Hi,

The last google product that is use is gmail, and while searching for a solid alternative, many threads mentionned self hosting, which has been on my mind for a little while but here is what’s stopping me so far: 1/ it sounds like a single point vulnerability 2/ I lack the skills.

As for #2, I’ve been down the privacy rabbithole for a couple years now, I know there are a lot of resources out there and I’m not afraid to learn, I just don’t know where to start.

But I don’t see the point in learning if in the end, I just build a server that could die in a domestic accident, resulting in me loosing a lot of important data.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated,

  • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Well, as everything, it is safe is you do it right. If you are just starting, you could try running some services in LAN, or if you don’t have the hardware, a cheap VPS with VPN or some other tunneling. That way, you’re not exposing your data to the wider internet.

    Of course, you should keep backups of everything you deem important, and once you start feeling more comfortable, you may try opening up your services with a reverse proxy (caddy, nginx) and some authentication (authelia, authentik). You can try hosting simple things, things that expect to be open to the internet, like a game server.

    If you’re limited by your hardware, you can start planning to buy something bigger. But I don’t recommend it to just get started; you can do a lot of learning with basic hardware (and the prices are crazy right now too).

    Edit: seconded what ghost_laptop said, an e-mail server is kind of the hardest there is for self-hosting. There are solutions like mailcow, but even that is very hard to set up.

    • Dop@lemmy.zipOP
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Most of the other reply go the same way, so I really appreciate all of you taking the time to write detailed messages, I have many resources/services I can check to take my first steps into self hosting now.

    • dihutenosa@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      you can do a lot of learning with basic hardware

      So so much.

      I’m running video calls (Livekit) for ~50 users (dunno how active) through an ancient laptop that doesn’t even have USB3. Among other things - the same lappy is also doing email and TLS termination for a HLS stream.

      I’m using an old phone, a Google Pixel 3a (that’s 4 GB of RAM) as a monitoring solution (Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager, ntfy).