What do I self-host?

tech, self-hosting

I've been recently deploying apps rather frequently on my personal droplet that I use for self-hosting. I tried hosting some bulkier apps and I was surprised when they ran without crashing or bothering any of the other apps that were already deployed.

I was impressed by this setup, and I hope that writing this post inspires confidence in others to self-host their own software.

VPS Information

I have a single $6 droplet and a 50GB volume mounted to it that costs $5. I reckon most people would be able to do without needing that extra 50GB, but I have to mention it for the sake of completeness.

I have allocated 4GB of disk space for swap. I did that while attempting to host a minecraft server (and not succeeding), but I left it that way. My RAM usage usually doesn't exceed 2GB in total, but I host apps like Plausible (Website Analytics) and Synapse (Matrix server), which recommend having 2-4GB of RAM.

Software that I self-host

| # | App | Description | Deployment method | | - |-------|-----|-------------|-------------------| | 1 | My blog | Static website built with Hugo | Static with Caddy | | 2 | Plausible | Website analytics | docker-compose | | 3 | Trilium | Notetaking | docker-compose | | 4 | Memos | Notetaking | docker-compose | | 5 | Miniflux | RSS Reader | supervisor | | 6 | Komga | Manga Reader | supervisor | | 7 | Synapse | Matrix homeserver | docker-compose | | 8 | Mautrix-Telegram Bridge | Matrix-Telegram Bridge | docker-compose | | 9 | Otto | Cute doggo discord bot that plays music and chess | supervisor | | 10 | Otto-web | Web app for otto | supervisor | | 11 | Minesweeper | Fully client-side minesweeper | Static with Caddy | | 12 | Self-hosting 101 Slides | Notes from my workshop, built with mdbook | Static with Caddy | | 13 | ... more slides | More static sites from other talks | Static with Caddy |

Deployment tools

supervisor configuration is simple enough that I can define all my services in the same /etc/supervisord.conf file (unlike systemd). This is a huge help because I can copy paste configuration from the same file. It is easy to understand so I know what to change.

The same is true for Caddy. I configure all my public sites in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile. Most website entries only need 3-4 words of configuration. This file also acts as a registry that I can refer to, to know which sites I have deployed and disabled. As an added plus, I don't have to manually configure SSL for sites deployed on Caddy. I like this much more than nginx and apache, where configuring new sites takes up multiple steps, and the Certbot SSL routine has to be repeated each time.

I use docker-compose instead of supervisor when a project has messy dependencies. It is easy to setup and I don't have to add supervisor entry for it. I find this convenient. I use docker ps to know which containers are running. I use volume mounts so that apps that use more disk space can use the larger 50GB disk.

rsync is very handy for deployments. I first heard about it after I had already had some experience hosting apps by hand on servers, and I felt stupid about all the hacks I had used before that to transfer files between my computer and the VPS. You can read more about it here.

While this is already a cost-effective setup, I want to move to actually hosting apps on my own hardware in the future. I've been putting it off because I've been on the move a lot recently. I recommend that even more if you can do it.

It's been a rewarding journey for me. I have rotated different tools before settling on these, and I'm sure I'll continue to explore more.

Ciao! 👋