I am somewhat late into the Linux-verse (three years in now) and want to move into self-hosting to do two things:

  1. Host my own Jitsi server and sessions. (or any other open source solution)

  2. Host my own solution to privately and securely share photographs of my kids and life here with my family abroad.

At some point, I want to host my own little static-website about myself which should “replace” having to give people a LinkedIn account or something.

The thing is, I know nothing about owning domains, etc. I have never done this before. I have been lurking around this forum to learn some of the basics, but would really like a more tailored reply (is possible). I am working in Europe.

  1. Which computer should I use? I want to host everything on my computer at home. I don’t want to go the VPS route.

  2. Where can I buy an inexpensive domain(s)? I assume I only need one.

  3. What other things do I need to consider? My current broadband is IPv4 only.

  • eodur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    8 months ago

    For image hosting I would look at Immich. It aims to be a full Google Photos replacement. It isn’t quite there yet, but it is quite featureful and rapidly improving.

  • yuris@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Hi! I’m quite new to self-hosting as well. Started about a month ago. I bought this Mini PC while it was on discount, but in general, any PC with Intel N100 should be cheap and good enough.

    I bought my domain on Namecheap, and I use Cloudflared to expose my self-hosted service with the domain I bought. More on Cloudflared here.

    I’m currently using the Mini PC to host a media server, personal notes app, a Minecraft server, and a link preservation software. I currently don’t have a photo storage service set up, because most of my storage are already used for my movies on the media server.

    However, I’ve been looking into the options for a self-hosted photo storage service. Others have mentioned Nextcloud and Immich, and they look great. I also found Ente which I might also give a try once I have upgraded my storage.

  • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    I have used Piwigo for this purpose the past 3.5 years. It’s running on a tiny Odroid HC-2 and solid state drive. The same device also runs Emby for video streaming. I started it with a free sub domain from afraid.org. I migrated to a real domain later. To run two services from one domain name you also need a reverse proxy and SSL certificate renewal, like SWAG or NGINX Proxy Manager or Zoraxy.

    The main thing I’ve learned is keeping everything isolated repeatable. On my Odroid I learned to use Docker and Portainer for the apps. But there were a couple times I broke everything through updates/upgrades. Now I have a small Intel N305 (Minsforum UN305C), running ProxMox VE, and apps in Linux containers. The first I set up myself to learn but later I discovered some open source helper scripts https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/. ProxMox seems a bit more complex than Docker/Portainer, but more flexible.

    I’m using IPv4 only but I’m migrating to IPv6 soon to help with in-network routing to my domain. My advice would be unless you want to host your own DNS and override your domain to resolve to LAN, just use your IP:port on LAN and use the domain only outside your home.