Self-hosting Linux project stopped
(Note: This post was published in May 2026, over a year after it was written.)
For more than twenty years I have been self-hosting the Internet services that were consumed by my and my wife’s household as well as by my hobby programming activities: Email, calendars + contacts, version control, bug tracking, and - last but not least - this and a couple of other websites.
Alas, this self-hosting project has now come to an end.
A bit of history
Project phase 1
I started the project in July 2003 by buying some cheap PC hardware and a fixed IP address, and installing Debian Linux on that machine. My main motivation for doing this at that time was to learn new things, and to exercise my Unix skills that I had acquired in my first job as system administrator of a number of Xenix and later SCO Unix machines. At some point, though, the project became self-perpetuating because I had become accustomed to the freedom and flexibility that I gained from having my own server - I simply could no longer imagine how it was to live in dependence of cloud and other service providers.
Phase 2
In 2011 I was fed up with what had become a creaky old PC tower that was chugging along in a permanent semi-disemboweled state somewhere in a dusty corner of our flat. I switched to a small, neat and silent Mac Mini, which was a joy to install and maintain.
Phase 3
In 2016 one of the two hard disks in the Mac Mini gave out in a catastrophic hardware failure, and I realized what a fool I had been to neglect my backups. Although I eventually got my data back thanks to a professional data rescue service provider (for a price!), I resolved to no longer keep the server hardware at home. This decision was not an easy one, because it meant I had to relinquish physical control over the hardware, but on the other hand I had become increasingly tired of dealing with hardware problems over the years and simply didn’t want to have to deal with such things anymore. Other compelling advantages such as security against fire or burglars, or a faster backbone connection, finally convinced me to rent a dedicated server at a trustworthy Swiss provider.
I quickly realized that I still needed a little bit of server hardware at home, for two purposes:
- The file server service, which I did not want to host in a remote data centre.
- A machine that could run the automated backup solution that I had devised after the Mac Mini hard disk catastrophe.
The most suitable candidate for “a little bit of server hardware” was quickly found: A Raspberry Pi.
With this new setup - a combination of a dedicated server providing Internet-exposed services and a Raspberry Pi providing Intranet services - the next phase of the self-hosting project began.
The final phase
Unfortunately, over the next years what had started as a fresh and interesting experience in 2003 slowly become stale, and the responsibility to keep household services up and running in my spare time was no longer something that I enjoyed, but a chore that I performed with reluctance. Although I was aware of this slow change in attitude, I kept up maintenance of the dedicated server out of habit and because I wanted to avoid the work that I was sure would be necessary to change something, anything!
In February 2025 a week-long emergency (which in the end turned out to be a relatively simple problem with awstats log file processing) finally gave me the impetus I had needed to make the decision that I had had enough! Buoyed by the decision I went into a frenzy of action, and within a month I had stopped all self-hosting activities, terminated the dedicated server rental, and migrated to using the services of paid hosting providers.
Thus ends a defining era of my private (tech-)life. ðŸŽ
Project outcome
A project that ends surely must have an outcome ☺, so here’s what I take away from this 22 year long exercise.
Skills and know-how
Apart from the bare maintenance tasks, which kept my Unix shell skills honed, the project continuously provided me with fresh ideas and insights of how things can be done. I am quite proud of the fact that over the years I have learned how to do DNS, LDAP, SMTP/IMAP including a robust anti-spam system, a multi-vhost web server, and a number of other productive end-user services such as CalDAV and CardDAV. As a natural by-product I believe I have also gained a good working knowledge of certificates and the general principles of public-key cryptography.
Documentation
Because it’s too difficult to remember all these pieces of knowledge, especially given that they are prone to change over time, I have documented everything that seemed worthwile in my wiki. The history of that wiki reaches back to 2004.
Professional career
Another tangible outcome of the project was that numerous times during my professional career I have been able to draw on various pieces of knowledge that I had previously gained from this project.
Although to some readers this may seem to be the most important of all the benefits, I consider it a mere side-effect. I strongly believe that learning something because it interests you has a much deeper, lasting and satisfying effect than learning something because you think you have to.