James on The Self-Hosting Blog

Issue #20 • Competition time & Fun with Ansible!

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday! What a crazy month it's been as well, we've been looking into a lot of ansible stuff these past few weeks in preparation for some new features coming to the blog, so watch this space!! We're also preparing some tutorials for getting started with Ansible and some nice tips and tricks we've found along the way.

🎉Competition time!

As we head into Spooptober things are starting to get cold here in the UK, which means it's a perfect opportunity to buy that new home lab and start warming up the place!

Issue #17 • New Horizons

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

📰 The Self-Hosting Blog • Issue #17

Things have been quiet here, both of us have had far too many distractions this past month! Having said that, here is our first monthly dose of all things self hosting!

Because of how busy we've been we haven't been able to publish any new articles, but we do have some things in the works so watch this space! we're doing a write up on how to set up a Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi and we're also hoping to do some weird things with Docker...

Issue #6 • The self-hosted alternative to Trello and Notion

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Self-Hosting Blog • Issue #6

Happy Monday! Hope you had a good weekend!

Focalboard has taken the internet by storm this week, introducing itself as an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana. We have written a post about how you can set up your own instance to have a play around and see what all the fuss is about.

It's very early days for Focalboard, but what they have so far looks really promising.

Setting up a Kubernetes cluster (K3s) using Raspberry Pi's and Portainer

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“If bridge building were like programming, halfway through we’d find out that the far bank was now 50 meters farther out, that it was actually mud rather than granite, and that rather than building a footbridge we were instead building a road bridge.”

- Sam Newman, Building Microservices

The way we build software is changing. Instead of following a rigid specification we now build applications in a much more agile way which means we need to apply this mindset into our infrastructure and deployment process. Because of this almost all of the applications I build are containerised and sometimes split into modular parts. I work on most of my projects on my own which means having the ability to throw applications onto a server quickly with minimal set up is a huge plus for me.

Why should you should spend the time, effort (and money) on self-hosting?

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Self-hosting. Why? What's the point? Everything you could use is already available online. Why should you spend the time and effort (and money) on self-hosting projects?

A question that I have asked myself many times.

Why should I spend the time setting up my own servers, complicating already seamless services, re-inventing the wheel?

I can just use Dropbox to host my files. Maybe Google Photos to automatically save all my pictures instantly when I capture them. How about my password manager? I can just use LastPass, it does everything for me. I don't even need to think about it.