Ok, how do I start self-hosting?
Ok, how do I start self-hosting?
I've been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I'm still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just "install this distro and click these buttons"? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I'm not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from "you can check your IP address using ip a" would be appreciated.
More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I'll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don't mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I'm able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that's step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they're either too simplistic (no I don't want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don't know how DHCP works).
Thanks in advance
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I just wanted to thank OP for this post. I have the same question, as this is where I'm at. I also plan to run my server from a raspberry pi 4 on a 5T SSD for storage. Is this an adequate setup for a server?
It really depends on what you want to run. I have a clusterHat (four Pi Zeros on a Pi4) that runs a Hashicorp Vault cluster with minimal usage.
The big thing about self hosting is what happens if you (or other people) start to depend on your service - what do you do about hardware failures? Maintenance windows for patching?
To start off, a Pi is fine, but you'll probably start maxing out your compute and memory (again, depending on workload).
For many, many things a pi 4 is a perfectly adequate server.
There are a few semi-common tasks where you will run into it's limutations:
- it can't do real-time media transcoding, which only matters if you want to run plex/jellyfin and your playback devices can't playback the media types of your content
- it's connectivity wrt. storage is limited. You won't easily be able to run 8 Hard disks with it (and if you do, they will be slowed down and less reliable since USB is in the mix)
- compute-heavy tasks in general might be a pain (for example face detection/classification in an image manager)
This might sound like a lot, but that still leaves tons that you can do just fine on a pi, it's a great starting platform at least.