{maique}

Twice a year I get the urge to self host something. Not even something in particular. Just something. I like tinkering, and that is what this whole thing is about.

I’d march on down to Linode (now Akamai), Hetzner, or DigitalOcean and fire up a server. There are many MANY others offering VPS, but these are the ones that always come up, and they have been favoraby reviewed by many. Picking a distro is the first thing you’ll have to decide. Quite frankly, it’s already getting tricky! I, not a Linux (or server) person, will usually go with Ubuntu. Just because there are a lot of users doing the same, Ubuntu is everywhere, and tutorials are easy to find.

Deciding what specs that server will have is the second thing to figure out. It really depends on what I’ll run once the server is up. And I don’t know. I really don’t. There are thousands of things you can install and try. From well know apps, used by everyone, to little ones, known only by a few hardcore users. Each has its own technical requirements.

My next challenge is always finding something I need. And I don’t need anything, not really. By now I have all the apps I can ever use, of course. So I’ll just pick something I’d like to see working, and that’s a lot of fun already.

Following online tutorials, copying and pasting commands into the Terminal, some of them clearly very much above my knowledge level.

Terminal this, configure that, harden this other thing, set up that other one.

If things go wrong here, and sometimes they do, I’m a little lost. I don’t have the knowledge required to figure out what got me into the situation, and what needs to be done to get out of it. Most of the times, it’s either back to the search engine looking for an answer, or just nuke the whole thing and start over.

If I don’t screw things up, I’ll be ready to move on, and follow the instructions pertaining to the app I’m installing.

It is a learning experience, for sure. Keeping the server updated, without breaking any part of it, is not an easy job for me. Wondering if everything is safe, from data loss to hacking attempts, is daunting.

If I install Yunohost (Free), or Cloudron (Freemium), some things will be easier once it’s running, as they both have a big app catalog than you can then install with a single click, or close to that. Take a look, for instance, at the incredible amount of available apps you can run after you have Yunohost installed. It’s impressive. Cloudron also has an incredible catalog, of course.

There is always some extra details to take care of, but it’s not that terrible.

There are also droplets you can try (on DigitalOcean for instance), that make things a little easier. One-click install, or very close to that.

What next? I try this or that for a couple of days, but then I’ll tinker a bit more, and things will fail. Or I won’t commit to the app, because I don’t have a real life use for it. Or I won’t trust it to keep data safe in the long run (not the app’s fault, but my own).

Usually the server will be up for, at most, a week. I’ll shut it down, forget all about it for half a year, and repeat. I’ll go through the catalog of apps, and think I should maybe try something…

Truth is I rather pay someone a small fee (usually in the vicinity of what this server would cost me) to host that for me, and take care of the nitty gritty parts. Of course with my server I can run multiple apps, and save money that way, but it’s just too much trouble.

I have tried a multitude of apps, and I always end up shutting down the whole thing. Ghost, Wordpress, Nextcloud, Wallabag, FreshRSS, they all end up in the bin.

Enter PikaPods. Self-hosting for the rest of us. Or, as they say

PikaPods combines the privacy of running your own server with the convenience of commercial cloud services.

A mix of self-hosting and managed hosting, they will take care of OS and app update, while you still get to pick the specs of the pod, and have access to the data (you can use FTP). No need for your sysadmin skills, at all. That, for me, is great. The list of apps you can run on your pods is (still?) much smaller than on those other platforms, but it’s growing. Maybe you’ll find something you can use already. A few cool apps are available already.

I moved a big Ghost install to their service, configured Mailgun with no problem, mapped my domain in a sec, and no one even noticed the move. It’s been running stable since then. I have less restrictions here, and I’m paying 25% of what Ghost(Pro) used to cost.

I’m happy this service was mentioned to me, and will surely get another pod going. I just need to pick another app. And, very likely, will shut it down after a week. Or maybe not, this time.