contact me at [email protected] link
I’ve been running my server for over 2 years now and learned a lot while doing so. Other than just personal enjoyment, here are some of the reasons I think you might enjoy running your own server.
- What to run
The most common question I get when I tell people that I run a server is “Why do you need a server?” for that I do have a couple of reasons.
The first and most useful component I’m running is my Pi-hole server. Pi-hole is a private dns server that . Basically, it gets rid of a lot of tracking and ads when I visit websites. But what I found out was, other than websites, it also blocks tracking for softwares, such as some of the IDEs that I use. Probably not perfectly, but I feel a bit more confident that my code will be harder to be seen by some other third parties.
Another equally important service is Unraid. It is a NAS that I use to store all my assets and unfinished projects. I had a habit of collecting as much as assets I can find so I can use them later if I can. However, their file sizes are not small and they were taking a lot of storage in my main pc. So my Unraid server keeps my files externally.
I also run a remark42 server so you can write comments on my website. Although it goes down from time to time due to my personal maintenence, you should be able to reliably leave a comment if you want.
There are many other quality of life services that came and went, but these are the ones that I use the most at the moment.
- Where You should run it
You can rent a cloud server and run it from there, but that woudn’t be the point of this article. I’ve been maintaining my own hardware, and I reccommend you do too, if you can. You don’t have to buy any expensive, shining new servers. You just need an old used pc, with some place with good ventilation.
I first started running mine because my mom was throwing away her pc and I thought that was a waste of good hardware. With 4GB of ram, it couldn’t handle windows 10, so I replaced it with 2 x 8gb ddr3s I had lying around. No gpus with an old intel cpu that I can’t even remember the model name of. However it handled Pi-hole and Unraid without any problem at all (it struggled time to time though).
The only upgrade I added after that is the cpu, now a 4th gen i5, with an esata card to attach some external storage. I also got a UPS, and that’s about it. The whole setup is under 1000$ and without the drives, probably under 500$. The drives are the expensive part, but if you are not plannng to run a nas, that wouldn’t be too much of a concern.
