In the What are YOU self-hosting? thread, there are a lot of people here who are self-hosting a huge number of applications, but there’s not a lot of discussion of the platform these things run on.
What does your self-hosted infrastructure look like?
Here are some examples of more detailed questions, but I’m sure there are plenty more topics that would be interesting:
- What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?
- Do you use containers or plain packages?
- Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?
- How do you handle logs?
- How about updates?
- Do you have any monitoring tools you love?
- Etc.
I’m starting to put together the beginning of my own homelab, and I’ll definitely be starting small but I’m interested to hear what other people have done with their setups.
I’ve got a mix of hosting environments personally. A dedicated box hosted with Hetzner (their auction prices can be pretty decent) plus a Pi 4 and an old NAS for internal services. Docker containers used for pretty much everything - mostly set up with a big ol’ /opt/ folder with a bunch of service specific folders with docker-compose.yml files and bind mounts galore. Got a wireguard VPN bridging between then because that seemed sensible.
Running Portainer for some extra management and monitoring, then a bundle of stuff:
Got a spare old i5 machine around set up to auto hook into Portainer if I need some extra grunt at some point, but it’s more likely to be used when I can’t be bothered paying for the dedicated box.
Aware a lot of it’s suboptimal, but it’s easy to work with and familiar, and that’s enough to make it workable.