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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Another Pro tip:
If you really want to self host and have good internet speeds, then just use a dynamic dns service to point a domain at your home network :)
It’s free minus the power costs. Sure you won’t be able to guarantee availability but for most personal(and friends/family) use it’s more than good enough.
I say this because the reason a lot of people use VPS is because their ISP won’t give them a static IP. You don’t need a static IP.
Cries in ISP-forced NAT
I was right there with you and did a vpn tunnel with cloudflare. Not a perfect solution but it works well for my jellyfin server.
Yeah, but your speed is limited by the tunnel. My ISP has excellent upload speeds otherwise (140 Mbps).
I checked with my ISP, they said they will give me a static IP but it will cost around $15 per month along with my internet cost. I'd rather just get a VPS.
Seriously. Even better when they just turn it on one day without warning because they can’t handle building out infrastructure to suit their growing customer base. Bastards.
If your domain is registered with cloudflare, they have an amazing tunnelling service that is free to point your domain to your own device at home!
For people who don't like cloudflare, it's also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g. nginx on the front end, and rathole or frp for the reverse tunnel. I use ssh if I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don't come from my "real" IP) and that's not super ideal, but it works.
This is of course considerably more difficult than something that's point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I'll release a step by step HOWTO.
One thing to look at if you're going this route is whether your router supports NAT loopback (a.k.a. NAT reflection or NAT hairpinning). This feature means that you can access your server via the external IP (and therefore via the ddns domain name) even from within your network. It's really useful for phones and laptops that might be on your home network at some times and off somewhere else at other times, so you don't have to change configurations on e.g. the Nextcloud client, or remember to type in different addresses inside and outside the network. Some routers just do this, some don't, some it's a setting you have to turn on. The router built into my ISP-supplied cable modem didn't support it so I got my own router and put the ISP one into bridge mode.
Even still, you can get a small VPS and connect a VPN between it and your LAN, using it as a gateway with a static IP.
Gotta watch out for bandwidth limitations and data caps on small VPS like that though.
I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.
FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there... just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.
Here is a thread with 4th July deals. On that forum you can often find deals for cheap, low-spec VPS.
Oh wow this is quite an interesting proposition. Do you have any ideas / suggestions for what could reasonably be run on a box with 1 GB RAM?
Try putting an RSS reader on their like FreshRSS! Or a bookmark manager such as LinkAce! Start your own personal wiki/knowledge base with BookStack! Try deploying them natively, then learn how awesome docker is and put them into a compose file. Add wireguard into the mix so your services can only be accessed via a VPN.
Now get yourself a domain if you don't already have one. Pro tip if you want to maximize the cheapness of your setup, you can get a .xyz domain for .99 cents a year! Just has to be funny numbers, but find some numbers that has meaning and its not bad. Now that you have a domain, put those bad boys in a subdomain. Tired of those pesky browser errors? Time to setup a reverse proxy and get yourself an HTTPS cert. Caddy is brain dead easy to do this.
Thank you for the introduction to BookStack, I needed an app for a book/Wiki and that looks great. You use it and like it?
I can't believe in all my searching for cheap domain names that never came up, thank you.
For me, something like PiHole for DNS-based Adblocking, as well as potentially a Wireguard/OpenVPN installation (via PiVPN potentially) for an easy adblocking VPN combination. Depends on the available bandwidth, however, but some lower powered applications, even up to a small personal Matrix Synapse server could be viable on 1GB Ram if not abused.
Get a free oracle cloud account. 24GB RAM 200GB disk 4 core CPU for free. 5gbps connection, IPv4 and 6. I run all of my stuff that I want running outside of my house there and run everything else on my proxmox cluster.
Friends don't let friends use Oracle.
I've seen a few comments from people who've had their Oracle free tier accounts deleted with no warning.
Problem is Oracle sometimes just hates people, so declines all attempts to get the Free Tier.
I know from experience
If only sometimes. My company relies on Oracle...
As someone who once had to work with Oracle databases and licensing as a part of their job, i will never willingly use another Oracle product.
ABSOLUTELY THIS. Same. I have to deal with Oracle and their Opera PMS platform which uses Weblogic, 19c, and a variety of other products and it makes me actively want to scream and light things on fire. If I can help it, you won't catch me using another Oracle product if I can avoid it.
I've been trying to register for a month now and it wouldn't accept any of my credit or debit cards I even copied the address from my bank statement to make sure it's correct, it keep denying even though it does take money off of my account.
Only ARM64
ELI5 what a VPS is?
A VPS is a Virtual Private Server, basically a cloud computer that you rent access to and can use it for whatever you want. Primarily, people use it for hosting websites/services that need to be on 24/7, which it can be since they are typically in massive datacenters, but they can have other uses.
Thank you. How does it compare to a raspberry pi, or a mini pc at home? Is the draw that it's available 24x7 and on the internet?
It's kind of the same thing as a Raspberry Pi/Mini PC, though can be seen as more reliable (since someone else is being paid to make sure it doesn't, or you and potentially many others will complain), as well as typically being very scalable if you require more power later down the line, as opposed to buying hardware for yourself. There's many other reasons, but those are some of the main ones.
And with a service level agreement and you don’t have to worry about e.g. the SD card dying on you