I have several years of Linux experience and I know how to fix my own problems, and I have experience self-hosting using Docker and Docker Compose, but I really feel that I don’t know how to self-host and that I just copy and paste commands without understanding it, I would really like to learn how to self-host by myself but I don’t know how I can start or with what resources for newbies I can start with.
I am interested in self-hosting several services, but the one I am currently most interested in is changedetection.io, as there are multiple such services but they all require a membership fee, and I prefer to self-host on my own.
I’ve heard a lot about Proxmox and I always thought it was some kind of VPS, so I can selfhost it for myself?
And another problem that I had with my previous selfhosting attempts is that I didn’t really know how to solve my problems, I could run the script and set up my domain, but when it comes to solving some problem I really couldn’t because or there was little specific documentation of my specific problem.
For example, I remember having selfhosted Nextcloud and when I wanted to enable ffmpeg so that my videos had a miniature I found instructions on how to do it but with different selfhosting methods.
Proxmox is a hypervisor, which is an OS that is built to run Virtual Machines (proxmox also runs containers). It is open source and can be installed for free, just like any other linux distribution, the same way Windows is installed. There are tons of tutorials out there on how to use it.
From there, you could setup some popular containers, including nextcloud, or even install full OS’s in virtual machines to install software manually on them. It is a great first step, especially if you have limited access to hardware.
Holy shit, that sound super useful, thank you so much and everyone who has answered.
I went Proxmox when I was in your shoes a few months ago.
It installs like a Linux OS so you already know how to do that.
You get a webui to work from.
From there, YouTube is a massive help. Watch videos on “how to install WHATEVER on Proxmox” and just replace WHATEVER with whatever you want to prod until it works.
My first service was Home Assistant, which I already ran on a Pi. I had that fully migrated in a day giving me a spare Pi.
Next it was Portainer, and used that for Adguard and Uptime Kuma, and then I got fancy and threw secondary servers of those services on my pi and put that on the network as a fail over.
So yeah, just install it and try to do shit, YouTube is your friend.
Over the last few months I’ve made a whole bunch of different combinations of VMs, LXC and Docker until now, where I have Home Assistant, a NAS and a Debian server which I deploy docker stacks into.
At one point I had about 15 different machines I could spin up, but now it’s just the 3. The great thing about Proxmox is you can just create and destroy to your hearts content