A few days ago I decided to learn how to self-host multiple services (calibre, quartz, etc) on my own server. This lead me through a bit of a rabbithole and mutiple conversations with LLMs, which were of great help. After that, I decided to write this post to remind myself in case I need to do it in the future.

Utilities

The main utilities that I used to accomplish the task were Vultr for a virtual machine, DreamHost for domain names and nginx for serving the files.

Vultr

I am using one of the cheapest options. The machine has 25GB of internal storage, 1 vCPU and 1024MB of RAM. The monthly cost is 6$, which I consider to be a fair price. I might decide to buy a Raspberry Pi in the future, which may achieve similar results for a lower long-term cost.

This machine will be were the files are stored. The main tool to connect from your host machine is using the ssh protocol.

Dreamhost

I got the wiki domain name for 2$/year. It costs more to renew it for another year, so I will decide when the time comes what to do with it.

I am using subdomains (eg. subdomain.maindomain.org), so I needed to create new “A records” for each subdomain. Yes, I should also add the ipv6 addresses for the subdomains.

Nginx