The cloud is still useful just make it yours
Last week the power company showed up to replace all of the power poles in our neighborhood. With just a few hours notice we were without power for the whole day and therefore my home lab was down. This forced me to pretty quickly realize how much I've already come to rely on it. Which on one hand is awesome. Super stoked that I've already built it into my daily workflow and needs. But it did make me feel the annoyance of not having cloud service convenience. So this was the push I needed to get a VPS up and running. So far I'm being pretty selective about what I put up there for both privacy and storage reasons. Current first must haves were:
Gitea. I'm running a lot of my notes and static site files in repos now and being able to keep that up as consistently as possible.
Static sites. My static site files for heyhowdy.org and s3th.online are (as mentioned above) both living in Gitea repos now. I'm running Coolify on the server which makes it super easy to deploy repos as static sites. It also keeps things a little simpler so I can quickly spin up services and test things.
Miniflux. Great RSS server and barely uses any resources. I've been migrating a lot of my web content consumption to RSS so having it up reliably is great.
Matrix. I've been experimenting with getting a Matrix server up and running and was able to get it working! This one is more just for fun but I'm hoping to use it more in the future and maybe starting a little community on there.
I'll be continuing to migrate more things over there as it makes sense. For heavier services like my Jellyfin or music library the storage cost just doesn't really make sense when the idea is to save and use what I already have laying around. I'm also keeping more privacy sensitive services like Paperless-ngx local. So far I'm keeping copyparty (which I love holy shit) local but I'm considering maybe spinning up another instance of it on the VPS just to have a fallback for quick file passing in a pinch. All in all though for so far less than $5 of use this first month I've got a nice consistent personal cloud with plenty of room to grow. I ended up going with Hetzner as my host just because I liked their privacy policies the most at a glance and their features are great.
#homelab