Posted by websku 1/11/2026
No judgement, but wanting to tinker/spend time on configuration is a major reason why many people do self-host.
p0wnland. this will have script kiddies rubbing their hands
This is nonsense. You can't self-host services meant to interact with the public (such as email, websites, Matrix servers, etc.) without a public IP, preferably one that is fixed.
I don't have a need to give people public access but if I did I would set up Authentik and proxy everything through it and hand out usernames to people I want for the whole thing (or per app). You would open only :443 and not worry about a thing.
As a bonus use caddy as forward auth, create a wildcard subdomain (cloudflare dns supports it), configure caddy for wildcard domains for sub-sub domains and dns cert verification via cloudflare token. This way nobody even knows your real domain names. Nothing they can see in DNS or certificate transparency logs. (This is my working theory. I haven't actually researched it too deep but I am doing it.) You add a new app/site in caddy's config and everything else is completely automatic. You can even use dynamic dns with a client or a script that uses the same cloudflare token to update your IP.
As I said above. Don't even need to have a public IP on this machine. Better if you don't in case something like docker or an AI agent accidentally opens a port. (Your router already protects you but I am talking about if this was on a cloud host or an ISP that gives you real IPs for each of your machines)
I recently had a bunch of breakages and needed to port a setup - I had a complicated k3s container in proxmox setup but needed it in a VM to fix various disk mounts (I hacked on ZFS mounts, and was swapping it all for longhorn)
As is expected, life happens and I stopped having time for anything so the homelab was out of commission. I probably would still be sitting on my broken lab given a lack of time.
That being said, I procrastinated on getting postgres backups working and ended up causing self-inflicted corruption, so it is nice to see you've got that setup and have thought of pretty much everything!
It's not tariffs (I'm in Switzerland). It's 100% the buildout of data centers for AI.
But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.
Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.
I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.
Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.
When using them with production code they are a liability more than a resource.
I just wish this post wasn’t written by an LLM! I miss the days where you can feel the nerdy joy through words across the internet.