Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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The unfortunate reality is 'what I've got' is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I'm taking the free/borrowed friend's setup.
My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don't need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you're running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I'm missing is the storage.
You are on the right path. Most stuff people self host requires very little horsepower. Most of your CPU will be idle in the end. Things might get expensive if you want to add a lot of storage, but the good news is that can be added later as you need it. I think you'll be surprised just how much a modern-ish laptop can host.
The thing with that laptop though, is that you’re probably able to upgrade the storage and RAM if you need to. That’s valuable. I mean, hilariously expensive to do at this point, but possible none the less.
The way I see it, have a think about what you want to achieve, what self-hosted service is most important to you, and start with that. If you have 200gb of music and you’re sick of giving Spotify money, spin up a Navidrome container and a free Tailscale* account so you can stream your own music to your phone wherever you are. Then see how your laptop responds to that. If it falls over then perhaps you’ll need to have another look at your hardware, but honestly, it probably won’t.
As for the RAM, I used SSH to hook into my server yesterday so I could watch htop on it from another computer while I was importing hundreds of photos into Immich. All four CPU cores were maxed out at 100% and it sounded like a jet engine, but the RAM usage sat steady at around 5.5gb. And that’ll do for me. _ *Tailscale is magic, btw. A free account allows 100 devices, so if you’re running things just for yourself it means you can access everything wherever you are. For free. With basically no setup.
I'm fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there's a slot for another. The only reason I wanna 'start' by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.
I'm 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).
Honestly a not-the-worst back-up for a starter is just regularly (monthly for example) plugging in an external SSD, HDD or even a memory stick and put data you value in cold storage. Almost all can be rebuilt and gathered again, except data you personally value.