I’ve always used NameCheap. Can’t speak to their ethics, but customer support has been excellent the few times I’ve needed it.

Before I grew enough spare capacity at home to self host our family’s server, I was using MCPro hosting. It was fine and at the time, cheap. I understand they’ve been bought by Apex now though. No experience with them.

Not OP but if I had to guess, probably Turnkey File Server.

When I was first playing with NC I was using a RPi3 with an external SSD for a drive. Performance was pretty good, but as soon as I tried the same setup in a VM, the performance tanked. The only way I found to avoid the performance penalty was a manual install like it was bare metal, which I didn’t really want to do. My experience with such setups is that they tend to be brittle.

My understanding was that the performance penalty was caused by the chain of VMs. Proxmox --> Ubuntu VM --> Docker. I don’t know enough about it to say for sure.

My NextCloud is running on an old desktop that’s been repurposed into a server. The server is running Proxmox, and NC is running in docker directly on Proxmox using the nextcloud-aio image.

Found that had better performance than running it in a VM and was less headaches than the other install options.

I keep thinking about moving it to dedicated hardware, say some sort of mini pc, but it hasn’t been a high priority for me.

Really obscure stuff can be a bit of needle in a haystack. Some places you can try are Archive.org, YouTube, Usenet, and bittorrent (I have good luck on Pirate Bay, but YMMV).

I started running into the same problem about 2 years ago. Found a company called Send in Blue ( which has since been bought and is now called Brevo). They’re a commercial mail sender but have a free tier. How long that will continue to be available, I don’t know, but for now it solves my email sending issues.

Probably a little of all of the above.

Folks that run OSs other than Windows and Mac are usually not passive sheep. If you want folks to just sit back and ignore what is going on you probably don’t want agitators in the mix.

I have two. One account is through Protonmail and my main email account is through Private Email. Both are paid accounts, though Proton does have a free tier if money is tight.

Might try Trakt. It does a pretty good job of finding things I want to watch.

Thank you!

Thank you! That got me there!

My servers (an old desktop overstuffed with drives and an old dell laptop), networking gear and a 50 gal aquarium all run on the same outlet. As long as the aquarium heater is off, the outlet pulls about 200 watts. The aquarium heater spikes that to 400 watts when it kicks in.

Might check out Paperless-ngx. I know it has full text search. It OCRs everything you put in it. Not sure about integrating it with Wordpress though.

Why do you need it to be in a Wordpress page? I can’t quite see what you’re trying to accomplish.

You can certainly build a box for for use as a router, but you don’t need to.

If your not planning to build out anything public facing and aren’t going to run ipv6 internally, you can use any router to block all inbound ports and run everything over wire guard or tailscale.

There are a million and one ways to self host services. First question needs to be, what do you want to do and why. That will dictate the how.

Normally I’d say Intel, but given the issues Intel has had with the last couple generations of processors, go AMD if you are looking for new hardware. If you don’t mind used, I’d go with an Intel based Toughbook or Dell Latitude. Both laptops are well supported by the Linux Kernel. Avoid Intel 13th Gen and newer.

The main reason I like Intel is that, until recently, their naming conventions made more sense. Intel may be slightly more optimized AMD but it’s not going to be enough to notice, especially once you’re dealing with the more high end AMD procs like Threadripper. That said I haven’t used AMD processors since Athlons were king, 20+ years ago now.

Damn, now I feel old. The first linux distro I installed (and was able to run on my hardware) was their second release, 05.04.

That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal’s ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.

I’m tracking now.

The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn’t like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.

I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn’t have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.

How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.