I’ve been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I’m still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just “install this distro and click these buttons”? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I’m not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from “you can check your IP address using ip a” would be appreciated.
More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I’ll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don’t mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I’m able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that’s step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they’re either too simplistic (no I don’t want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don’t know how DHCP works).
Thanks in advance
Honestly one of the most well written posts I’ve read. Thanks a lot, helped me understand all of this networking stuff involved with self-hosting since I literally just bought a PC to function as my home server like 2 days ago.
Thanks! Maybe if I hadn’t just climbed out of bed five minutes before writing that I might have been able to organize the info a little better, but apparently everyone is happy with it. 😄
Don’t get caught up on needed fancy new hardware to run servers from, the last new computer I bought was a 386. This Spring I just rolled my VM servers off of some 2006 rack servers (dual-core and 8GB of memory, getting a bit painful!), and I’m serving up live internet content. You can go a long ways with old hardware. I always say play with what you’ve got, or with the stuff other people are throwing away. By doing this you can push a machine to its limits to see what it can really handle, which gives you a good idea of what hardware you want to upgrade to for YOUR specific needs. My new servers are from 2012-2014, and a massive upgrade at about $150 each!
