Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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From reddit selfhosted: What do you wish you knew from the start (www.reddit.com)

submitted 4 months ago by EliRibble to c/selfhosted

118 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?

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[–] Presi300 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Benefits:

Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for ~~piracy~~ storing all my legally obtained files.
Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.
Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.
Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.

As for things I wish I knew... Don't use windows for servers. Just don't.

SMB sucks, try NFS.

Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.

Bold of you to assume I'm a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started... Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.

[–] rekorse 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How's the network wide ad blocking work, that would solve a big issue with my kids.

[–] icedterminal 1 points 4 months ago

You either set the DNS settings per device to the system running PiHole / AdGuard Home, or if your router allows, set the DNS there. It's ideal to set it on the router.

Any time a device makes a DNS request to a domain, it's checked against the list. If found, it's stopped. If not found, it gets sent upstream to your choice of a public DNS configured during setup. I use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1).