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Cake day: March 4th, 2025

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  • If you’re familiar in any capacity with self hosted tech. Id suggest checking out matrix servers. I setup one for family and friends a few months back. Currently it’s only running on a 2 core 8 gig ram vps with around 15 regular users, and ticks over phone. It’s routinely used as a phone chat client like WhatsApp, as well as for voice channels instead of discord.

    You can utilise multiple different clients; but I would suggest element, as they’re the closest to WhatsApp, and therefore the easiest for people to adopt. (Afaik, it’s the only matrix client with voice & video call support too).

    Matrix servers run on the concept of decentralised federated servers, with the idea that as the technology expands, admins can federate with other matrix servers and allow cross communication (in much the same way the fediverse works).





  • I’ve read through your comments on this thread, and it sounds as though you need a better understanding of the fundamentals of website hosting, so I’ll try my best to give you some research topics to start from .

    I’ll make a few assumptions about your use case:

    • you want to setup a website as a project to learn more networking skills
    • you want to spend as little money as possible on this project.

    1 - DNS (Domain Name Servers):
    The core of how we access websites is something known as DNS; DNS is essentially a giant phonebook of all different public IPs, and the domain names associated to them. All website names, are really just human friendly aliases, for the IP address they’re assigned too. It is technically possible to host your own public DNS servers, but 99% of the internet will not trust your DNS servers, and as such it’s usually best to sign up to an established DNS provider.

    If you look to purchase just the domain name, you will have access to the DNS records. Alternatively, there are free DNS providing tools such as DuckDns which will give you a free subdomain, if you’re really strapped for cash but domain registration is really cheap, so worth considering imo.

    2 - VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting:
    Okay, so you’ve got curious-mind.org all purchased and now you need somewhere to point it! You could point it towards a self hosted server at home, but you should really consider spinning up a free VPS with a cloud provider. A free tier vps will be tiny (something like 1 core, 20gb space and 2gig ram if you’re lucky) but the knowledge you will gain from working remotely with a server, rather than locally; will help you progress a lot faster… You will force yourself to learn ssh, and how to master bash functions for admin work.

    AlaVPS have a permanent free tier VPS that could get you started. AWS also offer 12 months free on their micro EC2 instances. Once you have a VPS purchased; you can then go to your DNS provider, and update the DNS record for your website to point to the VPS IP address.

    3 - CMS (Content Management System):
    What is with tech and 3 letter acronyms eh?

    The next piece of the self hosted puzzle, and the part you’re referring too when you talk about a proper website is likely the CMS. CMS’ are modern tools that allow websites to build a theme, and then dynamically apply it to content. This allows for blogs, webpages etc… to be written in plain text, and have all the sites formatting applied rather than you having to apply it manually to each html document.

    Wordpress is the most used in the personal sector, and it’s very popular in the business sector too, though personally I’ve seen a real surge in Drupal usage over the last decade or so. Find the CMS that works for you, some are drag and drop; others are more code oriented.

    The above should hopefully serve as a good starting point for if you’re looking to not do this the easy way. (The easier method is to just pay a DNS provider to host a wordpress instance for you; but where’s the fun in that?) Make sure you read up on each of the acronyms; maybe in watch a Tutorial on each to get a basic understanding of what they are, and why you’re looking to use them. Good luck 👍



  • I spent a week trying to work out why my traefik instance wasn’t forwarding http & Https traffic to any of my docker containers. By the fifth day I remembered that the week before I’d decided it would be a good idea to test locally before uploading to my vps, by adding my site URLs to my hosts file. (All except traefik: which meant I was able to access the dashboard and see all my routers online… I just couldn’t reach any of them, with no logs for access etc… drove me insane.).

    It was only until I tried accessing from my mobile that I realised what I’d done.

    Should’ve known better, but that’s the price we pay for “good ideas” at 2am.


  • They do have Linux foundation Europe, which has a hq in Brussels. Afaik, all of the Europe OS projects supported by LFE are hosted in Europe also. They also claim to be independent; though I’m not sure if that means from LF entirely. Checking the job boards show roles in California and Germany however; suggesting they are the same entity. (Though I suppose that could just be collaborative?).

    The very nature of open source means someone else could just pick it up even if the entirety of LF were wiped out. (There are 5000+ collaborators on the Linux kernel git repo) But the reality is a large portion of those actively working on the kernel, are likely involved in LF in some capacity. Add the fact that LF fund multiple Open source projects, The impact of losing LF would be drastic for the future development of not just Linux, But the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.

    This isn’t the only threat to FOSS either; The fact that GitHub is owned by Microsoft is a concern imo.