I've been steadily de-Googling for privacy reasons, and self hosting what I can over the last few months. YouTube was one of the last services I used because there are a lot of content creators that only upload there.

Yesterday I discovered Invidious and got it hosted and I'm really impressed! It's an alternative frontend for Youtube that strips the trackers and ads out. You can also make a private account on your instance, and import your YouTube subscriptions, so you get a subscription feed, watch history etc all synced on your devices without having to log into Google which I really like.

I am running it in my Gluetun stack so it uses my VPN's IP address to request videos from Google, rather than my public one, which is another layer of abstraction to help prevent tracking.

I'm using the Clipious app on Android phone and TV which syncs nicely with the desktop webapp.

Obviously I only access my instance over Tailscale: hosting a public instance might open you up to legal issues (although if its behind a VPN, I guess maybe not?), bandwidth throttling by Google, and obviously other people using my limited internet bandwidth to stream videos.

Hello!

I've just set up a Raspberry Pi in my server closet to host a small Hugo blog to write content for and I'm really pleased with how it performs.

The first guide I wrote is how to install SearXNG with a VPN. Hopefully this guide is of use to some people, I'd really appreciate any feedback and such!

https://sa.mtate.me.uk/posts/2024/installing-searxng/

So yesterday I set up my Pi 4 to host a simple Hugo static site blog.

The Pi was already running Caddy to reverse proxy my Tailscale traffic so I could have nice custom domains for each service, so I added a caddy file server on a local port, then pointed a Cloudflare Tunnel at it so now my site is accessible over the internet.

I also installed Gitea on the Pi and set up a runner/action such that when I push to the main branch, it runs a Hugo build and outputs the public HTML files to the right folder to update the site. Really pleased with it and everything is blazing fast at the moment when I'm the only concurrent user.

I wonder how many concurrent users it can handle before starting to slow down. Does anyone have experience hosting a site on a Pi?

I've got a Synology NAS that hosts all my docker containers for things like Immich, Paperless, Jellyfin, CalDAV, Seafile etc.

Obviously its vital to me I don't lose my Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Documents etc. My personal files total 100GB at the moment (mostly Photos).

I'd rather not lose my Jellyfin media but realistically I could just download it again and as its 5.5TB and growing, I don't think there's a cost effective way to back that up to the cloud.

Currently, Hyper Backup uploads my /docker folder (contains all the databases and config for the containers) every other night to a Backblaze B2 bucket. A max of 5 copies are kept, to keep the bucket under 500GB or $3 a month. My Home Assistant also backs up to another bucket every night, but this is only 1GB so I keep up to 30 copies.

Once a week, I have my /docker folder sync to Proton Drive via RClone, since I have 500GB free storage on there which I don't use. My upload speed is quite bad (40Mb max) so I don't want these backups to happen nightly as they're quite often still going in the morning when I wake up.

One thing I was thinking about is getting a second cheap NAS to sit at my parent's house. If I put 16TB in there I could give them 6TB which is more than enough and keep 10TB for myself to backup my media and personal files again. It's a lot of money up front but may well be worth it. It also gives me another Tailscale exit node.

Another thing I was thinking is setting up an old Pixel with Syncthing to upload everything to Google Photos without hitting storage caps, but I have been trying to completely degoogle everything for privacy reasons so I may have to resist the temptation of free unlimited photo storage.