A Snapshot of My Self-Hosted Journey in 2024
What started as a simple experiment with Pi-hole in February 2023 spiraled into a full-blown obsession with self-hosting. Almost one year later, around Christmas time in 2023, I wanted to write a recap of my year self-hosting, but things happened and I never got around to writing about that. Now, two years into self-hosting, I regret not being able to go back and see how much farther I have come.
For networking I chose to go with Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3 as my router. I love this device as it offers a lot of functionality like installing Wireguard on it directly, DDNS support and other neat features. All while having a lot of helpful articles for every use case. At the start of this all I had never played with anything related to networking and there’s more than enough videos/articles/forums out there to go from newbie to expert with Mikrotik’s ecosystem. For wifi I snagged a good deal on marketplace and got myself a Unifi AP LR which works well enough for my small apartment.
My first server is a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB which is currently used as a dedicated machine for exposed services. Any service that I want to share with my friends and family, or that I want to be accessible through the internet go on the Raspberry Pi. It’s more than enough because I strongly prefer to keep my services private to avoid potential security problems.
