I love self-hosting, I have around 40 applications that I host on my home server. When it comes to my public facing services however, I still mostly use managed applications.
The only service I am currently self-hosting is my Git server over at git.alexhyett.com but even that is mostly managed as it is hosted for free on Railway (affiliate link, get $20 free credit).
There are quite a few services that I want to start hosting myself.
Plausible
I am current using Plausible for my analytics on my website. I went without analytics for a while but found I still wanted to know what people were reading or if a particular article blew up.
However, with my traffic it was costing me £22.80 / month (£19 + 20% VAT). Plausible does however have a community edition which you can self-host.
PeerTube
I have missed making YouTube videos and I want to start again this year. With a full-time job and a family I have struggled to find the time though.
I think part of the issue is after doing my regular software development job all week, the last thing on my mind is to make videos on software development. I plan to do more varied videos on more topics like self-hosting, AI and productivity to keep things interesting for myself.
This will likely mean less views as the YouTube algorithm doesn't particularly like mix focussed channels. To overcome this I am thinking of starting up a Patreon again so I can offer a membership with benefits. One of those benefits will be ad-free videos, which I plan to host on my own peertube.
Hetzner + Dokploy #
Last weekend I managed to make a start on this by setting up a server with Hetzner and installing Dokploy.
I have heard a lot of good things about Hetzner and their prices are pretty reasonable.
I ended up picking the CX42 server, which gives me:
- 8 vCPU
- 16GB RAM
- 160GB SSD
- 20TB Traffic Bandwidth
All for €19.68 / month inc VAT (£17 / month). Depending on what you are planning to host this is probably overkill, but as I know I am going to be hosting PeerTube in the future I wanted something a bit more capable than the minimum. This also works out as £5.80 / month cheaper than I am currently paying for Plausible.
The setup was pretty easy. You just pick your server, upload your SSH key, and you're all set.
Next up was installing Dokploy. Dokploy gives you that Vercel, Netlify or Heroku experience of self-hosting, but all controlled by you. On my home server I just use Docker Compose, but I wanted something a little easier to use for this setup.
Installing Dokploy it is just a case of running curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh and following the instructions.
Dokploy has Traefik built in so setting up the reverse proxy for applications is all done by the UI.
I managed to get Plausible set up with a Docker compose file in Dokploy with relative ease. There were a few gotchas though that took me far too long to work out.
- Dokploy automatically adds a
dokploy-networkto the container that is going to be reversed proxied through Traefik. Adding an external network to a container however seems to disable the internal network your get per compose file. This meant my frontend had no access to the database. I had to manually create an external network for this application and attach it to all my containers. - When specifying a git repository as the source it doesn't have access to the files in that repository for mounting. I had to manually add any required file mappings via their advanced file mount section by copy and pasting the contents into the UI. If you need specific files it might be better to build a new docker image each time with these embedded.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
🛠️ Tool — New Ensō - first public beta — This looks like a really nice tool for writing, especially for either daily journalling or writing a first draft of a book.
🛠️ Tool — GoatCounter – open source web analytics — If you want something simpler than Plausible as a self-hosted analytics solution then this might be worth a try.
📝 Article — Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent — $50 a day / $1000 a month seems like a hell of a lot of money to spend on AI, but I can see how it could be useful. I only spend around $10 — 20 a month on AI at the moment. It works well when given specific instructions, and you know what the expected outcome is. I am hoping for a powerful self-hosted model that is small enough to run locally.
📝 Article — Claude Code now supports hooks — If you use Claude Code this could be useful. You can basically hook into the lifecycle of the commands and get it to run predefined things. Such as running formatting tools or tests after changes.
📝 Article — Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck — I agree with a lot of this. Writing the code isn't generally what takes the longest time, especially for senior engineers. I often find working out exactly what to build and getting the requirements right takes the most time.
🛠️ Tool — FossFLOW: Make beautiful isometric infrastructure diagrams — This looks cool for making infrastructure diagrams.
📝 Article — Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots — I am sure bots will find ways to get around these blocks, especially if it is still open to the public.
🌒 Moon — ASCIIMoon: The moon's phase live in ASCII art — I get all nostalgic when I see ASCII art, and I am always amazed at what can be achieved. This is amazing!
📝 Article — The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million — This was a fun read. It is amazing that even if they only had an outer shell of notes with it hollow (or not money) on the inside it would still be worth $530,400.
📝 Article — Building a Personal AI Factory — When I read articles like this I always feel like I am not using AI enough. I still prefer knowing exactly what is being changed and then reviewing it. I particularly like the part about updating the inputs, so things are gradually getting better each time.
📝 Article — things i don't like about my job right now — Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment will find a lot of this relatable. Reading this makes me glad that I work with a small team of intelligent people.
Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
💬 Quote — There are some interesting discussions on this quote. I don't fully agree with this, the table saw still requires a skilled user to make anything. LLMs will eventually get to the point where programming as we know it will be obsolete.
📝 Article — Wind Knitting Factory — I didn't know a thing like this existed. Anyone need a 10m long scarf?
📝 Article — what i would ask my future self — This is a nice exercise. I wonder what questions I would like to ask my future self.
📝 Article — Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking — This has been my experience as well. If you are using a well known language and framework like React and Tailwind LLMs can do a good job. I tried producing an app with Svelte and failed miserably often adding in React concepts that didn't work. Your own experience is important as well. Knowing what good code looks like in your chosen language is important when using LLMs.
📝 Article — Local-first software (2019) — There are some great concepts in here and even though this articles is 6 years old it is even more relevant now with people being conscious of how their data is being used.
📝 Article — The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public — I noticed Google put up the price of Google Workspace to fund the AI features that I don't use. AI is great for some things I don't want AI to write an email for me.
📝 Article — I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links — It is interesting, but I think your mileage will vary quite a lot depending on what links you save. This guy obviously saved a lot of parenting links and house listing, so the AI was able to deduce quite a lot.
📝 Article — Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists — One good thing about AI is its ability to generate ideas, even if it did this by mistake. Soundslice looks quite cool as well. I did think about making a product like this.
📝 Article — Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database — This is the issue with MCPs that are connected to a database. MCPs should be seen similar to APIs as just another interface, but it is up to you to secure it.
🛠️ Tool — RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor — I don't do any RAW photography myself but if you do, this might be useful. Not sure what this has over darktable, but it looks nicer.
📝 Article — Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web — I have not used Astro, but it looks very similar to Eleventy which I use for my blog. I am going to have to give it a try someday.
🛠️ Tool — FlopperZiro: A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone — The FlipperZero looked really cool when it came out. If you don't want to shell out nearly £200 on it then you can try building your own alternative.
🛠️ Tool — MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation — This looks quite cool, but I can't tell from quickly looking at the docs if it only works with their browser extension or whether you can incorporate it into your own chatbot.
🛠️ Tool — BrowserOS: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet — I like the fact that this is working locally with local LLM models. Although there is no way I would trust an LLM to buy stuff for me on Amazon!
🛠️ Tool — Kiro: A new agentic IDE — Amazon is now getting in on the agentic IDEs. I haven't tried this yet as I have been happy using Zed for coding with an LLM. This looks like a good experience though.
👾 Game — Dog Walk: Blender Studio's official game project — This looks like a super cute game. I love the fact that the models were made from paper first before being scanned in.
📝 Article — Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories — I am going to carry on using git init but it is interesting to see how git works.
🛠️ Tool — Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service— This is quite cool and works quite well.
💬 Quote of the Week #
Creating the space in your life for ideas to blossom is a non-obvious thing to do and is often only learned through experience. Some people need more of “beer mode” and other people need less.
From the article How to create a virtuous cycle for creating and sharing online by Paul Millerd.
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