Self Hosting

(Resume the blog from the beginning 1-Motivation and approach )

Try Self-hosting

To go further, I was tempted with the idea of self-hosted, which means to host at home my own web and cloud servers, nothing less. But to start this journey, you must be either a passionate about computers, or be helped. Luckyly, I'm both, and concerning the help, I was lucky to meet Neutrinet, which is our belgian chaton .

My Cube

Cube Olimex


Neutrinet

As you can see from their site, Neutrinet offers two services:

  1. The cube: They can order the Cube material to host your own server, and set up for you. Personally, I ordered my own materiel from the site of their provider Olimex, because I wanted to chose a more powerful card. Neutrinet have chosen Olimex because they build Open-source hardware, which is rare in this domain.
  2. La VPN: To be able to run your own mail server at home, your internet service provider (Proximus, Orange, ...) must allow the mail traffic to your server, which is often not the case to protect you from pirates. The VPN (virtual private network), is a secure channel between you and your VPN provider (in this case, Neutrinet) which allows to bypass this traffic limitation. The VPN has other benefits, like having a fixed address on the internet (IP address) so that the other mail servers could find yours to deliver your email. Please note that Neutrinet VPN is not intended to make you anonymous on the internet, like it is often expected from VPN providers.

Yunohost

To manage your server at home, there are many administration tasks, requiring some technical skills not easily accessible to everybody. Luckily, Neutrinet uses an open-source software, Yunohost, to facilitate the management of the server et automate almost all administration and maintenance tasks. Yunohost allows to link your Cube to your domain name, if you have one. Personally, I had my own domain name: https://amer.ovh and it points now to the Cube. If you do not have one, Yunohost offers you a free sub-domain in one of the following domains, which would look like: yourname.nohost.me, yourname.noho.st or yourname.ynh.fr.
With all the above, you can start enjoying your Cube, and install, with few clicks, the services you want, among the multiple ones freely proposed, like:

  1. Pico cms, the web server, which allow me to publish simple sites, not requiring a database, and namely this one.
  2. NextCloud is the software that manages the file cloud, like and better than commercial clouds. It allows backing-up your files and synchronizing them automatically from your phone or computer, it manages your calendar and contact list, and manages collaboration tools, for your family or small business.
  3. Postfix the mail server that lets you host one or more of your own personal e-mail accounts, and those of your friends and family to whom you can now offer your e-mail and cloud services.

Conclusion

The conclusion of my experience is as follows:
I'm very proud of my brick, and it's enabled me to materialize my services. Now my cloud is a nice little red box, next to my TV, consuming just 2 watts of energy. I've rediscovered the pleasure of publishing blogs and sites linked to my domain name, because it's now so easy. On the other hand, I now have to keep an eye on my brick, and when it's not running, I have to restart it.

I also used to make backup copies, manually, then I automated them so as not to lose anything in the event of hardware failure.
So it's still a bit fragile, but it's also pushing me to do without superfluous services, to move towards a bit of computer austerity, which is, I think, a good attitude to take to reduce your carbon footprint, because you don't realize it easily, but the pollution caused by the consumption of online services is enormous, so you might as well do without what's not indispensable.