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Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

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41–50 of 194 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#41
* Buy a domain as Domain

* Buy a Asustor AS5304T as NAS

* Setup CloudFlare on Domain

* Setup services as docker containers on NAS

* Setup CloudFlare tunnel into NAS docker services with auth in CloudFlare

* Enjoy services.

Note, if any of that sounds hard I must kindly point out that you're playing a risky game trying to do all this yourself securely and should evaluate whether it's easier to just pay a service for all this.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#42

To understand networking: read a book. Much of my early networking knowledge came from https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/1593414 but you can probably find more modern variants of such a book. Getting a good grasp of networking requires reading and experimentation; luckily, you've got the tools for experimentation already. Most of application deployment is little more than reading the docs and tuning the configurati…

> To understand networking: read a book. Much of my early networking knowledge came from https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/1593414 > [Computer networking: a top-down approach, Kurose and Ross 2009]

This is the kind of reference I was looking for. Anybody else have a favorite. Maybe more accessible? "For Dummies?" :-)

Thanks for all these concrete suggestions.

EDIT: "Free t-shirt"?! AWESOME :-)

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#43
post #34

I 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 fr…

What is difficult about image hosting? Database containing photo endpoints and flags, simple HTML viewer based on tag selection. Database backup is solved and blob backup is solved.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#44

It 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?

The downside is you might not want to leave your computer running all day and VM networking can be a pain if you want to access the services from other devices on your network.

A pi/old computer is a physical box you can put in a corner and you can be sure the physical network works if it is connected.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#47

It 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?

The only downside is, I believe, the electricity bill. The reason to use a rpi is that it has enough computational power to do many useful self-hosting tasks while consuming only a fraction of the power of a beefy computer.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#48

* Buy a domain as Domain * Buy a Asustor AS5304T as NAS * Setup CloudFlare on Domain * Setup services as docker containers on NAS * Setup CloudFlare tunnel into NAS docker services with auth in CloudFlare * Enjoy services. Note, if any of that sounds hard I must kindly point out that you're playing a risky game trying to do all this yourself securely and should evaluate whether it's easier to just pay a service for a…

> Note, if any of that sounds hard I must kindly point out that you're playing a risky game trying to do all this yourself securely and should evaluate whether it's easier to just pay a service for all this.

You articulated something I couldn't: an important goal for me is to know enough to be able to evaluate such risks and decide which things to hobbyist tinker and which things to pay to outsource.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#49
Y'know I'll probably make one.

> But I have no clue about networking, and I don’t know where to start.

Start here, because it's literally the foundation, but you don't need to be an expert. You probably understand more than you think if you have a VPS and can access it, though. As a start, you need to have working knowledge of the following:

- The OSI model so you understand the layered model of networking, even though nothing strictly folows it.

- what a subnet is,

- what NAT/port forwarding is,

- what TCP is,

- basics of routing (packet not on my subnet? send to default gateway which is a router, rinse, repeat)

- that IP addresses are associated to interfaces, not computers or people, and

- why HTTP is called an application-layer protocol,

- what SSL certificates are and how they work.

- you also need to study up on Docker and containers as a lot of web apps are released as containers now.

Re: Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

#50
post #32

Without 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 bet…

No offense taken. Sounds like good advice.
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