For a while now, I've been hosting services for my own use. It's really nice to know I hold and control everything. I've been jerked around by online services I don't control for long enough in my life. They shut down, change terms, remove features.. My own choices however, are usually deliberate.

There are more inherent risks when self-hosting, as I am not a company, but often is more than sufficient for my needs.

what I'm hosting

• Git server
  • there is no web service (not really needed)
• immich server
  • replacement for google photos, it's lovely! a really solid web app.
  • i've got it behind nginx restricting access only to my internal network
• cryptpad server
  • Google docs replacement
  • encrypted at rest, very simple and easy to use or share
• minecraft server
• xmpp server (prosody)
• emby media server
• syncthing relay server
• tor relay
• signal chat bot
• degoog (metasearch engine)
• jenkins ci
  • internal network users only
• mastodon
• copyparty

monitoring

For monitoring, I'm using a really dated solution.. munin. It's fine, it generates a lot of charts for me about different services. I can see major peaks in traffic or usage, which is more than I really need right now. Nothing interesting ever happens, at least, for now? OK, that's not true-- I've had a few crazy things I noticed via munin, such as getting DDoS'd when previously running a public torrent tracker.

I've considered using Grafana, but I haven't taken the time to set anything up for it yet. Are you familiar with it? If so, write to me, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

sharing is caring

I'm always happy to share, so if you are looking for an account on any of these, shoot me a message about why and what, and maybe I can create an account for you.

hardware

HP Z420 Workstation, with an Intel Xeon E5-1620 and 64GB of ECC RAM (way too much RAM tbh), ~12 TB of storage.

cloud backups

A few of my services are backed up to cloud bucket storage, using restic so the backups are encrypted. I've been using Backblaze B2 since it's insanely cheap ($0.006/GB*month). Currently I'm using <50gb and paying ~$0.40/month. Pretty cheap for peace of mind.

connection

I'm hosting it all off my 1gbps parallel fiber connection

future

I'd like to replace the workstation with a smaller case, and a less power-hungry CPU. There's not really a great reason to use a server processor, I don't really need ECC RAM, nor do I need 64GB. I could save on those things, and instead get more storage.

I also want to reformat my disks, they're in a very stupid configuration right now, it's one logical volume spread across several physical ones. I also think I want to use ZFS or something with system-level snapshots. I think that would be nice for backup purposes.