My journey into the world of self-hosted applications & services
I’ve always been a fan of DIY – both the traditional kind, but also the IT kind. I’ve self-built nearly every PC I’ve ever had, and since the release of the Raspberry Pi back in 2012, been an avid “tinkerer” – I’m currently running 4 pi’s in my network – although that is changing – for reasons I will be outlining in the next few pages.
One of the Raspberry Pi’s I own has, for a few years now been a host for a number of docker containers I run, but I’ve recently got the serious bug for self-hosted services, and the Pi was starting to struggle a bit, both in terms of network performance, but also in terms of space. Now, I could have bought a bigger SD-Card to increase storage space, but I had other issues with running containers on the Pi, in that a couple of services I wanted to run were not available for the ARM architecture, so I decided to splash out a bit on a new mini-PC and then solve all my issues in one go.
These pages will run through my set-up, and hopefully explain how some of the technologies work – just in case anyone else wants to do something similar.
So, what is self-hosting?
As the name suggests, self-hosting is the processof running a series of applications on your own network, without the reliance (or costs) associated with buying or renting commercial apps.
There is a huge community of self-hosters online, devoting time and effort to helping others get their systems set-up and running just how they want them to – there are some seriously useful apps out there too, all it requires is a little bit of time and effort and they can all be yours as well.
In the following pages, I’ll walk through the hardware I use, the apps I have, and how to access them securely across the Internet.
So, grab a cuppa – and come with me on my self-hosting journey.
Part 4 – Network access