Hands On Self-Hosting

Note: This wiki was made for a workshop in Mar 2026.

The recording is still being processed, and will be uploaded soon

Thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the credits for the workshop!

Prologue: What is Self Hosting?

The act of providing or serving digital content or an online service typically delivered by a business.

The service or content is generally served locally from your own hardware. Often "self-hosters" use older Enterprise-grade hardware from their home internet connections however they also use other hosting providers hardware. This is still considered self-hosting.

While people who get into self-hosting often use their own hardware, using hosting providers help abstract away the hardware difficulties while getting you 90% of the way there.

What are some things we can create by self-hosting?

• Hosting a website is one of the lowest barrier of entry. (Nginx)

• Media-streaming services (Jellyfin, Plex)

• File synchronization services (Gitlab, Syncthing, Garage, etc)

• Photo galleries (Immich)

• Databases (Supabase, Convex, Postgres, etc)

• Game-servers (Minecraft, Rust, Factorio)

• You should checkout: Awesome-Selfhosted!

Why not just pay/get someone to do these for you?

• It’s great for learning! (and fun!)

• Self-custody of your own data (this is limited with VPS)

• Run servers/services that aren’t available as a SaaS

• Get fine-grained control over your service (great for debugging personal projects)

You can learn more here:

r/SelfHosted Wikir/SelfHosted