this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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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I know for many of us every day is selfhosting day, but I liked the alliteration. Or do you have fixed dates for maintenance and tinkering?

Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.

This post is proudly sent from my very own Lemmy instance that runs at my homeserver since about ten days. So far, it's been a very nice endeavor.

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[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Heya! I’m looking to get into self hosting. Any recommendations on good beginner tutorials or resources?

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 days ago

Pick something you want to self host first. Do you want a media library? Then look into Jellyfin guides, or komga, or whatever. Do you want a centralized blocking dns server for all your devices? Look into adguard/pihole/etc. do you want to fuck around with llms? That’s a whole thing but you totally can and look into guides on doing it

Just as advice you’ll find people that become borderline evangelical on what you use. It doesn’t really matter. Debian vs unraid vs truenas, ecc ram or not, etc. I mean it does, somewhat, and you should read about it, but don’t get hung up on small details. For home use basically anything is fine. Get an old ewaste pc from 2012 and run whatever os you want (just not windows though)

[–] krash@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

Welcome to the deep rabbit hole :-) how much do you know about how computers work? In general, you're going to need to understand some basic networking and general Linux administration, but if you already have a grasp on that then I'd say you just need to start small (simple service, aim to have a resilience goal with backups and restoration) and other metrics that motivates you. Perhaps you want to learn something new with every service you host? You decide, this is your hobby :-)

[–] daddycool@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

You can start by using any old PC you have laying around and install Proxmox on it. Proxmox is a free hypervisor that allows you to make virtual machines and containers which makes it easy to setup and administrate servers/services. This will give you a good foundation to start playing around and give you an idea of your resource requirements.

[–] habitualcynic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Fellow noob here, lots of great suggestions already. I agree with the “find a specific idea and start there” so you can be vested in what you need to learn.

I suggest starting with an old raspberry pi or other old hardware that may not get the job done, but fiddle with it toward your goal until you prove you can do it. It’s so rewarding!

Once that’s done, move on to getting whatever hardware you need to execute the vision well. Mechanics don’t start learning by working on a Ferrari!

[–] bigDottee@geekroom.tech 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Find something that interests you, and look at the docs of how to get started. It literally is the easiest way to learn and get involved in self hosting

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Here's a list of self-host/foss/Linux YouTubers. Check them out. I've learned SO much from them:

  • Veronica Explains
  • Network Chuck
  • Jim's Garage
  • Andrea Borman
  • Awesome Open Source
  • Techno Tim

I can add links to each but searching should find them easily

[–] bigDottee@geekroom.tech 3 points 2 days ago

To add:

  • Jeff Geerling
  • Raid Owl
  • Hardware Haven
  • Apalrd Adventures
  • BeardedTinker
  • Craft Computing

I follow these and some other I can’t think of the name right now, but some great resources!

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wow, thanks! I couldn't find Andrea Bowman, it shows me some video about criminal cases! 😆

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It would have helped if I got her name right Andrea BoRman

YouTube channel

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago
[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 2 points 2 days ago

Don't have a good guide, but in addition on the thing you plan to selfhost yourself you need to decide where it's supposed to run. In a rented VM from a hoster? There are several ones where you can get a decent VM for a few bucks each month.

Nowadays, Docker (or containers in general) are very popular, as an alternative to directly installing services on the vm. They make many things easier, but it's another thing to learn about when you're just starting - fortunately, there's plenty of guides etc!