mnnpr

Services I Self Host

Recently, I invested in a VPS to self host a few services in order move away from proprietary services like Google.

I bought a Hetzner Cloud VPS because they are based in Germany and hence follow EU data protection laws. I got my domain from namecheap for dirt cheap :)

I also like how I can customize and personalize the self hosted services to my needs. For example, the following picture shows my login page for NextCloud.

nextcloud

List of Servies

Cloud

I self host Nextcloud to get a personal cloud storage with features like Office, Notes, Contacts & Calendar.

On android, I have DAVx5 installed to sync my contacts and calendar with Nextcloud instance using CalDAV and WebDAV. To sync my notes, Orgzly has an option to sync using a remote WebDAV repo which does the job. I also have an Collabra Office server that is configured to work with Nextcloud. This makes a pretty good alternative to the GDocs Suite.

Sadly, Nextcloud doesn’t has an official cli client. Therefore, I use rclone with WebDAV to manage my cloud from the cli.

nextcloud

Email

If you’ve ever tried hosting an email server, you know it’s a real pain in the ass. There are a lot of moving parts in a mail server and on top of that, you also have to configure things like SPF, DMIK and DMARC so that your mails don’t get marked as spam. This has been the most headache inducing part of my self hosting experience to be honest.

I use the Postfix + Dovecot + MariaDB + OpenDKIM stack to send and recieve mails. I haven’t installed a webclient like Roundcube or Rainloop because it’s extra headache. The SMTP and IMAP services can be used using any mail client so that’s not an issue.

On Android I use K9-Mail and on my laptop I just use Nextcloud’s Email app.

Paste Service

I’ve always wanted a simple pastebin service that is terminal friendly. fiche is a simple pastebin service that I found which allows users to send information to it using netcat. So a simple,

    echo just testing! | nc paste.mananapr.xyz 9999

is what I need to do. As I can pipe anything into netcat, this makes pasting things so much easier.

Blog

I use nginx to serve this blog with ssl. The certificates were generated using LetsEncrypt. The certificates are valid for this blog, my mail, fiche and nextcloud.

To generate these html pages, I use a simple bash script that compiles markdown to html using pandoc. The script can be found at the blog’s github repo which I will link in the sources.

IRC

I run weechat in a screen instance so that I am always logged into the IRC channels. Earlier, I used to use my Raspberry Pi for this but now I have migrated to my VPS due to better uptime.

Sources:


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