what internship are you doing?
4th is writing your own self hosted tools
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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The thing that I hate about self-hosting is that a lot of apps that could just be a plain offline thing are instead being designed to be super bloated server-docker things. Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
Databases are not reasonably portable data formats.
I mean.. if you stick to standard SQL...
i uhh yeah host abt 10 containers on an i7 laptop currently. in my small office (kids bedroom) closet. I do also have a 3tb storage available but its what I had … an external wd drive. sigh. i am nbr 3 huh?
I've been pretty happy in #2 for years.
"Wow these R730/R740 ear destroying rack servers are super cheap on ebay"
No lie, they're awesome. I've got two R720s, and they really aren't bad. I leave one off. The other runs 4-5 VMs and doesn't spin loud at all. Lack rack, surplus drives, a refurbed UPS and it just goes.
Only 27 containers? That rookie numbers... You gotta pump those up!
I'm currently sitting at 131 containers across 3 Kubernetes nodes, all bare-metal though, no virtualization.
131 containers seems crazy to me. How many actual services does that translate to? Is it actually closer to 50 services running in parallel on three different nodes for redundancy?
There's probably also a fair amount of repeated servers that aren't redundant. Like postgres servers that are single purpose and multiple containers to provide it for an "actual" service.
Level 4 would be using some sort of off-grid decentralized networking instead of the internet?
I just use flash drives to transfer stuff from my computer to the ipad so i can watch in bed lol, keep my music on an mp3 player
Surprisingly those dual-ended USB-A + USB-C flash drives can be pretty decent, especially for stuff like this.
it's easier to wait like 5 minutes for files to transfer than to maintain a whole wireless streaming setup. i think of it like walking over to the video rental store lol
Stage 3
I'm in stage 2
I’m also in stage 2 but getting closer to stage 3 😂
Me too but now I'm afraid
Same, been there for a decade.
I'm careful about what I want to host because I know I'm the asshole that needs to fix it when it breaks, and password managers that my wife uses are 100% off the self-hosted menu.
Vaultwarden requires Bitwarden to keep on allowing client access. Even if there are FOSS plugins/clients, I still need ot host it between my house and a cloud and it needs to be highly available.
I'll keep paying for that one.
Same here for pretty much the same reasons
Stage 2 is ideal. Normie self hosting. Once you figure out docker youre cooked in the pipeline
lol at 'accidental' beta testers. I tell my family they're testing my shit
When you spur of the moment decide to turn your gaming pc into a proxmox machine and then miss gaming so you end up down a rabbit hole of iommu groups to pass your Gpu through to a steam os VM to wrestle with Linux virtual display drivers so you can use sunshine to cast your games to your laptop
It eventually worked but you can quickly end up in a niche hell hole with little to no coherent documentation.
Trash guides is a gateway drug
Holy shit you just described my setup to a T
Is it worth it after that's all said and done?
I'd love to power gaming in my house from a central server, but I keep imagining that it would be spotty and frustrating as hell.
Game streaming is good, but not perfect. It's useable, but you do get the occasional stutter, dropped frames, connection issues, etc. Not to mention increased input lag.
If you must have your PC in a different room, you'd be better off buying an optical hdmi cord. That's what I do for gaming on my TV after playing a few games through various game streaming apps and getting fed up with it.
I've seen this idea a few times now. How do you get your controllers to connect? Say I want to keep my PC in the basement and have a TV on the second floor. How do I connect the controllers?
I run a USB to Ethernet adapter from my PC to living room TV along with a optical HDMI cable, I even have a second HDMI for when I want to run a second portable monitor on the couch arm rest for notes and stuff
I’m not sure how the person you responded to did it, but LTT has a whole video series on doing just that from what I remember.
Your mileage will vary some hardware has better support than others latency can be an issue on titles that are sensitive to it.
Rocket league is unplayable but survival craft games play really well!
The most straightforward approach to dabbling with it would be to install classicoldsongs Apollo on a windows machine it includes virtual display drivers that just work out the box, pair a moonlight client and see how it works for you!
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I converted my gaming machine into a server a while back. I like to live dangerously though, no proxmox. Baremetal. If my blog is slow, sorry y'all, I'm gaming. Deal with it.
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With this sort of thing, I'm always left wondering what I'm missing in terms of the hardware. Like, I've been collecting bits and bobs of old hardware for years, but it feels like if I want anything more than an absolutely basic raspberry-pi-level server, I need to buy dedicated hardware. For example, I want to put together a nas, especially since I do have a collection of spare, old hard drives, but would want raid for that. Unfortunately, its rare to find a mobo that has more than four sata ports, and all the power supplies I have available to harvest from other systems are either too weak, or are proprietary, meaning I'm halfway to buying a new PC anyway. Is there something I'm missing, or do others just have more disposable income?
You can get an PCIe HBA on ebay for $50-60 bucks and will allow you to connect 8 disks to a single system. Look for ones that specifically say they have been flashed to IT mode which will let the host system address the individual drives and enable you to use MDADM for RAID. My "Server" is literally just the old motherboard from my gaming PC with 4x 8TB drives connected to one of those ebay HBAs.
That's basically what I did, along with the new PSU, but thats still a lot to spend on a hobby/luxury, unfortunately, so I can't really afford to tinker with it more than that.
You dont have 11 leftover/trash computers/laptops/harddrives your family dumped on you? Im 26 and ive been given legitimately 16 different computers from my mom, dad, grandparents, and in-laws
Where do you think all the aforementioned hard drives came from? Lol. Its just that so many of the other parts are proprietary/old that I can't mix-and-match to make something more useful. For a breif period, I had four separate working desktops, and not one had a standard power supply or mobo. I swear all of that should be made illegal.
To piggyback off of OR3X's comment, I purchased a LSI 9300-16I for my Plex server which will support 16 data/SAS drives with the 4 way cables. They make a 8I version as well that's cheaper. Power is still something you have to work out though, but that's a single PSU.
I purchased my unit on eBay for $53 a couple years back. I use unRAID to host everything and would recommend because it's fairly simple to setup, and works very well with mixed disks and parity. I've had 5+ old drives fail over the past few years and never lost any data.
For a lot of purposes, an old slow system is great. Craigslist (if you're in a country that has it, otherwise use your local equivalent) is a great place to find super cheap old equipment to build server infrastructure from. Thrift shops too, I regularly find old UPSs that just need a new lawnmower battery chucked in to work at my local thrift shop, they charge like $10 for em. Usually found near power strips.
I bought a second hand Intel NUC and put a big harddrive in it (I think only.some models have a slot). Works pretty good.
I think I have reached stage 4: No hosting, off-site backup is on an external SSD in a locker at work
I’m worried I don’t know if I’m 2 or 3
Nonsense! The old laptop I run proxmox, home assistant, and most of my containers on is mounted to the wall in the garage, not under the stairs.
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I'm definitely stage 3 but it's still an enjoyable hobby that isn't that time-consuming. I think stage 4 is creating your own services and spamming social media in search of users.
Laptops have an integrated UPS!
Tried that for a while. The battery turned into a spicy pillow and nearly broke the keyboard from how much it puffed out.
If you do that, make sure the laptop has a feature to keep the battery from charging to 100% at all times. UPSs with lead acid batteries handle sitting at 100% much better.
I use a NAS for backup and I am always concerned about the backup being in the same physical location as the primary. I still haven't figured out the best way to resolve that.
rsync.net, borg, rclone.
Or get an s3 bucket on AWS, linode, digital ocean and dump things there.
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