Self Hosting

Intro

I’m an avid self-hoster. Well, I love the idea of self-hosting. Do I host everything myself? Definitely not. But I’m starting to do more of it.

Wait, what?

If you’re reading this and not a software engineer, well, self-hosting running software on hardware (physical or virtual) that you yourself own and only you and others that you choose have access to.

So where to start?

I’ve self-hosted my own DNS server for years. The popular one is Pi-Hole, an adblocking DNS server. It’s amazing and I have two (redundancy, yeah!) running on my home network. One on a Raspberry Pi 4, and another on my NAS. I take it one step further and back the PiHole with Unbound as well for even more privacy. You can find my image here: https://github.com/nickzelei/docker-pihole-unbound.

PiHole is pretty dang easy to get running, and most all home routers allow you to configure your DNS servers, and pretty much every consumer device allows you to do so if your router doesn’t. It makes a pretty great first step into the self-hosting world.

Buying my NAS

About a year ago I finally pulled the trigger and bought my first NAS. It’s a 4 bay Synology and overall I love it (with all its quirks.) I didn’t think I would use it much, but it’s just so nice having networked storage and has really come in handy. Plus, it effectively doubles as a second server outside of my RPi.

What to host?

There are tons of awesome self hosted (hint) guides out there for any and all categories of software that can be self hosted. I mostly host DNS servers, budget software, and some media management software. Basic stuff that I use daily or weekly. I’d like to continue hosting more and more (within reason) as there is some non-zero amount of maintenance that has to happen to keep this software up to date.

The feels though

I think the biggest boon about self-hosting (even if it’s work!) is that feeling of knowing that I am not reliant on anyone but myself to run it (and the amazing open source contributors that make it possible to even have most of the software.) But when I say not reliant on anyone, I mean mostly not some 3rd party SaaS provider. I own the data. I own the instance and compute. It just feels good.

Slap Tailscale on the server and access it from anyone through your own encrypted wireguard! Amazing.

The AI piece

We can self-host AI models. Yeah you can’t necessarily host the big boy models without some serious investment, but we are only a few years away from having simply amazing AI models that run on your airpods. We are barreling towards ever techie being able to have smart AI self hosted, totally offline on their own machines. What a time to be alive, especially as a self-hoster.

I love talking about self hosting, if you do too, shoot me an email. I’d love to chat with you about it.