A couple of months ago, I came up with an idea. What happens when I replace whole my services to self-hosted services. That dream swallowed me whole! I imagined a some things:

• I need some “home” service like as Google Drive or Calendar etc. I still haven’t decided yet what will be the replacement.
• I want to create a separated place for my research and tests.

Okay, it seems no spectacular, only two small things. 0 experience with dev ops stuff and a definite need for flexibility. I considerate many options. Some clouds like as oracle or azure, but I am afraid about cost. My colleague told me about his a’la Kubernetes cluster. He runs it on 3 micro PCs on microK8s from Canonical. This option, in my opinion, is totally overengineering. I have to buy 3 machines, set up a cluster, learn Kubernetes. I looked for something more effortless and something which will bring result after step by little step.

In the end, I mixed those approach and decided to buy a one micro pc and run Proxmox on it.

My setup on November 2023 Hp Elite desk 800 g3.

• i5 6gen
• 16 GB of RAM
• 1 TB SSD NVMe
• 1TB HDD

Proxmox Virtual Environment v. 8.0.3 Proxmox Backup Server from v. 3.0-2 from tuxis.nl. These guys offer 150 GB for backup in the free tier.

Why I choose that solution?

Firstly, simplicity and flexibility. Using virtualization, I can create many setups. I need to try Kubernetes, voilà. I want to try cluster of this - okay, no problem. In the case of network research, you can virtualize this. In the end, the most important thing to me if something goes wrong, or it’s not more necessary, you can delete it and restore a backup or start from the beginning and other separated stuff is safe.

As I already mentioned, backup. Security and stability, it was a second thing I looked for. Proxmox provides as brilliant backup solution. And again, if I screw up something, I can always go back. Then I found another great one service which is tuixs.nl which gives you 150 GB free backup storage.

At this moment, a setup that backup strategy.

Keep 3 last day copies and one weekly.

And last but not least - capabilities of development. Nobody is an oracle, and I don’t know what comes in the future. That setup seems developmental. Mostly, I mean if it is necessary, I can add the next machine in the cluster in low cost budget and very fast run my setup on it.