My Week of Self-Hosting Adventures

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

This week I went all‑in on self‑hosting, from tinkering with operating systems to spinning up my own VPS and deploying apps with Docker. I grabbed a basic hosting plan for around ₹700, and it was totally worth the experiment. The journey started with the essentials: creating users, updating packages, patching the system—basically getting everything production‑ready. For exposing ports I chose Caddy instead of the usual Nginx.

Apps I Tested

Glance

• Simple self‑hostable server status/dashboard

Uptime Kuma

• Self‑hosted uptime monitoring

Outline

• Team knowledge base

Zerobyte

• (no additional details provided)

ntfy

• Simple notification service

n8n

• Workflow automation

Each of these was a mini‑adventure in itself.

Why Try Self‑Hosting?

Self‑hosting gives you control, teaches you a ton, and is honestly just fun. It forces you to understand the underlying infrastructure and lets you customize services exactly the way you need them.

Next Steps

I’m experimenting with building my own OS (more on that in an upcoming series!), but for now I’m focusing on something simple: setting up a Raspberry Pi to host my own home VPS. Could be the next chapter in this journey—stay tuned! 🚀