It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

I started with the 2020 tutorial from these guys. They’ve updated it a few times through the years so I can’t speak to how good the new version is, but I’m sure it’s probably plenty to get started.

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/

After I followed this guide, I’ve deviated significantly as I learned and started to do my own thing. It’s a great place to start and learn the basics of containerized applications and once you have that then you can host most things that are dockerized. All I need to do now to start up a new service is pull up the README on Docker Hub (or better yet, if LinuxServer.io has a container that does what I want to do, on their website), figure out what I want to do with the variables and any setup that needs to happen, and then I add it to my .yml and start it up!

I’ve got it all tracked now on GitHub so I can see what I’ve changed and when and if something were to go wrong I could revert back to a known-good configuration.

De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.

Engineering background for reference.

It was just always so annoying having to go into the iPhone keyboard punctuation twice for each domain

Man, some people have really thought of everything. I am so impressed.

Honestly, I learned a ton from these guys: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/

I’ve diverged a good bit since then of the services I’ve added and the specifics of how I configure things (I still use Traefik whereas I think they’ve shifted to Nginx), but they have a great example of a GitHub repo and what it looks like to manage a self-hosted server.

For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.

So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.

Absolutely no shot I can afford 40 TB of SSDs for my NAS

You don’t need portainer for it to be easy! The wiki is quite great at providing setup examples for docker compose, regular docker, and others!

I figure if I’m already using their proxy, may as well have my domains there as well… one fewer party to trust.

Not something that I need but absolutely beautiful UI and congrats on the 2.0 release!

Yeah tbh if I’m already going to be using Cloudflare for DNS, might as well use them for their registrar as well. One fewer entity to trust.

They own the domain instead of you. They can then act as a middle man between any inquiries and you, and as a company, they’re able to shield you from many 3rd parties.

Definitely a fair point, always good to see that in a project

Although in the subscription version, SSO is not available unless you purchase the “Contact Us” version. https://sso.tax would like a word.

Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”

I use Fastmail.

My domain has me plus the wife, and she’s not willing to tolerate any amount of fiddling or bugs or anything, so we needed something that would Just Work™, and Fastmail fits the bill quite well.

Their features are great, I actually prefer their app over the native iOS app, and they’ve been rock solid since I signed up. I can also have any amount of aliased and I can put all three of my domains on there. Plus they’re not Google which was the biggest thing I needed them to be.

Love / hate how it’s always the easiest answer. For me it’s always fucking DNS.

Dang I really like your idea of testing the backup in a VM… I was worried about how I’d test mine since I only have the one machine, but a VM on my desktop or something should do just fine.