Due to reliability issues with Cloudflare Tunnel, I have decided to take the boring route and host my webpage on Github Pages. Right now, the biggest hurdle I’m facing in self-hosting is my own reluctance to pay for a publicly facing IP address for my house. While I’m confident my pfsense firewall will prevent anything nefarious from getting in, I’m not comfortable with the privacy impacts of that setup. I’ve explored using a cloud-based VM and VPN to tunnel incomming requests, but my ISP’s peering agreements make that solution suboptimal.

Last week, I attempted to join the fediverse by self-hosting Pleroma. It did not go well.

One of Pleroma’s recently added features is hosting the server on a different domain than is displayed in the username. Unfortunately, that feature is only available in the development branch and isn’t in a stable release. Foolishly, I forked Pleroma and attempted to merge that feature into the stable branch. After a few minutes, I thought my changes were correct and compiled the software. Everything seemed to work, so I finished setting up Pleroma and successfully created an account.

The infrastructure behind most websites involves sprawling data centers, highly specialized hardware, and multiple teams dedicated to ensuring four nines of uptime. On the other hand, this website runs on a repurposed desktop computer, uses commodity networking hardware, and someone cosplaying as a sys-admin manages it. This post will show how I’m managing and serving this website (almost) entirely from my basement.

I should acknowledge that I’m using Cloudflare Tunnel to connect my servers to the internet and as a reverse proxy. Self-hosting purists will roll their eyes at this, but it beats paying for a VPS since I’m behind CGNAT. Currently, I have no plans to use Cloudflare for any other services. With that out of the way, let’s talk about hardware.