Debian + Containers is definitely the way. Literally so stable it’s boring.

Same here. I love DuckDNS but after the third DNS outage taking down all my services I migrated to Cloudflare and haven’t had a single problem since.

Backups need to be reliable and I just can’t rely on a community of volunteers or the availability of family to help.

So yeah I pay for S3 and/or a VPS. I consider it one of the few things worth it to pay a larger hosting company for.

I intentionally do not host my own git repos mostly because I need them to be available when my environment is having problems.

I make use of local runners for CI/CD though which is nice but git is one of the few things I need to not have to worry about.

Do you have any links or guides that you found helpful? A friend wanted to try this out but basically gave up when he realized he’d need an Nvidia GPU.

I’ve been testing Ollama in Docker/WSL with the idea that if I like it I’ll eventually move my GPU into my home server and get an upgrade for my gaming pc. When you run a model it has to load the whole thing into VRAM. I use the 8gb models so it takes 20-40 seconds to load the model and then each response is really fast after that and the GPU hit is pretty small. After I think five minutes by default it will unload the model to free up VRAM.

Basically this means that you either need to wait a bit for the model to warm up or you need to extend that timeout so that it stays warm longer. That means that I cannot really use my GPU for anything else while the LLM is loaded.

I haven’t tracked power usage, but besides the VRAM requirements it doesn’t seem too intensive on resources, but maybe I just haven’t done anything complex enough yet.

DuckDNS is great… but they have had some pretty major outages recently. No complaints, I know it’s an extremely valuable free service but it’s worth mentioning.

Cloudflare has an api for easy dynamic dns. I use oznu/docker-cloudflare-ddns to manage this, it’s super easy:

docker run \
  -e API_KEY=xxxxxxx \
  -e ZONE=example.com \
  -e SUBDOMAIN=subdomain \
  oznu/cloudflare-ddns

Then I just make a CNAME for each of my public facing services to point to ‘subdomain.example.com’ and use a reverse proxy to get incoming traffic to the right service.

I’ve had a lot of good luck with Syncthing. If you’re just syncing files locally you can disable nat traversal.