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 contents
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 .
