self-hosting

In the previous post, we talked about the importance to have a flexible homelab with Proxmox, and set it up. Long story short, I only have a single physical server but I like to experiment with new setups regularly. Proxmox is a baremetal hypervisor: a piece of software that lets me spin up Virtual Machines on top of my server, to act as mini servers.

After years of self-hosting on a VPS in a datacenter, I’ve decided to move my services at home. But instead of just porting services, I’m using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more flexible and robust set up.

When working on my homelab, I regularly need to pass credentials to my tools. A naive approach is to just store the token in clear text, like for example in this opentofu snippet.

I self-host services mostly for myself. My threat model is particular: the highest threats I face are my own incompetence and hardware failures. To mitigate the weight of my incompetence, I relied on podman containers to minimize the amount of things I could misconfigure. I also wrote ansible playbooks to deploy the containers on my VPS, thus making it easy to redeploy them elsewhere if my VPS failed.

I self-host services on a beefy server in a datacenter. Every night, Kopia performs a backup of my volumes and sends the result to a s3 bucket in Scaleway’s Parisian datacenter.

Our relationship with computers and phones has changed. We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscriptions.

You just set up a new server, and you want to SSH into it to start configuring it. You open your terminal, use the ssh command to connect remotely into it and… you get greeted by a prompt telling you the authenticity of the host can’t be established.

When I was a kid, our house got burgled three times. Our most valuable belongings were taken, our safe place put upside down, and our minds were scarred. This had a deep impact on my relationship with belongings: I want as little of them as possible, and I want them to be easy to replace.

I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.

I self-host a few services. It’s easy to put services online, but self-hosting properly in the long run is difficult. A part of self-hosting properly is having backups and monitoring. In this article I’m going to show you how I make sure to get off-site backups, with a Raspberry Pi at home pulling data from my VPS. There’s room for improvement, and if you have constructive comments on how I can do better I’d be happy to hear them!