptop running windows 8
I got a raspberry pi and some wd red drives when Google photos went for a pay model. We use it to back up our phones and pc, and to run jellyfin and torrents. It’s not wildly different from doing things on pc, except it’s set it and forget it. Having something always on, reliable, and “just works” makes it worthwhile.
I have my mini pc always on too lol.
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.
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.
A vague interest in taking my data away from “Big Tech” led me to get hosting a few years back and use a private email solution professionally hosted. Last year, I bought a pi then went through a breakup and didn’t touch it until recently haha.
I just had to rebuild from scratch but I’m running Flame dashboard, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Baikal, and a rickroll server disguised as a Docs app, because I’m a red blooded American. :P (and the boring stuff lol)
A friend in high school helped me install a counter strike server on linux on an old desktop. From there, I experimented with hosting some forums and an upload script to save files remotely. In the days way before the cloud was a thing. That got me interested enough to start figuring things out and get into it.
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.
