my introduction to self hosting was back when i had a minecraft phase during my undergrad. i really wanted to play online with my friends but unfortunately the free/low cost servers were not good enough. they had constant lag spikes, server activity limitations and a plethora of other problems. that introduced me to the idea of running my own server; with an oracle cloud instance and a problem at hand i started working my way through the process of setting it up. the sense of accomplishment and having granular control over a service i use led me towards the world of self hosting.
services i have self hosted:
- obsidian live sync
- qbitorrent web instance to seed ISOs
- bitwarden vaults using vaultwarden
- linkwarden, a very powerful bookmark manager
for now, i’m working on trying to self host umami analytics for this blog. working on setting up these services helped me learn a lot about docker and how amazing docker-compose is.
my end goal with this is to have a home lab later down the line. i would love to cut off the reliance on cloud providers. but for the time being my current setup allows me to run all the services i need.