I’ve been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I’m still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just “install this distro and click these buttons”? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I’m not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from “you can check your IP address using ip a” would be appreciated.
More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I’ll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don’t mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I’m able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that’s step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they’re either too simplistic (no I don’t want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don’t know how DHCP works).
Thanks in advance
I second containers. I use Unraid and have found it pretty simple to get started. At one point I was using a vm on unraid as my gaming machine, although I have moved away from that and now have a low power Unraid server for hosting.
I agree. Unraid is great because it is user friendly and easily scalable. I started using it a few years ago just to set up a NAS with two HDDs and a Plex library and now have over 50 containers and 8 drives. That’s the beauty of it. You want more drives, just add one. I feel like TrueNAS is probably technically better but this feature was really important to me because I had a feeling that scaling up would be in my future.
The community is very supportive and SpaceInvader One is an amazing resource, as well as Trash (SIO is not trash, Trash is the name of another resource lol)