this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Selfhosted

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A Beginners Guide To Selfhosting Part 1 (gtfoss.org)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by gibdos@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I recently became interessted in learning about static site generators. So I decided to start a little 11ty blog, in which I teach people, who are new to self-hosting, how to securely set up their own server with Ubuntu and Docker.

For now, I've got my Beginners Guide series as well as a more detailed introduction to SSH and its features. I plan to eventually write down all I've learned about self-hosting in the past 20 years.

Hope it ends up being helpful for some of you.

EDIT (2025-10-28): Finally got around to get a proper domain and switched my blog to Hugo. Much easier to deal with and more capable imho than 11ty (and actually useful documentation as well). Oh and got rid of Netlify. Their 300 credit limit for a free deploy project is far too limiting if any deploy costs 15 credits...

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[–] lando55@lemmy.zip 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I wrestled with whether or not I should be that guy, but self-hosting by definition generally means everything down to the bare metal, i.e. not a VPS.

I can understand how the term could apply to the broader definition of running your own services on managed infrastructure, but it seems odd not to make that distinction in a beginners guide.

[–] gibdos@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

I see your point. But to me, self-hosting just means being responsible for the server and services and not necessarily having my own hardware server at home. And just calling it hosting is too broad a definition for me. And at the end of the day, the guide works just as well for your own hardware or a VM, as it does for a VPS.

[–] exu@feditown.com 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Making the term self hosting exclusive to running stuff at home feels unnecessarily elitist. Not everyone has the space, bandwidth or family approval to run stuff at home.
You can have the term homelab if you want

[–] Two9A@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Right, I self-host email and have done for ten years or more, but I don't do it out of a server at home. Does my Postfix not count as selfhosting any more?

[–] shiftymccool@programming.dev 4 points 7 months ago

Hmmm, definitely a grey area in my mind especially with the definition of "host". The host is where the software lives and that isn't yours. Maybe self-managed?

[–] lando55@lemmy.zip 2 points 7 months ago

I'm ambivalent as to who uses the term and how, but a deviation from the general consensus of its definition might cause confusion for newcomers to the field who can't make the distinction. That said, I enjoyed OPs post and appreciate the time they put into it.

Homelab on the other hand is not synonymous with self-hosted infrastructure and services, as its intended use is not for production workloads.