First I’d ask if you need to open ports at all - if this is only for your family’s use then Tailscale or one of its alternatives can accomplish the same goal without opening ports in your firewall or worrying about security flaws in your hosted services.
If it’s for public use, maybe consider cloudflare tunnel?
Personally I use miniflux, which has been amazing. It offers the fever and Google reader APIs, which many phone apps can talk to which means the UI can be almost whatever you want (I’m using reeder on iOS)
It supports all the feed formats, but for sites that don’t offer a feed you’ll need some other solution like kill-the-newsletter.com
That’s fair, but I’ll point out that eating is sort of a subscription model.
I know nothing about this person, but on multiple occasions I’ve had the thought that if I was a gazillionaire, I’d sponsor a bunch of open source. Maybe this is that? I’ll choose to stay hopeful (though I’m kinda dumb about this sorta stuff)
Your quoted paragraph is the only sane alternative to the ad supported internet. Think Fastmail vs gmail - both are run for a profit, but fastmail’s business model is to simply sell subscriptions. Their incentives are better aligned with the consumer, and while nobody’s going to become a billionaire off the company I have to imagine that they have a very reliable customer base.
Good software should be paid for, devs gotta eat
My advice is to just use Tailscale. It’s a 5 minute setup and you get access to your stuff from anywhere, securely, without opening ports to the public internet. It will give your server a second IP address, which you will be able to access from any other device which is also registered to your Tailscale account.
My personal setup:
Encryption has very little overhead; modern CPUs have hardware acceleration for all the common algorithms. What are you doing that’s so performance constrained you can’t tolerate even that?
Bootable thumb drive with a persistent OS installed and preconfigured?
It’s a lot more painful if you don’t know what you’re doing and disregard good advice.
Well then maybe you should also pass on making generalizations about selfhosting?
…… am i a container bro?
You’ll want to learn some database administration before you attempt this. Simpler to just give them all their own instance.
That’s correct! I can share my docker-compose if that’s helpful. I’m on my phone, but I believe they just have to share a volume.
To clarify, calibre-web is not “the docker version of calibre”, it’s a separate project that provides a nice web frontend for an existing calibre database.
Yeah, they’re a complete solution. OS and everything
I can’t answer all of it, but much of what you’re asking for can be accomplished with a simple samba share. If you can handle nextcloud, you can set up samba.
It’s perfectly reasonable to use the same device to run your web services and as your NAS. There’s no reason you can’t divide them up later if you want.
You’ll need to pick a file system, I suggest either BTRFS or ZFS though there are several options. BTRFS is neat because it’s flexible - you can make huge changes without ever dismounting. You’ll want to plan for a multiple-drive solution, and you’ll need to decide how you’d like to balance performance, space efficiency, and failure tolerance. Whatever you do, pick one single drive size and stick with it – different disk sizes xan work, but there are restrictions and they complicate things.
A good backup is automatic, versioned, and encrypted. You preferably want one offsite and one onsite for anything irreplaceable. Restic is a good tool, as is Borg backup, as are many other options. Personally I run a restic job nightly, with backblaze b2 as a destination. I also have a local backup on normally-unplugged drives that I run manually every couple weeks.
For plumbing, tailscale is really nice. Easy to set up, and you get remote access to everything with minimal config and no holes in your firewall.
Regarding hardware, you have many options. Old laptops actually make great homelabs:
Their biggest drawback is a lack expandability/upgradability, though you can get pretty good USB drive bays to partially address that. Another option is the intel NUC family and its competitors, basically tiny desktops built out of laptop parts. A third option is to build a normal desktop PC, either into a normal case or a rack-mount one if you have the space. The off-the-shelf options work, but are limiting in my experience. That said, they’re the way to go if you don’t want to do a lot of tinkering.
Whichever solution you go with, personally I wouldn’t start with any less than 4 drive bays. More is better, you can’t have too many. You should be able to shuck your old drives and put them into any 3.5" drive bay.
For reference, my setup is an intel NUC with a thunderbolt 10 drive bay plugged in. I have a mishmash of disks, ~48tb total in BTRFS raid 1giving me 24tb usable. Running a good handful of docker containers and a samba share, all accessible over tailscale.
Sorry for the info dump, happy to answer questions.
They do support multiple users, but they gated the feature behind a subscription.
Use any old computer you have lying around as a server. Use Tailscale to connect to it, and don’t open any ports in your home firewall. Congrats, you’re self-hosting and your risk is minimal.