My journey into self-hosting

I'm not sure how this post will end but knowing me and my journey so far I suspect it'll get a bit 'anti corporatisation'.

My journey of self-hosting started around 2012-2013 when I was still in school, running up a Minecraft server so me and my friends could play together without having to spend money we didn't have on hosting or lugging our PCs around to LAN parties. As interest in Minecraft waned I picked up DayZ, a zombie mod for a military simulator game for ARMA 2, although the DayZ server was short lived it lead me to hosting TeamSpeak3 and ARMA 3, along with Project Zomboid on and off as new updates came out. Recent years I haven't run many game servers, only really doing so as someone wanted to play something, and with a lot of Peer-to-Peer or Company hosted servers there are less need or potential to self-host game servers.

Around September 2018 having bought my home a few months earlier began running a D&D campaign with friends, I had been keeping all my notes of the campaign in text files but quickly became unmanageable so I looked to wiki software, there were online solutions available but were either subscription based or plagued with ads and external links that I would have no control over, I remember searching around for self-host options when I came across www.wikimatrix.org answering all my questions and being able to compare wiki solutions I landed on DokuWiki, a simple open source, flat file wiki meaning no database needed. Perfect for someone like me learning about hosting more than just the occasional game server, the wiki is still live and in use keeping track of the D&D world, characters and campaigns. nightcall.net

Jumping a bit ahead but connected to the wiki and D&D I've also used LeafletJS to create an interactive world map. map.nightcall.net which is another journey in itself which I may dedicate another blog post to as I've learnt a lot from it and project is far from over.

Why pay someone to host a wiki that only me and friends will use? It requires little resources to run. Same with the game servers, I didn't start with anything fancy just old hardware that wasn't being used, bought some extra ram and away I went, why would I pay for server hosting for a game with friends when that same money could be saved to build better servers that we have full control over. But along comes a new enemy, DRM & Licenses. Even if you do avoid the subscription and make a purchase, the fine print asks you to be online so the software can talk back to home, ensuring that I do have a license stopping me from launching the software or game if I'm offline, or the purchase I make isn't for the product, it's a license to use the product that can be revoked at any time by the provider. Which makes me think why am I paying for this if I have no control over it?

In December 2024 I entered a smashing Windows mindset, I had a NAS doing backups and storage, with online access, why was I paying for OneDrive to do the same thing? I confirmed all the data was the same between OneDrive, my computer and my NAS then cut OneDrive out. Over Christmas I nuked Windows and installed Linux Mint, and the final step in mid January I moved my emails to Axigen via VentraIP, spun up Baikal for syncing calendar and contacts between my devices, once all cut over dropped my Microsoft subscriptions.

Some of the dates elude me through the various changes and tests of self-host servers and I know more will come and go as I continue my journey but in between all of the above I host this blog, a fake shop I made for some fun, Foundry virtual tabletop for my friends that play D&D online. My journey into self-hosting is over a decade long, with the most significant jump in the last few months, I don't imagine there will be a larger change but I know journey is far from over. My own little rebellion against the corporate monoliths and desire to keep my data as my own, sharing only what I want them to know, not them owning my digital presences in the digital world.