Ask HN: Do you still run a home server (self-hosting)?
TL;DR: Yes, it’s alive and well, and it feels like this space has never been better than now. A lot of things have changed since then. Now it’s called “self-hosting”&#x2F;“home lab”.<p>Due to the advent of low power small form factor PCs&#x2F;SBCs like the Pi, and all the additional management options you get these days: conventional bare-metal, but also containers, VMs, and everything in between, coupled with IaC like Ansible or Salt. A single machine can now be far more useful than just classical Unix services like LAMP or SSH - but you can still have those if you wish in addition to the new stuff!<p>I recommend checking the subreddits &#x2F;r&#x2F;selfhosted and &#x2F;r&#x2F;homelab to get an idea what people do these days. These are by no means the only places where all the cool discussion takes place, but they are a very good jumping off point. If you’re interested in managing file storage that goes beyond a few TB, &#x2F;r&#x2F;datahoarder is a good place to look too.<p>(And yes, running an email server still sucks. This time, the complexity is no longer about setting up or maintaining the thing (Mail in a Box&#x2F;Mailcow basically put this whole thing on auto-pilot for you, including initial setup), but about fighting the major email providers to force them to not silently drop incoming messages sent from your server).