Most of my friends are in tech, and I think one of them would enjoy hosting their own services if they got into it. Currently, I do most of our hosting, from media servers to game servers, but I think the hardest part is to give people an enticement to host.

For example, maybe they saw the lights automatically come on through the use of home automation like Home Assistant or maybe they wanted to control their own music library.

I think the idea of managing your own hardware and services doesn’t become enjoyable until you’ve already seen the outcome, such as having a resource or service available to you that you didn’t before. When I first got into selfhosting, I also had the problem with identifying what I wanted to host.

How do/did you get your friends interested in selfhosting? What services did they look into hosting themselves?

I’m not going to force someone into a hobby they aren’t interested in, I’m just curious how people brought the conversation up.

Thanks.

  • Darkassassin07
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    2 months ago

    Find a problem they are experiencing and introduce them to a solution they can self-host to fix it. Expand from there.

    I began my self-hosting journey 7ish years ago with media piracy and a desire to watch/access my files wherever I was. Learned of Plex, then Emby, Reverse Proxies, Domains, SSL, and on and on…

    Today I’m running 24+ docker containers and some miscellaneous stuff, across 3 systems; that’s always accessible via my domain/vpn.