Guides for running your own services instead of renting them from hyperscalers. Covers Nextcloud for file sync, Jellyfin for media, Vaultwarden for passwords, Gitea for version control, and dozens of other open source platforms that replace the subscription stack most people default to. Every guide includes the Docker Compose file, the reverse proxy config, the backup approach, and the failure modes we have hit in production. Self-hosting is not about paranoia. It is about owning the infrastructure your life runs on, understanding how it works, and keeping your data under your own roof. If you want sovereignty over your digital life, this is the practical path.
Debian 13 or Debian 12? Debian 13 (Trixie) has been the stable release since August 2025, and Debian 12 (Bookworm) is now oldstable: its regular security support ended on 12 July 2026, and it is covered by Debian LTS until 30 June 2028. For a new Docker host, install Debian 13. Every command in this
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Why Docker on a Raspberry Pi Makes Sense I have three Raspberry Pis running Docker in my homelab. One handles DNS and ad blocking, another runs monitoring and a dashboard, and the third runs Listmonk for newsletter management. They draw about 5 watts each, run silently, and cost less than a month of any cloud
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The Windows Minecraft Server: Start Here, Graduate Later Most people’s first server of any kind runs on Windows. That is not a criticism. If Windows is what you have, Windows is where you start. I ran my own first servers on Windows Server 2003, and the fundamentals are the same regardless of OS: install the
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The docker-compose.yml used in this guide (copy-paste ready). Why Docker Is the Right Way to Run Minecraft I have set up Minecraft servers on bare metal, on VMs, on Raspberry Pis, and in Docker containers. Docker wins. Not because it is trendy, but because it solves every annoyance you will hit with a bare-metal installation.
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Why a Minecraft Server Is the Best First Server Project I have been running servers professionally for over twenty years. Linux, Windows, bare metal, virtualised, containerised, on-prem, cloud. And if someone asked me what the single best learning project is for someone who wants to understand server administration, I would tell them to set up
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Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? I run Pi-hole on my own network; AdGuard Home’s feature set below is drawn from its documentation and community deployments, to give it a fair evaluation. They solve the same problem. They both work well. But they are not interchangeable, and the right choice
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I will be honest upfront: running Pi-hole on Windows via WSL2 is a compromise. It works, and there are legitimate reasons to do it, but it is not the ideal deployment for network-wide DNS filtering. If you have a spare Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a VPS, those are all better options. Pi-hole wants
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How to Run Pi-hole in Docker (DNS Ad Blocking with Docker Compose) If you are already running Docker on your server, putting Pi-hole in a container is the obvious choice. Your DNS service gets the same isolation, portability, and reproducibility as every other service in your stack. You can version control the compose file, blow
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How to Install Pi-hole on Ubuntu 24.04 (Network-Wide Ad Blocking Without a Pi) Most Pi-hole guides assume you are running a Raspberry Pi. That is where the name comes from, and it is a perfectly good deployment target. But plenty of people have an Ubuntu server already running in their homelab, or a spare mini
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How to Install Paperless-ngx with Docker (Go Paperless at Home) I have a filing cabinet in the spare room that I opened twice in the last five years. Once to file an insurance renewal, once to find a gas safety certificate that the letting agent needed in 48 hours and that took me two hours
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