Selfhosted

I'm running a TrueNAS server on bare metal with a handful of hard drives. I have virtualized it in the past, but meh, I'm also using TrueNAS's internal features to host a jellyfin server and a couple of other easy to deploy containers.

I'm doing this on a couple of machines. Only running NFS, Plex (looking at a Jellyfin migration soon), Home Assistant, LibreNMS and some really small other stuff. Not using VMs or LXC due to low-end hardware (pi and older tiny pc). Not using containers due to lack of experience with it and a little discomfort with the central daemon model of Docker, running containers built by people I don't know.

The migration path I'm working on for myself is changing to Podman quadlets for rootless, more isolation between containers, and the benefits of management and updates via Systemd. So far my testing for that migration has been slow due to other projects. I'll probably get it rolling on Debian 13 soon.

my two bare metal servers are the file server and music server. I have other services in a pi cluster.

file server because I can't think of why I would need to use a container.

the music software is proprietary and requires additional complications to get it to work properly...or at all, in a container. it also does not like sharing resources and is CPU heavy when playing to multiple sources.

if either of these machines die, a temporary replacement can be sourced very easily(e.g. the back of my server closet) and recreated from backups while I purchase new or fix/rebuild the broken one.

IMO the only reliable method for containers is a cluster because if you're running several containers on a device and it fails you've lost several services.

Containerisation is all the rage, but in reality it’s not needed at all for all but a tiny number of self hosters. If a native program option exists, it’s generally just easier and more performant to use that.

Docker and the like shine when you’re frequently deploying and destroying. If you’re doing that with your home server you’re doing it very wrong.

I like docker, I use it on my server, but I am more and more switching back to native apps. There’s just zero advantage to running most things in docker.

You sure you mean bare metal here? Bare metal means no OS.

Your phrasing of the question implies a poor understanding. There's nothing preventing you from running containers on bare metal.

My colo setup is a mix of classical and podman systemd units running on bare metal, combined with a little nginx for the domain and tls termination.

I think you're actually asking why folks would use bare metal instead of cloud and here's the truth. You're paying for that resiliency even if you don't need it which means that renting the cloud stuff is incredibly expensive. Most people can probably get away with a$10 vps, but the aws meme of needing 5 app servers, an rds and a load balancer to run WordPress has rotted people. My server that I paid a few grand for on eBay would cost me about as much monthly to rent from aws. I've stuffed it full of flash with enough redundancy to lose half of it before going into colo for replacement. I paid a bit upfront but I am set on capacity for another half decade plus, my costs are otherwise fixed.

Bare metal is cheaper if you already have some old pc components layjng around and they are not bound to my host pc being on. My PC uses a 600W power supply to run while the old laptop running my Jellyfin + pihole server use like 40W.

After many failures, I eventually landed on OMV + Docker. It has a plugin that puts the Docker management into a web UI and for the few simple services I need, it’s very straightforward to maintain. I don’t cloud host because I want complete control of my data and I keep an automatic incremental backup alongside a physically disconnected one that I manually update.

Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it's something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.

Not knowing about Incus (LXD). It's a life changer. Would never run any service on bare metal again.

Using GenAI to develop my Terraform and Ansible playbooks is magical. Also, use it to document everything in beautiful HTML docs from the outputs. Amazing.