Self Hosting Setup - 2023

You don’t know when an algorithm from a big corporation will end up blacklisting you and removes access to your online accounts. I have read a lot of hacker news threads where big corporations end up disabling access to accounts without any way to contact support.

Though, I’m not currently self-hosting email (and I strongly recommend you not to) for good reasons, it’s a good start to consider hosting the easy things. I own a raspberry pi model 4B which I thankfully got before the pandemic.

Here’s the list of items I self-host:

• piHole - a rock solid DNS server. It blocks trackers across the network for all of our devices. Adguard Home is also a good alternative.
• dnscrypt-proxy - An upstream for piHole since it doesn’t support DNS-over-HTTPS. I’m currenty using cloudflare’s DoH as upstream.
• miniflux - simple, clean and minimalistic RSS reader. I follow and read about other bloggers and news publications via miniflux.
• syncthing - synchronises and backs up my data across all devices and servers. Mobile clients are also available.
• plex - local media server. I mostly consume new content from online streaming platforms but there are some older movies I have in mp4/mkv format.
• tranmission-daemon - a lightweight torrent client with a web UI. Since I have a higher FUP plan from ACT (~4TB per month), I seed linux distros and scientific papers.

Things I wish to self-host in future:

• headscale - open-source co-ordination server for tailscale network. I use tailscale for all peer-to-peer communications between my devices and I want to move away to headscale in future.
• maddy - all in one email server. I currently use Fastmail, but I want to go with a self-hosting solution.

If you’ve found any interesting software that I’m missing out on, please let me know.