there are lots of cheap domain registrar options but if you’re looking for a cheap .com I always go for cloudflare, they also offer .org for pretty cheap and many other options as well. The domains other than the common ones are pretty decently priced as well. I migrated all my domains there last year and it’s really simple, integrates with their DNS really well and payment is pretty streamlined.
Some people seem to hate on it, but I love Docker, it works well for what it has to do and has relatively low overhead as far as I can tell. I personally virtualize a Debian server on Proxmox for my containers just so as to keep everything even more compartmentalized, but it takes more work than it’s worth to set up.
And if you don’t like Docker for whatever reason, you can also try Podman which is API compatible with Docker for the most part.
That’s a fair point, I self host stuff more out of convenience over privacy (although that’s still a factor) so I guess I just care less about them watching my traffic I suppose. CF is just so easy with their Argo Tunnels and domain registrar service.
I use their tunnels in conjunction with internal split horizon DNS so I don’t have to forward any ports and can access things locally faster so I’m probably breaking this rule but I haven’t gotten any emails or letters about it yet. Crossing my fingers they don’t care lol
It’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about this but didn’t they change their ToS in regards to media on their network? I thought I read something about that clause getting removed at some point a few months back.
ARM software support is just generally rough, yeah it’s good on RPi (and Mac) but on other boards it typically sucks, namely the cheaper boards OP would be buying. Here’s a couple software examples though, I’m a big docker user and just the other day I was trying to run I believe Mastodon and Lemmy on an ARM device but there was just no image for it. I’m sure I could build an image myself but for someone just getting into Homelabbing (like OP), x86 is the platform to use.
I’d recommend an x86 board because as great as the RPI and similar can be, ARM just doesn’t have the same support for a lot of things you might want to self host. I personally like to spring for a used thinclient PC off of eBay, because they have about the same resources as a Raspberry Pi but on an x86 platform. With my thin clients I typically install Alpine but a really light Debian install could work as well, and then from there you can go about installing Docker etc for a little homelab. Even better, if you get lucky and get a couple of them you could mess around with clustering them and some light Kubernetes at home. I’ve got mine running PiHole and Unbound on Alpine to serve my whole house with DNS and it works great. I don’t think I’ve had hardly any downtime issues or anything of that sort.
TL;DR: try a couple cheap thin clients from eBay and you can run some light stuff on them for cheap.
As recommended by others, you might want to use a real public domain that you own, and a reverse proxy for split horizon DNS. I personally run Bind9, Unbound, and PiHole as my DNS servers. Bind9 handles split horizon, so if I request my domain internally it gets routed through Bind. Then bind hands it off to PiHole for adblocking, and PiHole makes requests through Unbound set up as a recursive DNS server which doesn’t rely on any external DNS. I also use Traefik as a reverse proxy for all of my services. My set up is more complicated than necessary, and if you want just a few local domains, PiHole + a reverse proxy is plenty good for your needs.
Here is something I wrote previously under a similar post: “Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.” As I said, OpenWRT is very versatile and runs on many different routers, just find one you like and install it! Many of the supported routers provide Gigabit switching, and some even have multigit for your server connection.
Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.
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Proxmox sounds like it fits their use case , it’s a useful and tweakable solution, and because it’s based on KVM you can pass through hardware with IOMMU. Personally, I run Proxmox on my (admittedly not very good) home server with like 12 gigs of ram and a processor from the early 2010s, handles a few VMs just fine with hardware passthrough to a TrueNAS VM. I do run a lot of my micro services on some cheap thin clients (DNS mainly) for redundancy as I mentioned, they were cheap. Home Assistant OS is happy on Proxmox as is Jellyfin with hardware acceleration.