author	date
Kristoffer Grönlund	2025-10-10

själv är bäste dräng

=> Self is best dräng

=> A motivational speech on self hosting

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Microsoft

Amazon

Google

Apple

---

The internet is

too American

too Big

too Boring

Long live the _weird internet!

---

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

― Ursula K. Le Guin

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We live in the cloud. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of self hosting.

― me

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me

Kristoffer Grönlund

https://goto.liten.app

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the slides

• ghostty
• slides
• just

$ git clone https://git.liten.app/krig/baeste-draeng
$ cd baeste-draeng
$ just run

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What do I mean by self hosting?

• Pick a cloud service you use
• Find an alternative
• Run it yourself (on a VPS)

...

• instead of Discord
• run Mattermost

...

• instead of Github
• run Forgejo

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Why

• It's not that hard.
• It's fun.
• Resist Enshittification.

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ENSHITTIFICATION

Github is not improving, only getting worse.

There are other choices!

• Forgejo
• Tangled
• Radicle

Self-hosting lets me experiment!

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Other reasons

• Too much AI
• Privacy concerns
• Own your data
• Cloud costs are unpredictable

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Why not?

Email is a pain due to blacklisting.

• I use Fastmail (AU)
• For sending I use Brevo (FR)

...not impossible? see

https://maxadamski.com/blog/2025/10/email.html

...but definitely not on Hetzner.

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A framework for hosting stuff yourself

First: Somewhere to put your stuff.

• Hetzner (germany)
• OVHcloud (france)
• Hostinger (lithuania)
• Glesys (sweden)
• A raspberry pi at home (more on that later)

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DNS

Pick a domain name.

THIS IS THE HARDEST PART :(

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Running at home

• Tailscale / Wireguard
• Old laptop
• NAS
• UPS

Great for large storage like photos, movies.

---

(Tailscale is Canadian, it's OK)

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Data center at home

• pro: pretty blinkenlights
• pro: heats the home
• con: takes up space
• con: very loud

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OS / System setup

• Debian
• cloud-init
• ansible

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cloud-init

Script to setup VPS at creation, supported by Hetzner.

Example to start from here:

hetzner-cloud-init

• Set up user, SSH, firewall...

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ansible for setup

Can do more complex setup than cloud-init.

- name: Disable PasswordAuthentication
  notify: Restart sshd
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    dest: /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/10-no-pwd.conf
    mode: '600'
    content: |
      PasswordAuthentication no

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ansible, OS upgrades

I use ansible for ongoing maintenance.

- name: apt upgrade
  hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: apt update upgrade
      become: true
      ansible.builtin.apt:
        upgrade: yes
        update_cache: yes
        cache_valid_time: 86400 #One day

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Backups

• restic

#!/bin/bash
set -e
source /etc/restic-env
BACKUP_PATHS="/var/lib/docker/volumes \
             /home /etc /data"
restic snapshots || restic init
restic backup $BACKUP_PATHS
restic forget --keep-last 7 --keep-monthly 1 --prune

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Backups, where to

• Any S3-compatible storage provider
  • Hetzner
  • bunny.net

restic also supports SFTP over SSH, local directory, ...

restic restore to restore from backup

restic mount to browse the backup snapshot like a directory

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No one except Google really needs Kubernetes

Keep It Simple Selfhoster

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Coolify

• UI based service management
• Made for self hosting
• Makes running container-based services trivial
• Nice to have UI (can check stuff from phone)
• Notifications, backups, Docker Compose...
• Easy to setup

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Other options

• dokku
• dokploy
• caprover
• plain systemd/docker
• ...

Haven't tried those myself!

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Monitoring

• Beszel
  • Dashboard
  • More notifications

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SSL Certificates

• Let's Encrypt (easy with Coolify)
• Make sure to monitor certificate expiry!
  • Uptime Kuma can do this (run it with Coolify)

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Disaster recovery

• Try VPS restore from backup
• If that fails:
  • Spin up new VPS
  • Setup using cloud-init/ansible
  • Restore data using restic restore

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I've been self hosting some things for years.

Never had any major problems.

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Incident: Mastodon fork became unmaintained.

Cause: Was running obscure fork. :p

Solution: Switched to GotoSocial.

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Incident: Certificate about to expire.

Cause: Bug in Coolify (forgot config).

Solution: Fixed Coolify config, upgraded to get fix.

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Incident: Services went offline.

Cause: Outage at Hetzner.

Solution: Fixed itself before I woke up.

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That's it!