I have a long history with hosting (rolling) my own web services. It is not something that I would recommend to just anybody unless they were looking for a vocation. It’s not technically difficult, you just need to be prepared get your hands dirty and be disciplined with updating packages.
In the early days of the Internet the software was primitive and good technical people were hard to come by. There were no ‘control panels’ and you could not simply google an answer. There were no search engines and do vast indexes of tutorials.
I was unable to afford to pay for system administration in the early days, in fact, just making the repayments on my computer was hard enough. A computer capable of running the primitive graphics package at the time we very expensive.
Fast forward 30 odd years and I am still running my own web stack. I enjoy doing it and it keeps my Unix shell skills sharp.
If you are somebody with a busy schedule and you simply need a web service to achieve a popular outcome just go out and find a hosted solution somewhere. Although not all self-hosted platforms require the same level of maintenance and operation, when something goes wrong you can assume it’s going to happen at an inconvenient time.
So what am I currently hosting?
Like many IT professionals I have numerous devices running ‘services’ of some kind on my local network. I am limiting my coverage here to server type devices (that I have installed the operating system on) both on my local network and public.
- A web-services and messaging stack built with FreeBSD on virtual compute instance in Sydney, another running Samba in FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi hardware in my computer cabinet.
- A HomeAssistant instanced (HASSIOs on Raspberry Pi) also in my computer cabinet.
The main focus as I’ve said is to keep my skills sharp and because I enjoy it. Another concern is the data security and sovereignty, I probably have a very different take on what that means because of my professional experience.
The main services I run on these servers are: CMS, Mail, Spam filtering, Adblocking, VPN, DNS, Smart home/farm aggregation and automation.
I’m a little old-fashioned in the respect that I believe I have the right to avoid advertising, activity tracking and general eavesdropping. Most people are aware, but I guess they don’t believe they are impacted by the trading of their information. I think it’s a basic human right to choose what we share.
Even though I do use the services of Microsoft and Google some of the worst offenders for selling your data I acknowledge that avoiding them can prove to be more difficult than it’s worth. What you can do is; compartmentalise your accounts on the services, and to the maximum allowable limit to what data they have access to and prevent them from matching your accounts between services. You see what they do is they sell your account information anonymized to third-party data aggregators who use sophisticated algorithms to sew the data together. If you think simply using different accounts for different services is enough, it isn’t. Data algorithms can detect when a person has gone from one system to another system using different usernames by: your IP address, timestamps, attributes on the account such as birthdays, usernames, behaviours and subjects of interest. I do use a Microsoft email account quite a lot. Even when you host your own mail server you need to have a backup messaging system which is typically email. I run my own email Service I think it looks more professional and I know that I can manage the integrity of my mail from my server to my laptop or workstation or phone
I was until recently hosting my own file cloud storage using Nextcloud, however I found the effort involved was not worth the outcome. I am back using Samba as its more reliable.
Main services I run myself are my mail and my content management system at drives my website I rang them myself I can guarantee the integrity of the content it’s data sovereignty it’s copyright and I can see exactly how many people are viewing it anywhere from. I can have my own email addresses and I can block without question anybody who start spamming me.
The main service I run internally apart from a DNS server acting as an ad blocker and adding a letter a level of privacy to our web browsing, I run an instance of home assistant to aggregate all the smart devices on our local network allow me to control them centrally patch.
I could not imagine how violated someone would feel if they’re smart home system was hacked, and someone was able to view their security cameras see when their devices were switched on and off. If you are using any of the commercial home automation systems, the only thing protecting you from this happening is a faceless corporate’s word. In the very early days of Google, I was a Google beta tester and the company today I would not trust as far as I could kick their Skibbe wearing tesla driving arses down the road.