Chiraag's Musings

Not too long ago, I was not self-hosting anything (other than building my website from scratch). It's not because I couldn't (I have enough GNU/Linux knowledge and I've programmed in a fair bunch of languages), but because it felt too complicated and involved.

All of that changed about a week ago.

I had been thinking of self-hosting stuff for a while (an image gallery, a blog, and perhaps even a site for videos). The main problem I kept running into is that storage on VPSs is quite expensive, so I needed software with object storage support (I prefer Backblaze B2). A lot of image gallery software, for example, handles local images fine but doesn't have built-in support for S3-type storage.

Ironically enough, I started with PeerTube. It's the most storage-intensive of the services I have started hosting, but it has object storage support so I set it up with a B2 bucket. Setting it up was relatively easy and things magically show up across the Fediverse (it's still amazing to me how seamlessly it happens). I still need to setup transcoding, but that's the last bit.

The next one was Ente. Interestingly, I had started configuring this a while ago, ran into problems with the object storage configuration, and gave up. I decided to give it another go and actually got everything set up this time! It's a little complicated because they have several different services that should be run on separate subdomains (the docs do a decent job of explaining it), but after a bit of fiddling I have the main interface (for authorized users to upload photos), the albums subdomain (for public albums), and the embed subdomain (for embedding public albums in other pages) and everything works.

The final bit was actually easiest: this blog (through WriteFreely. I imported my old blog posts (from my previous WordPress-powered blog) and everything pretty much worked without a hitch.

The coolest part is that uploaded videos and blog posts (like this) automatically federate with the rest of the Fediverse. I have a Mastodon account, so you can reach out to me there about my posts (WriteFreely currently does not have comments, so the easiest way to discuss it is to tag my Mastodon profile in your replies to this post).

I am more than happy to discuss how I set these services up. Everything is on VPSs (WriteFreely and Ente are on the VPS for this website, PeerTube is on a different VPS for the other domain) and most stuff is relatively minimal in terms of resource footprint (PeerTube is relatively heavy and needs... 2 GB of RAM and 2 cores!). It's way more accessible than I had thought, and I am definitely glad I bit the bullet and looked into this.

Take control of your digital life!