Last week I officially started selfhosting.
I had an old gaming laptop (an old faithful ASUS ROG Strix thing from 2016) which surprisingly still worked despite me not touching the thing for 8+ years. I also got my hands on a cheap little 2bay DAS from CENMATE for about $100 AUD, so as soon as I plugged in some hard drives I was ready to go from a hardware perspective.
But actually motivating myself was another battle entirely.
I had several mental blocks in the way. Firstly, i’m in the middle of learning to daily drive Linux on my personal computer (CachyOS with Niri is really doing it for me!). Not a huge leap after working in it for 4 years but it’s still a change that i’m adjusting to.
I was also kind of stuck on where exactly to start with hosting my own services. I watch videos, follow a few blogs, and read the /r/selfhosting subreddit occasionally, but like most online communities those places are usually catered more towards the really DEDICATED hobbyists and full of lots of opinions and debates.
Enter my youtube algorithm (sidenote: YouTube is one of the first things I want to ‘de-algorithmise’ by using something like FreeTube, I really don’t love being served algorithmic content, but in this case it just happened to be a positive catalyst for me finally starting to self-host)
I was scrolling through and got served this 15 minute video, uploaded 2 months ago about a FOSS File Server called Copyparty. I was sold in the first minute when the video’s creator (also the developer of the Copyparty software) showed off it’s ability to work with Internet Explorer 6 and on a PSP. From a software perspective it was just cool.
Don’t even get me started on the motivations of the project, to run anywhere, support everything, do a lot of things at an acceptable level and maintain an adaptable, hackable piece of kit. Add in the fact that the UI reminded me of a time when the internet was fun instead of the corpo-slop interfaces of the 2020’s we get today and I was sold, I had to try this out.
So I did. That night, I sat at my desk, learned how to install and work with Proxmox, created an LXC running Ubuntu and setup copyparty to poke at it and see what it could do.
A day later I moved everything on my home SMB share across to copyparty and (using the very helpful instructions built right into the UI), mounted Copyparty to my CachyOS desktop and my Android phone via WebDAV. All this took me maybe 2 hours but it felt COOL. If I setup a reverse proxy or cloudflare tunnel, I could replace google drive entirely but make it fully customisable, API/script driven.
If you’re thinking about selfhosting, or transitioning away from Windows, or de-googling/de-algorithm-ing, just get started! For self hosting specifically, look through Github’s trending projects or even reddit at a stretch, find something cool and the momentum will build from there. Software like copyparty, that is just cool for the sake of it actually improved my motivation to host and automate stuff just for the hell of it, and I fully intend to find more of it. Maybe i’ll make a list?