Brian Douglass
Published
Self-Hosting 2024 Update: Self-Hosting on the Road
How do you have a homelab without a home?
My family recently started a new adventure, a long-term road trip around America. If you are curious about the details, check out my other blog or follow us on social media. But the gist of the story is that we’ve sold our house and are now hopping around Airbnbs.
Since I’m into self-hosting (and even wrote a guide about self-hosting OwnTrack), I’ve had to make adjustments since I no longer own a home to where I can stash my server.
Table of content
Why Self-Hosting?
Self-hosting, for me, is about sovereignty over my own data. I don’t need to worry about some big tech platform using my data to send me ads. Or a data breach exposing my data to hackers (we get enough of those from other places, looking at you Delta dental insurance 😒).
Self-hosting is also a great way to learn. In my journey, I’ve picked up some database management skills, reverse proxy skills, and, of course, Docker skills.
My Previous Setup
In my previous setup, I had two servers running my services. One was a 1 GB virtual server in Digital Ocean and the other was an old 32 GB laptop with various hard drives attached via USB. I should have taken a picture of it before I put it into storage, but it was quite the sight with 4 external drives hanging off of it.
I split critical services off into the VPS with everything else being served from the laptop in my basement.
My New Setup
Now I no longer have the laptop in the mix and I’ve updated the 1 GB VPS to a 2 GB version to handle an increase in the services being run on it.
This simplifies things as there is only 1 server to deal with. However I can’t really host my JellyFin media server in the cloud, storage would get expensive!
So my work laptop now serves as a quasi-server for media-related services. When we want to watch something on Jellyfin I have a docker-compose setup that I can spin up after attaching an external drive.
Services I’m Self-Hosting
Now that I’m more resource-contained in my self-hosting I’ve had to be more selective about what I’m self-hosting and where.
Services on My VPS
If you are curious about the details of my setup, check out this git repository.
FreshRSS
FreshRss is my RSS reader for keeping up on programming news and articles (among other things). I also have a few YouTube channels in there. I find it it crazy that YouTube actually supports RSS!
Gotify
Gotify is a self-hosted notification service. Paired with its Android app, I have it set up to send me notifications from my StatPing-ng instance. You can also easily send messages via any HTTP tool like curl.
IT Tools
IT Tools is a collection of utilities for programmers. I mainly use the JSON-related tools. I know there are other tools online, but I didn’t like the idea of putting my JSON data into random websites.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud is how I sync my personal calendar and contacts. It also serves as a file sync for my laptop.
Plausible
Plausible is an open-source website analytics tool. I even use it on this blog rather than using Google Analytics.
StatPing-ng
StatPing-ng is a network monitoring tool that I have set up to track various websites and my self-hosting services. With its dashboard, I can easily tell if anything is down when it shouldn’t be.
Syncthing
Syncthing is a file synchronization tool that I mainly use to sync my notes collection. I’m currently using Logseq to manage them.
I have it set up on my phone, laptop, and VPS. That way my notes sync across all three and my phone can sync when my laptop is offline and vice-versa. The Syncthing app has an option to only sync once an hour, saving battery life.
Tandoor
Tandoor is a recipe manager app. It also has a nice meal-planning feature. My wife and I use this extensively to store our favorite recipes and organize our meal plans for the coming week.
Wallabag
Wallabag is a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper. I don’t use this as much for reading as I should, but I do store stuff that I would like to read later…
Services on My Laptop
I also have a few services on my laptop, those that are either more resource-intensive or used less often.
Gitea
Gitea is a GitHub-like service that I use mostly to back up my own Git repos (kinda redundant since they are all on my laptop anyway…). But I also use it to mirror the source code for some important open-source projects. Does anyone remember the yt-dl incident?
Calibre Web
Calibre Web is ab ebook manager that also has a really cool extra feature. You can use it as a sync backend for a Kobo e-reader, which is the only reason I actually own a Kobo.
Monica
Monica is a “personal relationship manager”. Which is like a contact book on steroids. I don’t use it extensively, hence putting it on my laptop, but I would like to get better in my relationships with other people.
Jellyfin
And last, but not least, Jellyfin is a local media streaming app. I have to connect an external hard drive with all our media files, but when we want to watch something I can spin up the docker container and connect to it via an app on our Roku streaming device.
Conclusion
I do miss the ability to have a beefy server for running processes like media encoding and paying with generative AI. Although I have whittled it down to the most important services. At some point when we settle down again I would like to build a proper server, with proper hard drive bays!
If you are interested in any of the nitty-gritty details, check out my infrastructure git repo.
