Looking for advice on getting started with Self Hosting
Looking for advice on getting started with Self Hosting
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24823173
Hi folks, looking for a bit of steer to get off the ground with self hosting. My goals to start with are pretty straight forward:
- I want to set up Home Assistant to move my smart devices off the cloud and fully contained within the walls of my home.
- I want to set up my own little Pixelfed server for my family's use, along with some other federated socials.
From what I was looking at, I think my easiest route to doing both of these things is with a Home Assistant Yellow (built-in Zigbee and Thread system) with a Raspberry Pi 4.
I've never done anything like this before but I'm interested in learning. If anyone more experienced has any insight or direction, I'd really appreciate it! Cheers!
No reason to bother with a Pi unless you need the GPIO for something. You can do more with a Lenovo Tiny or SFF Dell.
Can you get those as cheaply though? Can understand getting something other than a pi as you don't need the GPIO but are there any good alternatives that are cheaper? If not may as well go for the pi
Or for that matter full sized is also pretty good.
If not a Pi, try to go for those (used)mini PCs, they will allow you a bit more power than a Pi and cost just about the same. Then get docker on it and you're all set for easy deployments.
And look up homelab youtubers, they have some good tutorials for beginners. thats where i started. Jim's garage would be my recommendation, especially his older videos about hardware, security and networking basics. You will need to learn these to keep things secure.
The Pi needs to stop being used and recommended for everything under the sun. Even its power consumption isn't competitive.
It was :(
My pi 4 is right on the cusp. 3 B+ was the best when it came to no dongles and power. Now its taking about the same power as a mini PC and you have to by the enclosure, fans/heatsink/dongles/etc..etc... I suppose you can still buy the old pis but man I miss when that was the form factor they were going for.
I bring over my 3/4 for hacking projects all the time. But I cant justify the 5 without looking at getting a mini pc for 10$ more and it comes with a hard drive ment to last longer than an SD.
You got quite good answers already, here and in the other thread.
My suggestion is to not start with pixelfed but something else (simple stuff like dokuwiki, you can use it to document your stuff while you're at it) to get an understanding of the whole process (running the service itself, making it available to the internet after hardening your infrastructure a bit etc).
Also, if you're not settled for how to do it exactly, give Docker a try. There's a reason it's popular among selfhosters!
Docker is way easier
Yeah I've been doing some reading and have seen Docker mentioned a good bit. I think I just needed some goals to start with, I'm sure I'll take a roundabout route to get there and all some new goals once I have those two done!
When you say "hardening my infrastructure" you mean suring up the security, yeah? Also something I need to add to the list to learn about!
Yes! Mostly having a plan on how to make your service reachable in the internet while keeping the rest of your local stuff shutdown.
Many people recommend cloudflare, but I don't think it's necessary. If you get a public IP from your ISP, it's relatively easy with dyndns. Personally, I have a virtual machine running nginx as a reverse proxy and configured the router to forward port 80 and 443 to that machine.