this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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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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Why is starting with Self-hosting so daunting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is true for any thing in life. Especially technical stuff. It helps that you have some understanding to start with, but you should learn how to start small and organically grow. You can't setup all and everything in one go.

I would do in this order to make self hosting bite size,

  1. Get docker working, with basic docker stuff.
  2. Host one service and use it over local lan.
  3. More services, but still strictly internal lan only. Get comfortable.
  4. Get VPN and try accessing services through VPN
  5. Now start research on how to expose, tools to use etc etc.