You may have noticed a few of my posts here, I am very interested in self-hosting and what advice can you give to a newbie? maybe some literature, video, I don’t know~
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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Honestly the single biggest thing to self-hosting is breaking stuff.
Host stuff that seems interesting to you, and dick around with it. If it breaks, read the logs and try to fix. If you can’t, revert to a backup and try to reproduce.
If you start out with things that interest you, you’ll more likely stick with the hobby. From there you can move to hosting things with external access - maybe vpn inside your own network through your router?
From there, get your security in line and host a basic webserver. Something small, low attack vector, and build on it. Then expand!
Definitely recommend docker to start with - specifically docker compose. Read the documentation and mess around!
First container I would host is portainer. General web admin/management panel for containers.
Good luck :).
Breaking things is the best way to learn. Accidentally deleting your container data is one of the best ways to learn how to not do that AND learn about proper backups.
Breaking things and then trying to restore from a backup that…doesn’t work. Is a great way to learn about testing backups and/or properly configuring them.
The corrolary to this is: just do stuff. Analysis paralysis is real. You can look up a dozen “right ways” to do things and end up never starting.
My advice: just start. If you end up backing yourself into a corner where you can’t scale or easily migrate to another solution, oh well. You either learn that lesson or figure out a way to migrate. Learning all along the way.
Each failure or screw up is worth a hundred “best practice / how to articles”.