this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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Self Hosted - Self-hosting your services.
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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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As someone else said, check the renewal price, not just the price for initial registration. And obviously try to pick a registrar that you find reasonably trustworthy.
It's called a top-level domain (TLD). TLDs are handed out by the IANA to various entities. Those entities (eg. a branch of government of a country) can set requirements for registrants and I think they also influence how much domains under that TLD cost. So you might want to pick one with sensible requirements (usually they're pretty lax but eg. some countries may require citizenship or registering a business with them) that you're able and willing to meet, is cheap, and that you more or less trust the managing entity of.
Depending on your hardware requirements etc. and what you want to achieve by self hosting, I would suggest looking into renting a cheap VPS (edit: embarrassing typo) instead of buying an old computer. It'll be more expensive in the long term, yes, but you won't have to worry (as much) about things like getting a static IP address, power usage/outages, noise and possibly heat in the summer, fiddling with router settings, telling everyone your home IP address and sharing bandwidth with your server. A third option would be something like a raspberry pi, if it's enough for your needs.
The limiting factor, aside from possibly hardware if your services become very popular or are particularly demanding, will likely be your patience in figuring out how to get things working. Email can be a particularly bad one, especially if you need to be able to communicate with mainstream email services. Of course everything also requires occasional maintenance, which again takes time and patience.
Sure, why not? But for a beginner I would recommend picking something with a good amount of documentation and support available to make finding relevant information easier and to (hopefully) be able to rule out the choice of OS as a potential cause when things don't work.
Thanks! I’m curious tho: what could there possibly be that introduces problems with using something like Gentoo as a server OS? The only thing that comes to mind is the fact that some software might not be available on portage or some software might be assuming systemd, but can’t that all be worked around by compiling manually or creating custom init scripts?
I don't think it's likely you would run into problems that couldn't be fixed, it's just that the more niche of an operating system you pick, the more time you'll likely be spending having to figure things out on your own. Often, to fix mistakes, oversights or assumptions made by others. If you love to tinker, that might be fine. If you just want your stuff to be working, it can get frustrating pretty quickly.
I’ll be fine, i love to tinker, and i also heard of many people using gentoo on server so hopefully it won’t be terrible lol