The only formal training I had was 20 years ago in high school when I took a pair of A+ and Networking certification electives. At the time I wanted to get into Systems Administration as a career, but no one was hiring when I graduated. Went into trucking instead.

20 years on though, I don’t really consider selfhosting a hobby, but rather the most cost effective way to achieve whatever I’m trying to accomplish for my family or myself. SAAS and subscriptions have kinda gotten out of hand, so I’ve “voted with my wallet” and just done them myself.

Mostly. I pay for email. That was a pain in the ass.

Do I still enjoy it, sure. But that’s has become secondary as my objectives have shifted over the years.

There are quite a few in the US. Two off the top of my head are Slant3d and PCBWay. With all of them though, you may have to do some final post processing depending on what you are printing. 3d printing services just print the item, they don’t do much beyond that.

Pretty much, but I keep getting burned by “free” and sometimes non-free online services. It’s a large part of why I self host the things I do.

And alot of folks are still bitter about Google Reader being shut down.

Before my last printer died 5 years ago, I was getting good results with Hatchbox filament. Not sure about their current state, but they were the most reliable I had found at that time. Looks like they currently have one I would call navy blue.

My new printer is supposed to arrive today, so I’ll be going through the filament evaluation grind again soon.

Hell, a death tax on assets over $10 million would probably cover it.

I’m using NameCheap. I don’t recall them ever asking me to provide ID. They do have an api (didn’t know that till now) though I’m tired enough at the moment that I can’t make much sense of their documentation.

https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/methods/domains-dns/set-hosts/

Not sure if it’s the simplest way, but this is how I did it. I set up a reverse proxy service in a vm using caddy and then used pihole (also in a vm) to set up a local DNS record pointing to the reverse proxy. The systems need to be set up to use the pihole server as their DNS resolver.

How it works is you type audiobookshelf.local.lan in the address bar and it queries pihole which says it at 192.168.1.100 or whatever. The Caddy web server at that address then passes the request on to the service at 192.168.1.60:8080.

Setup is a bit tedious but it has worked for me.

Looks good.

Only thing I would caution on is all of that USB storage. USB isn’t exactly known for it reliability when used long term for storage devices. Given the current market, however, It will do. When you can afford to, I would move the server into a tower with the storage on SATA.

I’ve been with NameCheap for over a decade. They’re a relatively quiet company that’s been around a while.

They’ve never done anything to make me want to change providers. Have my email through them as well. Good uptime. Ok-ish prices. Good customer service the one time I’ve needed it. Web site takes some getting used to, but it’s also never changed since I started using them.

I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin. I would say that Navidrome is probably simpler of the two to setup if you’re only interested in music.

In both cases uploading new music is the same. Upload the tracks to your media directory and wait for the next scan.

Yes. Currently using Gemma4:12b behind OpenWebUI and Hermes Agent plus a few lighter models for OCR and tagging in Paperless.

From what I’ve noticed, yes. Considerably.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain why, but something about running Baremetal --> VM --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO is massively slower than running Baremetal --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO. Hell, Nextcloud-AIO on a Pi4 was running faster than when I put it in a much roomier VM.

Someone tried to explain it to me but all I understood was that the databases don’t like that. Something about nested virtualization restricting performance.

Oddly I didn’t run into the same issue when I ran Nextcloud-AIO off of a Digital Ocean VPS. Not sure what they are doing differently, but that was running just as fast as bare metal.

I use Nextcloud to host my calanders. With caldav (what nextcloud uses under the hood), reminders are handled by the client. I use Apple’s Reminders app on my phone and Thunderbird on my laptop.

Nextcloud does have a built in calandering app, but I’ve not used it much. I think it can do email notifications of calander events.

It’s all good. The name came out a random name generator a while back. I liked the name enough that I started using it generally for my fediverse presence. No meaning beyond that.

I currently run the official Nextcloud-AIO. No issues once I got the reverse proxy figured out. That was a bit of a pain at the time. Caddy hadn’t yet become a popular choice for reverse proxies.

I will say that Nextcloud really wants dedicated hardware, not a VM, or proformance will suffer. Still useable but it tends to to be a bit slower. Can’t vouch for the office suite as I just don’t use it.

Wait, do we actually have unemployment assistance in the US? I thought it was just a slush fund for boondoggles I was forced to pay into. Every time I’ve tried to apply for it over the last 20 years I was rejected.

It’s been a while since I used it, but I think kmymoney has some basic features in that direction.

Most of the time I use Nextcloud. If I can’t wait for the file to sync I’ll use either email or a jump drive depending on which devices I’m moving data between. I

If I remember that I can, I’ll occasionally use bluetooth to send from my phone to one of my computers.

Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren’t the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they’re also more power efficient.

As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.

Meh. Reminds me a bit of the kerflufel when SystemD came out and largely replaced the V init system that came before. A whole bunch of religious adjacent arguments, at high volume with not much intelligence or understanding. It’ll pass.

All I need to know is does it solve a problem I have, does it work, is it stable, and is it secure.

Only warning I’ll give is that you should probably not get too used to your off site LLM models (Claude, GPT or whatever you’re using). Pricing seems unsustainable and the hype makes it feel like a bubble similar to the dot com bubble.

Might want to devote some time to trying to bring your LLM usage in-house. There is no telling who will survive the crash and it’s not always the “best” one.