Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.

If you are using wireguard from the VPS to your home server, it buys you nothing more. If you have mobile devices connecting directly to the home server, Tailscale will let them connect directly in most cases, which is nice.

I’m willing to recommend Tailscale because I run headscale and it does basically everything a selfhoster needs. When the free version is passable, it’s harder to enshitify the commercial version.

Wordtsar looks fun. I may try it out. I feel like converting to markdown and then using a plugin to push it into Wordpress is maybe just the precursor to going full-on static site generator ;)

I used phi3:mini-4k for tagging all my bookmarks and don’t think it was any worse than a big model for that kind of job. It will run on a 10 year old cpu and a few gb of ram. (note: ai tagging of bookmarks isn’t that great, regardless, but it helps with search).

Yeah, I don’t bother sorting and organizing old files/bookmarks/whatever. Automatic tagging and full-text search solve that need. I try to keep recent stuff organized nicely though.

And you can put a secure note in there that has all the instructions necessary for them to access anything they might need (either by taking that note to someone skilled enough to follow the instructions, or by making it dead simple enough for them to just extract everything to an empty external ntfs hard drive in a simple file hierarchy).

I found that going back to bookmarking (and subscribing to RSS) is the best way to pull away from the algorithm-feed-trough of the social media websites and SEO bullshit. As I got more and more bookmarks of interesting sites, and found lots of feeds to subscribe too, I found I naturally gravitated away from the corporate web. It’s a requirement now if you are interested at all in indie-web type stuff, forums for esoteric hobbies or software communities, or personal web pages of interesting people -those things just don’t show up on search engines or social media anymore.

Does it still count as “self hosting” if one of your backups uses something like restic to push to b2 or hetzner storage boxes? It’s not consumer point and click.

I have one copy going there, and one going to a $50 thinkstation usff connected to a single external hard drive. It’s not raid, but if it dies, it just gets quickly replaced while I rely on the hosted backup.

NAT punching and proxying when a p2p connection between any 2 nodes cannot be achieved. It’s a world of difference with mobile devices when they always see each other, all the time. However, headscale does all that.

I switched from Tailscale to headscale, and I still would suggest Tailscale to anyone. It’s just really done well and they seem to actually love that self-hosters and hobbyists use their stuff.

Well, that’s what you are doing with ssh tunnels and remote browsers. If you want separation, they can put your computer in their router’s DMZ (demilitarized zone), so it doesn’t have access to their devices. Additionally, If you use the Tailscale IPs (or host names) instead of their local IPs on his network, they won’t ever change.

Yes. EBay and Amazon have a certified refurbished thing with warranties for a little more money, or monitor local classified sites if you can inspect them. I’ve bought a couple off Kijiji here in Canada, which is a bit like Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. The sellers didn’t advertise that they were a business selling off-lease stuff, but you can tell by the number of laptops they post.

Find out if there are any corporate off-lease machines being sold in your area. USFF machines are frequently used as mini desktops or point of sale computers then sold off for peanuts when warranties are done. Especially look at i3-8xxx generation, as they don’t support windows 11 fully.

Thanks, I like it. The downside is that the VPS can see the content of my services, so it’s no good if you don’t trust the VPS provider, or if the content is too sensitive to allow that. I think it’s a good trade-off for my usage though. Performs well. One of the services I proxy is a rpi serving images downloaded from weather satellites. Connecting directly to the pi is super slow, but the proxy caching makes it 100% faster.

I use a $2 VPS in Quebec that proxies my home stuff over Tailscale. It uses Caddy and does the TLS encryption and caching. It has the providers DDOS protection, plus I have configured the firewall to have some further protection.

It could also just directly forward TLS packets over any sort of VPN if you didn’t trust the VPS provider or wanted to reduce cpu load.

Make a big flat pancake of batter and use a cookie-cutter?

The VPS is a $2 instance and very under powered, however it has a dedicated static IP and some Ddos protection. The basement computer is powerfully and capable of providing various services, but I don’t want any trouble with my home IP address. Tailscale let’s the VPS see the home computer securely.

I use both. Caddy on a VPS that reaches into my Tailscale network and proxies services hosted on a computer in my basement.

Either DMZ on the first router, or bridge mode on the second.