Post Start 12/12/24
Self Hosting is the practice of running your own private web servers, from a run of the mill websites to media servers, dropbox replacements, DNS sinkholes, and email servers. Personally I’ve been doing web hosting for a little over 2 years starting in 12th grade of highschool to get a minecraft server up and running. But I wasn't going to settle for any old minecraft server setup. For years I had complained about my friends Minecraft servers not being up consistently because “I’m not at home and I’m incapable of asking someone to walk up to a computer and hit two buttons because I can’t talk to my own family” or “It's raining outside and we like to pretend surge protectors don't exist” or something equally ridiculous. I was going to do better, and after getting a great deal on a computer from a long distance friend (there's a whole funny story that goes along with this involving a drive by nerf gun shooting at a gas station, but that's for another time). Good CPU, an insane 128 GB of memory and a hard drive that I somehow fried, and then replaced with a 16TB drive.
Now for the software. My first choice was Linux, a while back I was screwing around with a virtual machine after putting in some sketchy scripts on my laptop that unlocked Hyper-V despite me not having the correct windows license and proceeding to install Ubuntu. This was incidentally also related to working on a minecraft server except this time it was about me learning SSH so I can remotely start up a minecraft server hidden on my dads computer. Of course after mastering Ubuntu (dicking around with it for 5 minutes and then getting bored), I went straight to trying to install arch linux and following a tutorial got it in like 30 minutes, got KDE thought it was pretty cool and then kinda moved on with my life… until I had a thousand dollar server computer sitting in the corner of my room… except I still did nothing with it for like a month, then ran out of things to do and decided I might as well try and put it to good use. My first choice in operating system was to just do arch again, which worked and then I got around to reading more about linux, and switched to debian because of stability reasons.
So what can you do with a weird desktop with no keyboard and no screen? Well a lot actually, you will need a keyboard and screen for setting up RDP (if you're not insane). RDP stands for remote desktop protocol, and this is how you will interact with your computer if you need a GUI. However as you work you will grow comfortable using the command line in which you should use SSH. SSH simply allows you access to the command line of the computer you're connected to. With these tools you can pretty much install and run anything. I will all the notable things I’ve done with my server in the future in greater detail, but it includes, fake netflix and spotify (Jellyfin Media Server), Network wide add and tracker blocking (Pi-hole), remote game server manager (Pterodactyl) and a bunch of other weird a wacky things, that I use on the daily, hence most utilitarian hobby.
Post End 12/20/24