Found this blog-post interesting as it reflects many of the lessons learned by me as well. But this s probably for the more advanced self-hosters ;)
That’s an interesting share and a practical one to learn from.
Been selfhosting for years and still don’t employ best practices.
The advice is solid. But the order should be ‘version control everything’, ‘automate everything’ and then ‘document everything’ after you did the first two. Config files are way more valuable than wiki entries or blog posts.
I started documenting stuff in zim-wiki.org and on wiki.tilde.fun (project’s Dokuwiki) when I realised I should’ve used Ansible from the get-go. I thought ‘if I version control the dockerfiles and have good docs, I should be fine.’
Sure enough I could admin my shit. But it turns out the docs were incomplete and when a friend of mine joined the admin team, we painfully had to fill in the gaps and migrate every single thing to Ansible. We’re still not done half a year later.
Our goal is that you can shoot the server down, rent a new one, rewire DNS and run Ansible a single time. Everything should be recovered from backups and set up. This will take months to accomplish - if I had used Ansible from day one it’d only take weeks.
