Doony & Me

My Self Hosting Story

I’ve now been running my own Virtual Private Server for three months, and I thought I’d share what I’ve got and what I did.

The reason for doing this was purely personal. I’m not technical, but I do enjoy ‘tinkering’ and thought it would be good to try and host my own VPS.

I already have a couple of domains, through Fasthosts, so it made sense to use them and I selected a a VPS to suit me.

SIDENOTE: I might already be growing out of it - but that’s another story!

The one I chose has a single CPU, 2GB RAM and 60GB memory, onto which I installed Linux with Debian12.

So far, so simple. The cost for this is £32 for the year.

Once bought, I configured the DNS of my domain and I was pleased it all went very smoothly. I created a couple of sub-domains too, which will become clear soon.

Once all that was done I installed Yunohost. This is a service which makes server admin relatively simple. Just what I need.

Following the instructions, this was really simple to install, and there is a directory of apps that can be installed with a click. No need to run any command line prompts.

However, another reason for this project is to learn and improve my use of using these prompts, and I soon worked out what I needed to do there as well.

With Yunohost installed and configured, I looked at the apps to download. Yunohost itself is free to download and use.

  1. Nextcloud - I’ve been a Nextcloud user for quite a while on a hosted service, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of creating my own, and moving all my documents across. It’s great to finally host it myself. The VPS is just enough to run it without any issues, and the storage I have, so far, is satisfactory for my needs. The user interface for Nextcloud is not the prettiest, but it is functional.

  2. One of my subdomains was to host Collabora Online - the office suite. This was relatively painless to link to my Nextcloud account, so now I can create documents, spreadsheets and more, within Nextcloud

  3. I installed GoToSocial on another subdomain. The subdomain is a requirement for GoToSocial. It can sometimes be a little lonely on my own instance of the Fediverse but, again, it’s something I wanted to do. You can check it out here

I run weekly backups and, for storage reasons, delete the older ones frequently. I don’t have a need to keep multiple backups anyway.

My Current Tech Stack

I am as far from a nerd as you can get, however, I have to admit to feeling quite nerdy when I use this stuff.

At the moment I am not interested in hosting my own email, but never say never!!

Is this something you have done? Are there any recommendations to improving what I’m doing?

Let me know in the comments

#technology