One thing that has kept me from starting to self-host is that I'm terrified of the thought of opening ports on my network to the open internet. For people who have self-hosted, how do you secure or set up your network?
Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
31–40 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#32Without meaning that in a rude way: Learn to find and read documentation.
Oh and very much avoid random tutorials on the internet. As in, go for official source and use these tutorial only to connect the dots. The reason is that there is huge amounts of really bad advice on the internet and a lot of the tutorials only work in very specific situations (versions, OSs, etc.). Official documentation tends to be a lot better, and it's a good idea to choose software that provides good documentation.
Also make sure you do it one step at a time. You want to give things time to know what failure cases it might have. This prevents you from situations where everything "crashes and burns", because there is an update.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#33My suggestion, which many people will probably disagree with here, is to go take the following certifications: - CompTIA Network+ - Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate For extra credit, pass the Linux Foundation Kubernetes certs, get a AWS cert, pass the Offensive Security PEN-200 cert, or take any of the GIAC certs. These won't make you competent, but they'll provide a baseline that you can quickly attain which…
I appreciate this perspective. But I was hoping for something at, um, a smaller scale of commitment. :-)
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#34I guess most of your "wanted" list is easily achievable, except the first one: There is just no self-hostable product for photo management that comes close to Apple/Google in terms of reliability, feature set and ease of use.
Take all recommendations with a grain of salt. They're not even close to the capabilities of Google/Apple (unfortunately) – no matter what people are trying to tell you. This is my experience from trying out most of these systems at some point in time (Nextcloud, Photoprism, Synology Photos, and more).
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#35Give cloudron.io a try. Simple to get started, technical yet secure and has an active community.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#36It depends on what direction you want take. You could purchase a $5/mo digital ocean server or a $5 raspberry pi and start by installing https://pi-hole.net , https://nextcloud.com , https://syncthing.net , https://www.plex.tv , or some other software to get the first (largest) thing you want resolved. Then move on from there and install the next package you need. Ad blocking for your phone? VPN for work? Self hosted…
Why is the self host advice to always buy a Raspberry Pi, use an old crappy computer you have lying around, etc? I have a very beefy desktop for the first time in over a decade (maxed out Mac Studio) and I am wondering is there any real downside to having these services run on it?
You can certainly run these as background tasks on your existing daily driver, but you don't have to.
I've found a raspberrypi/orangepi to work just fine and it doesn't matter if the main computer is on, I'm upgrading to a new system, or traveling between work (laptops). It just sits in the closet and does it's thing using a tiny amount of electricity.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#37One thing that has kept me from starting to self-host is that I'm terrified of the thought of opening ports on my network to the open internet. For people who have self-hosted, how do you secure or set up your network?
I self host a lot, the main thing is to keep your software up to date and make sure you don't accidentally open any ports you don't mean to. The top main mistakes people make is 1) never updating software and then getting exploited, and 2) accidentally not having or misconfiguring your firewall. Like leaving an "internal" service exposed to the internet.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#38I do not know of an opinionated beginners guide, but would recommend browsing r/selfhosted and r/homelab a bit. Lots of these and similar questions are answered on a regular basis. Some starting points - photos: NextCloud - git: Gitea - BitWarden: Vaultwarden (even if you deploy this locally you want a SSL certificate as clients will refuse to connect otherwise) I'd suggest using official docker images to get started…
> - photos: NextCloud
If you don't mind horrible experience viewing photos/videos via nextcloud, go on. In my case this was unusable. Thumbnails not pregenerated even after trying (Yeah, didn't spend whole day on that issue) and generates on the fly. So viewing larger directory is... rubbish. Videos don't play as nice not to say they don't even have thumbnails. Feels like "guest book" from 2000 - no features that auto organizes stuff - just a directory with photos and you're on your own with unorganized mess of photos.
How great was HN when it suggested me https://photoprism.app/ - and it really just works! Nice, performant, featureful, yet feels lightweight. Finally I can view my photos.
I still use nextcloud just for sync and photoprism just has directory mounted as readonly. Still, sync from phone feels heavy along with "failed to sync" errors and just hangs doing nothing... I long to try out syncthing - but then I loose web access to documents which.. maybe someone can suggest some frontend for that?
Someone also suggested https://photostructure.com/ - it looks decent, haven't tried out.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#39One thing that has kept me from starting to self-host is that I'm terrified of the thought of opening ports on my network to the open internet. For people who have self-hosted, how do you secure or set up your network?
nginx or other reverse proxy running SSL - don't open ports directly to any of the apps.
You should also run fail2ban on everything.
Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?
#40It depends on what direction you want take. You could purchase a $5/mo digital ocean server or a $5 raspberry pi and start by installing https://pi-hole.net , https://nextcloud.com , https://syncthing.net , https://www.plex.tv , or some other software to get the first (largest) thing you want resolved. Then move on from there and install the next package you need. Ad blocking for your phone? VPN for work? Self hosted…
Why is the self host advice to always buy a Raspberry Pi, use an old crappy computer you have lying around, etc? I have a very beefy desktop for the first time in over a decade (maxed out Mac Studio) and I am wondering is there any real downside to having these services run on it?
Mostly because you want a dedicated device to serve off of. If your desktop is always on it isn't that much different.
My desktop gets shut down, rebooted, crashed, wiped and reloaded, and otherwise abused as I get thoughts.
My home server has been the same (don't worry I run updates) for a couple years, chugging along, sipping about 1/4 the power my desktop would take.
In the beginning of your self hosting journey, the opposite might be true. You might want to try 300 things, and that's hard to do if you're trying to get work done on your desktop.