Where to start with Self-Hosting - A Beginners Guide
Self Hosting your own services has a wide range of benefits. It's a great way to gain a deeper understanding of tech and how the internet works under the hood. You're in charge of you're data, where it's stored and who has access to it.
Don't get put off by the scary Dell PowerEdge servers in the cover image, we won't be needing that much processing power! Any old laptop or a Raspberry Pi 4 is a great way to get started, just be a little cautious with the energy consumption of older hardware.
You don't even need to own the hardware, instead you can pay monthly for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) where you are allocated a small chunk of a server located within a datacenter. You can expect to pay £3-10 per month for this.
Although you can connect to your self-hosted services directly by IP address paired with a port. Using a domain name makes it more user friendly and easier to set up HTTPS. There are many domain name providers out there. You can expect to pay between £4-10 a year for this, just shop around for a good deal with a quality provider.
DNS (Domain Name Service) is a fundamental part of the internet as we know it, when you head to example.com your computer will reach out to a DNS server such as 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 to retrieve the IP address behind the domain name 93.184.216.34.
