Free at last

Hello,

I can now officially announce it: I have crossed the Rubicon of self-hosting—the act of hosting one’s own server(s) and/or Internet service(s) at home for ALL my Internet tools.

For several years, I had been experimenting and testing various solutions to host services on dedicated servers or directly at home. Some of my customers have used some of them.

I would regularly reopen the file as the anniversary date of my hosting contract approached for the email and web servers.

This year, I seized the opportunity.

Technical Infrastructure

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I am using a machine running Linux Debian on which I rely on Docker services.

I use the reverse proxy NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager).

For electronic messaging, I use Mailcow. I chose to use this “packaged” tool even though, in general, I prefer to remain as independent as possible.

Motivations for Changing

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Among the key motivations, here are the most strategic ones:

• Regaining more freedom to install whatever I wish without
  • being throttled by a strategy decided by others, nor
  • limited by technology that no longer truly evolves and is resting on its laurels.
• Having access to features that were sometimes restricted—wrongfully, in my opinion—by the host.
• Being able to deploy modern services with high added value;
• No longer penalizing Tor network users who do me the honor of visiting (including myself);
• Moving toward a vision of the Internet that suits me better;
• And more broadly, a vision of the world.

All this may seem rather abstract, especially since I don’t want to disclose all the points that bothered me in the previous situation, but believe me, it manifested in very concrete ways.

Great Satisfaction Already

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I already feel much lighter, and I have already found many reasons to be satisfied with my choice.

To begin with, I feel better for having finally turned my back on commercial practices that go against my vision of the world.

The same goes for technological and technical approaches and technical approaches that I consider profoundly inept and thoughtless. Plenty of others exist in this new world, but I can choose not to subscribe to them. Until now, I had to endure them while biting my tongue.

One example: the filling of DNS zones with heaps of records I never requested and never used. Add to that a undoubtedly poorly-crafted management interface, and I regularly found myself with “this site is slowing down your browser” messages and unacceptable waiting times to perform very simple operations.

I have already encountered immense joy and satisfaction in tackling various tools that I couldn’t really test without taking the leap to a dedicated server (testing them offline is not the same thing at all).

While it was already much more advanced than most people’s, I have been able to further perfect my email management strategy.

From now on, I freely have:

• A catch-all address;
• Numerous services:
  • Rspamd for spam protection;
  • ClamAV for antivirus;
  • Sieve by Dovecot for automated processing; and
  • An integrated management tool, easy to use and full of useful features to make a manager’s life easier.

Promises and Hopes

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For me, this migration is an opportunity to make a major technological leap that was becoming essential.

I was able to do it without incurring costs—on the contrary, since I am removing the burden of external hosting.

I can now consider extending or developing the tool very extensively. The possibilities are countless, even if I know I won’t be able to do everything: the machine I’m using isn’t exactly young, and some applications like MongoDB require things I don’t have.

Too Easy

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Of course, I was already able to do (and was doing) great things. I had already made this leap several times without finalizing the switch.

It was not difficult for me to cross this threshold.

So, it’s done…

Better late than never.

Note

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I had first decided to use a tool like Coolify or Dokploy. After several attempts in that direction, I don’t think these tools are mature or serious enough for me.

• I like reliable, “no-surprise” solutions.
• I prefer to master what I’m doing when I do something.

Best regards,

Marc JESTIN
https://marcjestin.fr