The Ever-Expanding Home Server

Everything I self-host, in one convenient spot.

The Ever-Expanding Home Server
Photo by Jonathan / Unsplash

I run a lot of software, and minimal hardware. Maybe some day that will reverse course, but for now, it's quite a lot of software. Everything is routed behind Cloudflare, and private applications are behind Cloudflare Zero Trust (w/ GitHub for SSO)

My Main Server

Software

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Everything besides Plex & apache2 is ran inside of Docker.
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Want to spin this up for yourself? Have a look at my docker-compose.yml here!

Hardware

  • OS: Ubuntu Server
  • Host: OptiPlex 3010
  • CPU: Intel i5-3470
  • RAM: 8Gb
  • GPU: GTX 1050
  • Boot Disk: 500Gb SATA SSD
  • Media Disk: 14Tb Easystore

Game Server

Software

Windows VM:

Hardware

  • OS: Ubuntu Server
  • Host: ThinkCentre M715q
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2400GE
  • RAM: 16Gb

Email

Yes, I am running my own email server too. Granted it's not fully self hosted but it basically counts.

After setting everything up it's been rock solid for multiple years. I don't send a whole lot of email but I've had no issues sending to Gmail users, although I've heard Microsoft is a bit worse about receiving email from self-hosters.

I'm using the basic $5/mo Cloud Compute from Vultr with Mail-in-a-Box.

Backup

I don't have a very sophisticated backup system, eventually I'll bring it up to acceptable levels but here's what I currently do.

I run my backup system off of a Raspberry Pi 4B w/ 4Gb of RAM running Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

Nightly, I backup (using rsync):

  • Docker Volumes
  • My Home Folder(s)
  • Website Data (/var/www, /etc/apache2, /etc/letsencrypt)
  • MySQL Databases (w/ mysqldump)
  • My Mail-in-a-Box emails
  • My Family iMac (Home Folder is backed up to my Media Disk on my Main Server)

And for now, that's about it. I want to get more into hardware but it's challenging for me right now.