dihutenosa

I’m using a Matrix group chat, mostly, or Nextcloud for bulk stuff. Basic, but works. There probably are better options.

Oh cmon. It’s not for the faint of heart, I agree, but it’s a learnable skill and totally can be done.

you can do a lot of learning with basic hardware

So so much.

I’m running video calls (Livekit) for ~50 users (dunno how active) through an ancient laptop that doesn’t even have USB3. Among other things - the same lappy is also doing email and TLS termination for a HLS stream.

I’m using an old phone, a Google Pixel 3a (that’s 4 GB of RAM) as a monitoring solution (Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager, ntfy).

I self-host mail from home. I don’t have reverse DNS, but I’ve set up the rest of it (SPF and stuff). It works about as well as email usually does. I needed to register my IP in Spamhaus.

I’d use nginx and https://git-scm.com/docs/git-http-backend

Here’s a tip: it’s one less firewall to manage, if you make your server be the router, and have your Cudy do only WiFi in dumb AP mode. Or, if the server is in a good enough location, install ´haveged´ and have it serve WiFi too.

Is there a particular reason you’re not selfhosting Wireguard, instead relying on a commercial provider? I’m running this thing on my phone, via F-Droid: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.zaneschepke.wireguardautotunnel (it eats battery if you enable keepalive, but you normally don’t need keepalive, so leave it unset).

Find a car. It needn’t be in perfect condition. It’ll let you run away from many a sticky situation, carry your loot, provide light, and you can mod it. Perhaps add a minifridge or such.

Get an old Android phone, possibly with a dead screen (bootloader must be unlocked). Flash PostmarketOS on it, or (if not supported) Termux. Its idle usage (with WiFi on, screen off) may be considerably less than 1w. It’ll have considerable amounts of CPU cores and RAM, more than a cheap VPS.