I find they tend to make things more difficult, because as soon as you want to do anything outside of the nice box they give you, it’s much harder than doing it on a regular setup.

Plus these days basically every application has a docker image, and deploying with docker compose is really easy and quick.

I do use Proxmox and Portainer though, since they are mostly just sitting on top of standard systems.

To give you an idea of what you’ll experience in your self-hosting journey: adding services is the easy part, maintaining a system in production over many years is the hard part. And the self hosting solutions you mean are quite bad at that. Eventually I ditched even Proxmox because its updates are cumbersome and you never know wheter you’ll end up with a working system after the upgrade.

Ultimately, you want to avoid any complex transitions in your system altogether. Decouple everything, make everything disposable, especially your OS. The ootb-selfhosting-solutions are the antithesis of that: lots of hidden magic behind colorful buttons, which makes it immensely hard to get a working setup the second something goes wrong. And that will inevitably happen with time passing.

Well, managing servers is part of my job. So stuff like what you mention doesn’t really make it easier for me and it adds unnecessary overhead.

I’m a tinkering nerd, so I like to have a headless Linux box.

I did use self hosting operating systems in the beginning, and they’re nice. However, when I tried just a plain Ubuntu headless install, I felt way more accomplished after getting everything working.

No, maybe use them as a toy for app discovery, but otherwise when those projects get eventually abandoned, then it’s a mess to move out

Plus they always try to hide how stuff works behind the scenes so that day that upgrade script has a bug and fails, it’s hard to revert to a working stage.

It’s like trying to get in the classic car business without any mechanical knowledge.

That 1950s Ford was working great when you bought it, but if you have no idea how it works, you need to pay hundreds to fix it. Except here it’s difficult to find someone that can drop in and fix your automated self hosted setup, even for money

Plain old Debian on the hardware with all services living in LXC containers. LXC containers are like working with VMs or ‘real’ machines so I only needed to learn about 3 more commands to get new services running, the rest is regular old Linux.

I’ve used OpenMediaVault in the past and it is great, especially for new users, but I just prefer a bare-bones solution.

I didn’t even know this type of this existed until somewhat recently. I usually write my own systemd files to host containers with podman and manage them with systemd.

I use Cosmos Cloud because it makes managing my containers and hosting them a lot easier. It includes a reverse proxy (with anti ddos and anti bot), an OIDC server, a container manager (lets you import docker composes too), easy container deploy through app store, multiple users, and more. It’s also supposed to come out with a few features that let you connect through a VPN (so your services are not directly exposed) and set up cgnat bypass / hide your ip.

Just docker and some scripts. I used unraid for a bit but it annoyed me.

I use Debian for my self host stuff, I did start out with Mandrake and webmin. but after wanting to customise some config, I moved to deb

So what you’re asking is “y u no host Yunohost”?

I usually use Debian with a docker-compose.yml file for most things. If there’s a Debian package for some software, I prefer that over using Docker.

Having said that, I’ve just built a new home server and am using Unraid on it. Its Docker UI is pretty nice.

I only use industrial solutions: Kubernetes, Ansible and Docker. My infrastructure is like my source code: versioned in git, maintainable, testable and repeatable.

I just have a couple of headless AlmaLinux boxes. Almost all of my apps are set up inside docker containers. If I have some time, I do plan to change the system to Debian stable/NixOS, given the recent RHEL drama. But otherwise, I think this is the way to go. Self hosting “solutions” tend to actually create more problems than they solve.

Unraid works well for me, everything is in docker containers, and I imagine I could move them elsewhere if needed. But over the past few years that’s not been necessary.