styx
I have a yearly vps subscription with 16GB ram, 160 GB ssd and 8 cores, including 5TB network limit. It is some Lithuanian company (time4vps). I don’t have a static ip at home, and if I want to get one I have to pay pretty much the same amount, so why bother?
It has Debian 11, and ufw as the only security measure, together with Caddy as reverse proxying everything so only a handful of ports are open (80,8080, 443, and one for syncthing and one for dot).
I have the following services running:
- Nextcloud (for office tools, calendar, to do, boards)
- firefly iii for self accounting
- technitium dns server for doh and dot with blocking
- grafana, prometheus and node exporter foe monitoring
- libreddit for, well, you know
- searcxng
- trilium for private knowledge base
- tailscale for tunneling and VPN
- syncthing for file syncing and password sync together with keepassxc
- my personal page, auto updating with github actions over sftp.
I have partially documented most of my work in my blog, so you can take a look if you wish https://mustafacanyucel.com/#blog .
I sugget using Caddy. It’s insanely easy, handles SSL so you don’t need Let’s Encrypt (it uses LE under the hood), has a reverse_proxy command that is 1-3 lines. I dabbled with Apache2 for a time, and I can say switching to Caddy was the best decision.
I now have a DNS server, syncthing, nextcloud, grafana and a few more stuff all behind reverse proxy, SSL handled by caddy. Some of them point to file servers for different paths (i.e. stuff.example.com/admin goes to a website and stuff.example.com goes to the service) and the configuration is less than 5 lines.
I tried with the official docker way, and failed too many times :) . Then I decided to lurk around some public instances and let the platform mature for a little bit more. The problem is usually the docker build fails.
I advise to run Caddy server instead of nginx or apache. It is insanely easier compared to the other two, handles SSL out-of-the-box without any input, and very user-friendly.
Nextcloud notes support markdown. It may be a starting point.