Hosting On the Cheap
The goal I was aiming for was to reduce cost to a minimum. Not because I am cheap as much as frugal, minimalist. Since I had a Lenovo twin-core laptop laying around, that is what I used. It hardly draws any power. Then again, I hardly have any traffic yet. It homes this Web site, my professional Website, a photo album, and various knickknacks I may keep installed if useful. I have a very tight bandwidth allocation of 10mbits via cable. As soon as more constant work becomes available, I plan to upgrade to fiber.
As I can only count on 8gb of RAM, I was glad to see that Docker images have small footprints. I can run the above with space and CPU cycles to spare. Then again, as mentioned previously, not much traffic yet. I can’t wait to see what happens when thing pick up. I have a VPS available I can re-purpose in a moment. It currently host my email server, which can’t be run at home because of the required reverse DNS pointer, which can’t be supplied by my current ISP.
Gaining Control Over My Data
As most Web endeavors heavily rely on data brokering for profit. I try my best to gain the upper hand in this matter by, of course, self-hosting, but also by applying good housekeeping practices. Some of these are encryption, password sanity, and preemptive security auditing.
All disks containing personal or sensitive data are encrypted. They are protected by a substantial password. This concerns all computer-mounted disks, backup drives and removable media, such as DVDs and CDs. Additionally, BIOS password are set on all machines. So booting my laptop, for example, involves entering a password three times: once to go past the BIOS, another to make disk drives readable, and yet another to open a session. All passwords are long, different, and only stored in a password manager whose pass word is committed only to my memory.
Keeping My Brain Alive
As I started this journey a little way back, I had no prior experience with Ubuntu LXC, Docker, Proxmox, and Caddy. I had built servers before but none containerized. I greatly enjoyed the process and learned a lot in the process. These are not the only subjects I learn about but they come in useful for my current ambitions.
The brain being a “use it or loose it” type of deal, barring illness, I keep it busy with this kind of exercise.
