I am somewhat late into the Linux-verse (three years in now) and want to move into self-hosting to do two things:
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Host my own Jitsi server and sessions. (or any other open source solution)
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Host my own solution to privately and securely share photographs of my kids and life here with my family abroad.
At some point, I want to host my own little static-website about myself which should “replace” having to give people a LinkedIn account or something.
The thing is, I know nothing about owning domains, etc. I have never done this before. I have been lurking around this forum to learn some of the basics, but would really like a more tailored reply (is possible). I am working in Europe.
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Which computer should I use? I want to host everything on my computer at home. I don’t want to go the VPS route.
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Where can I buy an inexpensive domain(s)? I assume I only need one.
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What other things do I need to consider? My current broadband is IPv4 only.
For point 3 - I’d suggest OpenVPN or Wireguard. Simple and secure without too much fuss involved in making it work. You would have to distribute keys and/or logins which might complicate things for the users if they are laymen though.
Also I’d agree 30mbps is not much, but for just a few users it should be fine.
In general I will +1 Nextcloud, its not the best and kinda slow and heavy, but its the best and most full featured UX for newbie users. Feels just like something like Google or Dropbox would put out, sans all the bullshit and tracking. You can extend it easily too if you ever need to.
I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.
I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.
Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.
yeah…
back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.
They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.
Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.
I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.
But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.