hi there, comrades! just curious, what do you all actually host for yourselves?
i currently run a two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers and am looking at adding a Raspberry Pi 400 that i was gifted and don’t know what to do with. i have ideas though!
anyway, i’d love to hear what you’ve found useful, helpful, and/or fun to run. my own answer will be in the comments.
DNS, web, mail, WireGuard, etc. I wrote the webserver in about 700 lines of Go and the other software is by other people. Currently I’m rewriting everything in Rust and will write an authoritative DNS server in Rust. Eventually I want all my services to run on my own software (except for WireGuard, which is best in-kernel).
My first professional mailserver was around 1996, with 400 users, up to over 3000 users by 2001. It was awesome then but now mail is the last thing I’d recommend anyone self-host. The ecosystem has been deteriorating for decades at this point.
I used to work for a major shared environment web hosting company that also hosted mail for its customers and the mail was the absolute worst. Both in terms of day to day support of users wanting to connect mail clients and in the bigger scope of keeping our mail gateways in good reputation on global blacklists. All it took was a couple bad actors to ruin mail reputation from an entire cluster of servers, and in shared hosting you’re bound to have well more than a few bad actors.
We had methods in place to try to keep it in check, but it was like herding cats. I left that company several years ago but even then they had been trying to ramp down and discourage mail hosting by offering Google Apps, not sure if they still host mail or not.