wltr

Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.

So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).

I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.

All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.

All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!

If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.

Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.

My bet is that the tech bros hang in the same bar, and they’re just doing that for fun, and they don’t really care about the plebes not getting it.

Glad I left Digital Ocean like almost a decade ago, yet it still feels I’ve been with them for too long.

If you don’t setup or activate exit node, no traffic is routed through any of your nodes. All you have is the access to the nodes. Which is what you need. I tested exit nodes only recently, they’re very easy to setup as well, but I found no practical need for my use case.

I think installing and logging in should be trivial remotely. Like hey mum, install this app, and log in (trivial with Google or Apple accounts). The rest is on you. Just test the waters yourself first, you’ll get the idea, it’s pretty straightforward. Even if it’s not what you’re looking for, you’d have more information and skills to move to the next thing.

I’d suggest you to investigate either Tailscale or similar solutions. I’m using Tailscale, and it’s really easy to set up. It can automatically connect to the VPN when you access their resource, and the internet works as well. So technically, they can be connected all the time. That’s much safer than the alternative of just opening a port, and dealing with things like CGNAT.

The alternatives to Tailscale I know about are Headscale (which you need self-hosting), Netbird, WireGuard. At least, but there are more.

And search for tunnels as well. You could utilise Cloudflare Tunnel, but I wouldn’t go that way.

I’d suggest testing waters with Tailscale as it’s the easiest, and tweak from there. They have a YouTube channel which helps at starting, I found it just recently. (I use them for a year or two now.)

While I have no respect for Windows people, it’s interesting to read through their failures. Yeah, do Windows instead of spending bits of your time to make an effort at learning something new.

I mean it, in a non-sarcastic way. You can start with Windows, and if you won’t give up on this hobby, I bet you’d come to some open source system instead at some point. After all, the entire self-hosting point is not in ditching Windows, but ditching proprietary thing corporations lure people to use, to farm their data and money too. And attention, not the least thing. It’s just that Windows is precisely the very thing a self-hoster would despise.

Having one to boot into ‘launch that game’ mode makes sense to some, but running it to run some services 24/7, makes little sense, if at all.

For the rebellion!

Here I am, with my Raspberry Pi 2B and a few Orange Pi Zeros. Plus one Intel Atom 230 (an obsolete thing from circa 2010s if not older, it has DDR2 memory) as a file server. Most of my servers are at Intel Atoms old motherboards with these integrated processors. They are decent for what I do.