Selfhosted

Exactly right there with the not worrying. Getting started can be brutal. I always recommend people start without worrying about it, be okay with the idea that you're going to lose everything.

When you start really understanding how the tech works, then start playing with backups and how to recover. By that time you've probably set up enough that you are ready for a solution that doesn't require setting everything up again. When you're starting though? Getting it up and running is enough

Nothing proves a backup like forcing yourself to simulate a recovery! I like to make one setting change, then make a backup, and then delete everything and try to rebuild it from scratch to see if I can do it and prove the setting change is still there

Caddy took an afternoon to figure out and setup, and it does your certs for you.

Unfortunately, I feel the same. As I observed from the commenters here, self-hosting that won't break seems very expensive and laborious.

Reverse proxy is actually super easy with nginx. I have an nginx server at the front of my server doing the reverse proxy and an Apache server hosting some of those applications being proxied.

Basically 3 main steps:

• Setup up the DNS with your hoster for each subdomain.

• Setup your router to port forward for each port.

• Setup nginx to do the proxy from each subdomain to each port.

DreamHost let's me manage all the records I want. I point them to the same IP as my server:

This is my config file:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    server_name photos.my_website_domain.net;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2342;
        include proxy_params;
    }
 }

 server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    server_name media.my_website_domain.net;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8096;
        include proxy_params;
    }
}

And then I have dockers running on those ports.

root@website:~$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                          COMMAND                  CREATED       STATUS       PORTS                                                      NAMES
e18157d11eda   photoprism/photoprism:latest   "/scripts/entrypoint…"   4 weeks ago   Up 4 weeks   0.0.0.0:2342->2342/tcp, :::2342->2342/tcp, 2442-2443/tcp   photoprism-photoprism-1
b44e8a6fbc01   mariadb:11                     "docker-entrypoint.s…"   4 weeks ago   Up 4 weeks   3306/tcp                                                   photoprism-mariadb-1

So if you go to photos.my_website_domain.net that will navigate the user to my_website_domain.net first. My nginx server will kick in and see you want the 'photos' path, and reroute you to basically http://my_website_domain.net:2342. My PhotoPrism server. So you could do http://my_website_domain.net:2342 or http://photos.my_website_domain.net. Either one works. The reverse proxy does the shortcut.

Hope that helps!

Off-site backups that are still local is brilliant.

Pretty solid backup strategy :) I like it.

Different phases of power? Did you have 3-phase ran to your house or something?

You could get a Starlink for redundant internet connection. Load balancing / fail over is an interesting challenge if you like to DIY.

It's quite robust, but it looks like everything will be destroyed when your server room burns down :)