Introductions

A little bit about myself

This is Selfhosted Docs, a simple site documenting my selfhosting journey. I am a university student majoring in CS who started selfhosting when I was in highschool. To be honest, I didn't plan to selfhost at all at first. All I was doing was trying to find a new alternative to goolge photos as they were ending their free and unlimited photo storage program and limiting it to 15GB.

I loved google photos and would have gladly paid for additional storage but the problem was it was too expensive to get new storage in our country. I ended up having to search for alternatives to google for it. However, I was unable to find any that were as good as google. Most were expensive, and the ones that were cheaper did not have features like facial recognition or search by location. That was when I stumbled into nextcloud photos during one my searches. They had the Software as a Service (SaaS) option for enterprises and there was the free option which could be self hosted. It also had some basic featues like facial recognition and searching via location.

I decided to give the self hosting option a go. I had an old 2012 Fujitsu PC lying around and collecting dust in my storage so, I booted it and tried to setup NextCloud. Through this, I learned about plenty of technologies such Docker, Virtual Machines, Networking and Linux. Over time, my interests grew and I started trying to host other services as well. These services were not exactly things I was looking for and honestly it took more time and maintenance and I could have signed up many other alternatives online but I was having fun so I kept at it.

Soon, I started college and working part time enabled to save up some money to get a used Optiplex 7060 Tower and soon I was migrating out of the old Fujitsu (which was honestly on life support at this point) to slightly more powerful system. As I started expanding once more, I realized I needed some kind of documentation/notes sytem so that I could keep track of things. This is why I decided to create this site. It's primarily to help me document useful information so that I could look back at the solutions if I encounter any trouble. However, if you're browsing through this a find anything helpful, that's a win too! I probably would make a lot of mistakes writing this so please let me know if you see any. I will try to make regular updates and changes to this site!