Self hosting doesn't have to be hard or expensive!

[Kenvexity]

When I began frequenting the indie web, I always wanted my own website, and while there is absolutely no problem with neocities, or some of the other hosting sites, I wanted absolute power over my site, and the ability to install other software not related to my site.

To my luck, I had a Raspberry Pi 5 which I was not using, and I decided, it would be my home server. I needed a NAS for storage, as none of my devices had great storage, and the ability to host my site.


My humble setup, the Pi 5 connected to my modem. (I had to downsize the image, as it uses my website as the host, and I wanted to save bandwith)

I connected a 1TB HDD to it, and now it has my NAS, and I use OpenMediaVault to manage everything NAS related on there, a very user friendly software, fully open source, with great documentation and tutorials. I also host my very own website, https://kenvexity.org on this Pi. I use a cloudflare domain, for 6 euros a year, and I get protections, and many other benefits. There are great tutorials on setting up a cloudflare website on a Raspberry Pi, I use the one from "Pi my Life up", which also works on non-pi computers, as I used the same tutorial on my older ThinkCentre server.

This Pi does pretty much everything I need it to, I dont actually use a lot of storage, so the 1 TB HDD was enough, I just wanted a universal storage that all my devices could access. It has a 128 GB SD card, though I might eventually replace it with an SSD, as I know SD cards aren't the most reliable.

All in all, all of this was incredibly easy to setup with the correct documentation, and I truly think many can replicate this setup here. About the price, you can always get a cheap old desktop from Facebook Marketplace or similar, as I got the Raspberry Pi before the insane price hikes...

I hope this might influence someone to self host their stuff! Thanks for reading

[ManualOverride]

Are you backing up? SD Cards will often begin to fail all at once and external hard drives are a lower grade of drive that wasn't intended to be powered on all of the time. The part of the self hosting journey I am working at getting better too. That being said, you can't beat how little power your setup uses and gives you everything that you want from it!

[Kenvexity]

Are you backing up? SD Cards will often begin to fail all at once and external hard drives are a lower grade of drive that wasn't intended to be powered on all of the time. The part of the self hosting journey I am working at getting better too. That being said, you can't beat how little power your setup uses and gives you everything that you want from it!

yes and no actually, i usually backup my website once a week roughly or when i make a significant update to my site, which i store on my Mac. I backup what is important on my NAS on my Macintosh too, but I dont backup stuff that is just more convenient to access, like Linux isos, and such, but I backup what cant just be redownloaded, such as my important documents and work, so as to not waste space on my computers, these i also have backed up on another external SSD connected to my Mac.. I have a lot of external storage..

i dont usually backup the actual operating system on the sd card, as there is nothing important there that i cant just install on a normal setup, i just backup my site, as it is stored on the card.

[Onio]

I think this is so cool. I really want to self-host something, just for the heck of it, I have so many computers laying around. Right now I'm scraping up pennies to build a NAS, after that the next goal will be to replace the current ISP provided router/modem combo so I can configure the settings myself, and then I'll try hosting something For now, though, VPS, with thanks to ComSpec and ManualOverride for their recommendations

[Kenvexity]

I think this is so cool. I really want to self-host something, just for the heck of it, I have so many computers laying around. Right now I'm scraping up pennies to build a NAS, after that the next goal will be to replace the current ISP provided router/modem combo so I can configure the settings myself, and then I'll try hosting something For now, though, VPS, with thanks to ComSpec and ManualOverride for their recommendations

Thank you! You won't regret self-hosting either, but it is a bit of a rabbit hole, the only reason I haven't gone too deep is because I dont have money to go further

[ManualOverride]

I think this is so cool. I really want to self-host something, just for the heck of it, I have so many computers laying around. Right now I'm scraping up pennies to build a NAS, after that the next goal will be to replace the current ISP provided router/modem combo so I can configure the settings myself, and then I'll try hosting something For now, though, VPS, with thanks to ComSpec and ManualOverride for their recommendations

You can use Cloudflare's VPN service to host websites without poking holes into your firewall and it is free!

[Onio]

I think this is so cool. I really want to self-host something, just for the heck of it, I have so many computers laying around. Right now I'm scraping up pennies to build a NAS, after that the next goal will be to replace the current ISP provided router/modem combo so I can configure the settings myself, and then I'll try hosting something For now, though, VPS, with thanks to ComSpec and ManualOverride for their recommendations

You can use Cloudflare's VPN service to host websites without poking holes into your firewall and it is free!

Thanks for the reminder about this! Is this what they refer to as 'tunneling'? I'd absolutely like to try this out.

[ManualOverride]

Yeah, VPN is short for "Virtual Private Network" which is often described as a "tunnel" because it is like a channel inside the main channel, or a tunnel. But all it is is your traffic encrypted and setup logically in the operating system as a seperate network when in reality is routing over the same internet.