In the vast apparatus of the internet, I have my own little hideaway: an Alpine Linux box hosted on Hetzner. The website you’re reading lives on this very server, alongside numerous other personal services. Running these myself allows me to be completely independent of major service providers like Google, a choice with serious benefits for my privacy. It has also helped me accrue real-world experience with system administration—and the crises that occaisionally entails. Finally, owning a fixed amount of hardware means that there is zero marginal cost for additional services crammed into my alloted resources: this means the monthly cost of running my many programs remains well below market price.
My server setup would historically have been best described as a rickety shack, barely standing, upon which I would occaisionally try and haphazardly tack new services while hoping the whole thing wouldn’t come crashing down. This was sufficient for at least five years. But at Recurse, I became fed up with the status quo.
I explored a few radically different systems. Frank pointed me in the direction of Talos, and I played around with setting up a one-machine cluster. But Josh asked me if I really needed all that baggage, and truth be told I didn’t. So I returned my focus to trusty Docker Compose—and toward minimalism, pattern, and clear structure.
That structure employs a number of axioms: “All services are run in containers” (file storage and backups having been the big exceptions previously), “configuration and secrets get committed”, “no building images on the server”… Really, I can’t say it better than I already did during development, when I wrote long commit messages and thorough documentation.
I also upgraded my server during this transition. I investigated a move to the United States, but found that resources prices here vastly outpaced the rest of the world. So I made a different move: to the ARM architecture. Miraculously, I now get double my old resources at the same price. More than enough for my email, calendar, websites, and anything else I’ve thought of throwing at it over the years.
There is still room for improvement in this setup. As part of a renewed commitment to elegance, I dropped my janky self-hosted git setup and do not yet have a good alternative. And getting the server prepared entailed some minor setup work which should be controlled in a declarative and versioned fashion alongside the rest. But that rabbit hole seems too deep for even me at the moment… It will have to wait until next summer.
Check out the code for your own self-hosting inspiration!