I’ll add a tiny little suggestion since I think this is generally in the vibe of making sure people even understand what they can self host - find the thing that interests them with a low barrier to entry, and for god’s sake when you make a recommendation, don’t go into hard mode immediately.
EG: if you have a friend over and they’re like “wow this plex/jellyfin/emby thing is cool” then tell them about it, and don’t tell them they need to buy a rack, learn about installing OS’s, VMs, docker, RAID setups and filesystems, etc.
Either:
just setup everything for them with the understanding you’re on the hook for supporting it
give them that first hit, baby. “Let me show you how to install a VPN, torrent client and media streamer on whatever potato of a computer you have laying around.” This is extremely easy, and trust me if they’re into it don’t be surprised if next weekend they’re texting you asking about how you automatically grab everything or what to do about storage or whatever.
edit: this is a good example of why I really like unRAID for this. It’s what I run now because although I know how to do all of the things that it accomplishes, it’s just much easier. Even still I wouldn’t expect a novice to really understand or get much done without help.
Yeah that’s why I recommend UnRAID specifically. I’m a datacenter system administrator and yet my home server is an UnRAID OS running in a 10 year old computer I got out of somebody’s garage for free. I have not yet felt like I needed a rack at any point and this thing runs like 30 different services. People tend to go from a Raapberry Pi which can efficiently run like, a couple things, to buying a big powerful server when like any old x86 box can do more than like 80% of people need.
How can we help those who don’t have enough knowledge to self-host?
They can listen to the Selfhosted Podcast or Selfhostcast
Visit beginner oriented self hosted blogs like https://noted.lol/ and https://selfh.st/articles/
Or get started building with an OS made to make self hosting a bit easier like UnRAID
I’ll add a tiny little suggestion since I think this is generally in the vibe of making sure people even understand what they can self host - find the thing that interests them with a low barrier to entry, and for god’s sake when you make a recommendation, don’t go into hard mode immediately.
EG: if you have a friend over and they’re like “wow this plex/jellyfin/emby thing is cool” then tell them about it, and don’t tell them they need to buy a rack, learn about installing OS’s, VMs, docker, RAID setups and filesystems, etc.
Either:
edit: this is a good example of why I really like unRAID for this. It’s what I run now because although I know how to do all of the things that it accomplishes, it’s just much easier. Even still I wouldn’t expect a novice to really understand or get much done without help.
Yeah that’s why I recommend UnRAID specifically. I’m a datacenter system administrator and yet my home server is an UnRAID OS running in a 10 year old computer I got out of somebody’s garage for free. I have not yet felt like I needed a rack at any point and this thing runs like 30 different services. People tend to go from a Raapberry Pi which can efficiently run like, a couple things, to buying a big powerful server when like any old x86 box can do more than like 80% of people need.
Nice list!