I’ve been running a small home server for several years now, and I’ve started to wonder whether it’s time to admit that I’m not as knowledgeable in this area as I’d like to be and should seek some more experienced opinions.
I know every setup is different and depends heavily on the applications and services being run, but I’m looking for a general idea and some perspective. What does your base system look like?
For example, I’m using Proxmox as a hypervisor and running several Debian LXCs on top of it.
There is another post in the community but in my opinion it’s a bit too generic. While every setup is built around individual requirements, I’m curious whether most experienced privacy security conscious self-hosters eventually settle on a similar foundation. Not sure if the consensus nowadays is to run BSD instances for example.
I have my two main servers with AlmaLinux. one is just for me and my personal data, the other is my media server for the seven seas, and apps for my friends to access.
I also have a few Raspberry PIs with DietPi as servers for things like my WireGuard server, backup AdGuard Home instance, PeaNut for UPS monitoring, and PiKVM
I use umbrel. It’s probably not the most secure or private and it’s kind of stupid to use because most everything I host is in Portainer.
But it’s nice to use because it handles all the network side and it’s all GUI. I would recommend it because it will give you a confidence boost, but you’ll quickly realize it’s not usable with many of the regular installable apps because you can’t customize them enough.
Portainer is like a GUI docker app afaik and I use AI to help customize the docker compose files. I do host a few things that are installable from the Umbrel appstore.
Some of my favourite things that I host are an onion service Monero node, a snowflake proxy, and Ente Photos.
I might switch to proxmox at some point because I imagine it has better security, but it would probably be a lot of learning when I already have a functioning setup.