Self Hosting Journey

Disclaimer: This post is not a how-to guide. I’ll share my experience and my setup so that you can get an idea of what can be done. I’ve added links to the services I mention, in case you want to read more about them.

I knew about self-hosting but only the ‘self-hosted media’ part of it. I knew about Plex and Jellyfin, and that people set them up on a NAS. I never truly understood servers. My idea of servers was a big rack with a bunch of hardware and wires running through all of them. I had watched videos of LTT building servers with 100+ cores, 1 PB+ storage. It seemed like something that only companies build.

Introduction

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My self-hosting journey began when I got to know the extent of tracking that we are subject to by the services we use. I stumbled upon Louis Rossman’s YouTube channel. In a video he was talking about how a Software Engineer had to suffer because the Google Photos algorithm mis-flagged some pictures. That was horrifying and now, I was looking for a way to replace my Google Photos, mainly for better privacy and security. While searching for alternatives, I discovered Immich. I went to look for people’s views on reddit and I discovered r/selfhosted, r/HomeServer and r/homelab. Seeing people’s setup, I realized that any computer can be a server. I saw people hosting their stuff on Raspberry Pi. I have a lot of photos and I was storing all the photos only on my computer’s hard drive. I wanted access to all my photos and uploading all of it on Google Photos would have increased my monthly subscription cost. Immich offered everything I was looking for.

My Setup Details

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Hardware

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I wanted the cost to be minimum but also good enough to not worry about insufficient resources. I bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480 with these specs for around $300 CAD (~ $215 USD) from Amazon.

It stays connected to my modem via LAN. I am running it headless and I haven’t detached the battery or screen.

Operating System

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Initially I chose Fedora Server Edition because I was already daily driving Fedora workstation edition on my PC and I loved it. Fedora server also had a GUI for installation and cockpit for management, which made things a lot easier.

Then I faced some issues with certain apps on Fedora and I decided to switch to Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu and I was facing a lot more issues but with the hardware this time. Then I got to know about Proxmox and installed that. Best decision I ever made.

Since then, here’s how I’ve set things up.

Current System

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I am running one Ubuntu Server VM and one LXC container for VPN. All applications are running in docker containers. No ports are exposed, apart from a few exceptions. Networking is done through docker and everything is exposed only through nginx. For remote access, I use VPN. I was using plain old Wireguard when I had Fedora and had exposed a port on the modem. But later on, something broke, it stopped working, I gave up fixing it and moved on to Tailscale. Tailscale just works and I didn’t even have to open a port this time. I’m running it in the LXC container that I wrote about earlier.

I wanted to share my Immich setup with my family but I didn’t want them to deal with VPNs. I wanted something like Cloudflare tunnels but it had an upload limit of 100MB. Even on its paid tiers, there’s upload limit up to 200MB. I was looking for alternatives and I found Pangolin. I bought a cheap VPS for $11.29 CAD/year (~ $8.14 USD/year) from Racknerd for Pangolin and my setup was complete. I was able to give 200GB to each family member for free and it works like any other app.

Backups

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For backups, I am using restic. The backups are encrypted, compressed and have snapshots, thanks to its built-in de-duplication capability. I have one local and one offshore backup. I have configured restic using backrest to do daily full backups to an external SSD and daily backups of just the important data to a Backblaze B2 bucket. Backblaze costs me around $1.50 CAD/month (~ $1.10 USD/month).

Future Plans

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My current setup is actually not the way I want it to be, there are some flaws and things I want to improve.

1. Storage: The biggest flaw that I want to change first in my current setup is storage. A big chunk of my storage is allotted to the VM directly, I cannot resize it easily. I want to setup TruNas with maybe NFS, SMB or something better instead. I also want more storage with a good RAID setup.
2. Better remote access: I want to move on from Tailscale simply because I don’t want to trust any company with my data. I have been using it because of its convenience and reliability. I love it but I found something that fits me better. I want to self-host netbird on a VPS.
3. Better Portability: I want to setup config files to take my setup anywhere. Maybe I’ll go with NixOS or something similar.
4. Clustering: I want High Availability services. I am looking into setting up a Proxmox cluster or a Kubernetes cluster.
5. Better backups: I want to setup a local Proxmox Backup Server and maybe an encrypted daily backup of my server at my parents’ house over VPN and SSH.

Current Hosted Services

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Here’s my dashboard of hosted services:

Why it’s worth it

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I would definitely recommend self-hosting to everyone. It may seem intimidating but it’s very rewarding and it helps you learn and understand a lot about networking. Honestly, it’s a lot easier now thanks to containerization. If it wasn’t as easy as running docker run app-name or docker compose up -d to start an application, I wouldn’t be running most of my applications. For example, to have your own private suite of IT tools you just need docker installed and a file named docker-compose.yml with these contents:

version: '3'
services:
  it-tools:
    image: corentinth/it-tools
    container_name: it-tools
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    restart: unless-stopped

After this, just open a terminal in the folder where you’ve kept the file and run:

docker compose up -d

Now open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080. That’s all!

Now it is easier than ever to setup a server and I think everybody should have one of their own. Anyone can start with a simple laptop. If I could, so can you.