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

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

#11

Post by cube00 »

This is a long but satisfying road if you're a tinkerer. Start by prioritising. In my case, I was worried about Google locking me out so I started there, other things such as VPN could wait because I wasn't locked in on my VPN service.

In your case that might be migrating your photos off iCloud. I found the awesome-selfhosted[1] list to be excellent for trying out different products that match the size of the VPS you've got or maybe you just want to put that onto your local Synology NAS if you don't need your whole photo roll on the go.

Self hosted BitWarden is also another good starting point with the very lightweight vaultwarden[2] just make sure you always know where your vault is stored on your server and make backups.

While it's a long road it doesn't need to consume your life daily but it still requires you to keep up with all the things any sysadmin needs to handle like monthly patching, monitoring the logs for sustained abuse and break in attempts.

Subreddits /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab are also great places to have a browse.

[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...

[2] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

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

#12

Post by massysett »

Keep at it. Keep reading and applying your knowledge.

My path was to use Linux distributions that are well-documented that you can assemble piece-wise. Examples include Slackware, Debian, and Arch. By understanding the pieces you’ll come to understand networking better, and you’ll better understand how to help yourself.

That’s just one path though, certainly there are others. Just look at how far you’ve come, and realize that with time you’ll pick up more.

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

#13

Post by bo1024 »

Looking forward to following answers to this!

I can vouch for git repositories being easy to host on a VPS. I use a private git repo as my daily backup tool for my documents. A public one should be easy too. Access management for particular users, I'm not so sure about.

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

#14

Post by huimang »

For hardware: in the past, I would say start with a raspberry pi. But those are impossible to find at list price now. So instead, if you look on ebay for SFF (small form-factor) workstations, you can find something like an HP Prodesk G1 with cpu/storage/memory for ~$50-60. Which is significantly cheaper than a raspberry pi 4B @ $100+ by resellers.

Slap on a distro, and you're off to the races. Checkout /r/homelab and /r/selfhosted on reddit. You'll probably want to read about DNS and local networking (DNS & Bind is a good book).

You'll understand by doing things. Don't blindly copy-paste configs. Spend some time to figure out what they're doing and type every line in manually.

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

#15

Post by sokoloff »

bombcar wrote: post #2

Get a piece of hardware (old from Ebay is fine, consider power requirements, a small device with an SSD may be better) and throw the free VMWare ESXi on it, and start spinning up virtual machines at home. Play and experiment. That's how I started, and as long as you have lots of off-line backups, you can get pretty far. Tailscale makes two or more computers look like they're on the same network (simplification). Late…

I like this advice but would suggest proxmox instead of ESXi. (Seems to be a lot more traction in the homelab type of deployments and my own three-year experience has been really excellent.)

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

#16

Post by Xeoncross »

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 email? Retro gaming? Figure out what you want most and jump into that instead of trying to get everything all at once as it can be overwhelming to consider every system instead of taking one step at a time.

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

#17

Post by blakesterz »

I'll just recommend starting SMALL. Pick one, and start there. I'm not even sure which one on your list to recommend starting with, just pick one and go with it. All of those things are widely used and just asking your favorite non-Google search engine for docs/guides/how-tos will give you more good results than you need. Get to know that thing, how to set it up, configure it, keep it running, keep it secure, and how to recover from disasters. Make sure you know how to back it up and start over in the event of failure. So much of what you learn from setting up ONE will carry over to the others.

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

#19

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

anilgulecha wrote: post #3

I can recommend openmediavault. It comes as something you can setup on any logic machine or on a raspberry pi. It comes with many storage servers built-in, and can also run any container service as well.

Sorry to be contrarian, but I had a pretty negative experience with OMV. The install is nonstandard and non-paradigmatic (install uses some 3rd party script, can't do an apt install), it sets up a bunch of nonstandard scripts and configs, and uninstalling is a nightmare (can't apt remove). When something breaks (like networking), you have to fight with OMV wanting to have its own way. There's also a certain lack of polish and issues that you simply don't see in more commercial products.

I'm currently using Cockpit Project (and quite happy with it).

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

#20

Post by dml2135 »

I build my own server for the first time last year running Unraid OS. It's been great. Super easy to set up, all apps are installed as docker containers. SpaceInvaderOne and Ibracorp are great youtube resources, and their forum community is super active and helpful.

Definitely still an amateur in my networking knowledge but I've learned a ton over the past year.

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