Way back when, my Dad always told me to have at least three copies of everything, because one backup is no backup. So I have a 1TB Storage Box at Hetzner (€4/month, in a different datacenter than my VPSes) I push backups to with Restic. I also backup to a local machine (also with restic), and to my Dad’s NAS (you guessed, with restic), and to my old Debian server until I decommission it (also with restic).

All legs have different retention settings, based on how much space I have at a particular backup site.

Check their docs, mostly.

If all your services support binding to a unix socket, I’d bind them to /run/<servicename>.sock or similar, and set up a reverse proxy that hits /run/$servicename.sock when serving $servicename.devicename.lan. If the service can’t bind to a unix socket, you can probably socat it or similar, and keep using the generic reverse proxy. Then, all your router has to do is route port 80 to your Debian machine.

I’m running Tang on a VPS, outside of my homelab. Servers in my homelab set up networking and a dedicated WireGuard tunnel to the VPS from initrd, to be able to talk to Tang, to help unlock the filesystem. The WireGuard tunnel is only allowed from my home ISP’s ASN. So if anyone picks up all my equipment from my homelab and walks away with them, they will not be able to boot them up, unless they connect from my ISP’s ASN (good luck), or know the passphrase.

Additionally, some of my homelab computers that support TPM also have a TPM pin, so walking away with the disk only, and connecting from my ISP’s ASN would still not be enough. This is rather pointless, anyone who walks away with the disk only will likely take the entire computer instead. But it was fun setting it up.

In the not so distant future, I’ll update this setup to use Shamir Secret Sharing more, where I’ll have three pins: my VPS (via Wireguard), a small computer somewhere else in my apartment, and a third at a neighbour (+ TPM on supporting computers).

No. I’m not dead yet.

Mostly on coffee, not exclusively. Noticable amounts of spite & tortilla chips are also present, yes, but… no shame.

Only when I’m deprived of coffee.

Yes. My Actual Intelligence lives in my head, and runs mostly on coffee.

I’m using a setup similar to what you had in mind: I have a small €4/month VPS as my front, with scrapers taken care of by iocaine (it both blocks them, and firewalls the worst off automatically). That’s over 90% of the HTTP(s) traffic never making it past the VPS, greatly reducing the traffic into my home network. My actual servers are behind a WireGuard tunnel.

It does not protect against a non-HTTP DDoS, but that wasn’t part of my threat model to begin with. My VPS provider (Hetzner) has DDoS protection even for €4/month servers - that doesn’t include the scraper DDoS, but includes other kinds - I have luckily not been a victim of any, so no idea whether it works reliably.

Against the scrapers, a VPS + bot defense + Wireguard works like a charm. Can recommend.

Depends on what kind of DDoS OP wants to defend against. Defending against an AI crawler DDoS is entirely possible with a tiny VPS. I’ve been doing that for the past ~1.5 years on a €4/month CX23 Hetzner VPS.

Scriptability has been a thing since 2.2.0, released on 2025-06-16, but the built-in script appeared in 3.0 (2025-11-14).

Around here. In the default configuration, it is using the built-in handler. The script can be replaced with something like Nam-Shub of Enki (used by pretty much everything I host, and by Codeberg too, for example).

I’m very late to the party, but: no, iocaine does not expect you to detect the bots. It used to, but it does its own detection for quite a while now (you can replace the detection mechanism, though).

Whats are pros of XMPP?

Pros of XMPP is that I can fully self host it, it can do video & audio calls too, and has good clients that aren’t just a webpage wrapped in Blink (aka, Electron). Matrix is a pain in the ass to self host, especially if I don’t want to federate. My XMPP server is private, friends & family can use it, and that’s it. That’s what I needed, and it delivered perfectly. It does End-to-End encryption. It is weaker than Signal, for sure, but it’s enough for what I need it for. In short: it’s reasonably simple to self host, has good, usable clients for both platforms I care about (Linux & Android), we can chat, we can have group chats, we can have audio & video calls.

Also could u tell me about self hosting cost and time you spend on it?

Well, I’ve been self-hosting since about 1998, so the time I spend on it nowadays is very little. One of my servers has been running for ~4 years without any significant change. I upgrade it once in a while, tweak my spam filters once a week or so, and go my merry way. I haven’t rebooted it in… checks uptime 983 days. Maybe I should. My other, newer server, is only about a year old - it took a LOT of time to set that up, and the first few months required a lot of time. But that was because I switched from Debian to NixOS, and had to figure out a lot of stuff. Nowadays, I run just sys update && just sys deploy (at home, on my desktop pc), and both my tiny VPS and my homelab is upgraded. I do tweak it from time to time - because I want to, and I enjoy doing so. I don’t have to. Strictly necessary maintenance time is about an hour a week if I try to be a good sysadmin, ~10-15 minutes otherwise. It Just Works™.

As for costs: my setup is… complicated. I have a 2014-era Mac Mini in my home office, which hosts half my self-hosted things (Miniflux, Atuin server, EteBase, Grafana, Prometheus, ntfy, readeck, vaultwarden, victorialogs, and postgres to serve as a database for many of these). It’s power consumption is inconsequential, and the network traffic is negligible too - in a large part because I’m the primary user of it anyway. It is not connected to the public internet directly, however: I have an €5/month tiny VPS I rented from Hetzner, that fronts for it. The VPS runs WireGuard, and fronts the services on the Mac Mini through Caddy. iocaine takes care of the scrapers and other web-based annoyances (so hardly anything reaches my backend), unbound provides a resolver for my infra, vector ferries select logs from the VPS to VictoriaLogs in my homelab, and I’m running HAProxy to front for stuff Caddy isn’t good for (ie, anything other than http).

Oh, yeah, I forgot… we have poweroutages here every once in a while, so I have to turn the mac mini back on once a month or so. It happens so rarely that I didn’t set up proper Clang + Tavis-based LUKS unlocking, so I have to plug a monitor and a keyboard in. It didn’t reach a level of annoying to make me address it properly.

A bunch of my other services (GoToSocial, Forgejo + Forgejo runner, Minio [to be replaced with SeaweedFS or Garage], and my email) are still on an old server, because the mac mini doesn’t have enough juice to run them along with everything else it is already running. I plan to buy a refurbished ThinkCentre or similar, and host these in my homelab too. That’s going to be a notable up front cost, but as I plan to run the same thing for a decade, it will be a lot cheaper than paying for a similarly sized VPS for 10 years. The expensive part of this is storage (I have a lot of Stuff™), but only comparatively.

By far the most expensive part of my self-hosting are backups. I like to have at least two backups (so three copies total, including the original) of important things, and that’s not cheap - I have a lot of data to backup (granted, that includes my music, photo & media library, both of which are large).

• Music -> Navidrome / mpd + various clients
• Google maps -> When we’re driving, I have an offline GPS. Otherwise CoMaps.
• Comms -> XMPP (Prosody on the server, Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android) & Signal (latter mostly at work)
• Email -> self hosted (usual postfix + dovecot + rspamd + etc stack) with notmuch as my main client K9 on the phone
• Authenticator -> Aegis
• Password manager -> self-hosted VaultWarden
• Google Reader (RIP) -> miniflux
• Bookmarks -> Readeck

Yeah, setting the server up was a bit of an adventure. But I did that once, and it’s been serving us well since. My users saw none of that.

I have an unfederated XMPP server (running Prosody), family’s using Conversations (Android) & Dino (Linux) with it. We can chat, send images, do voice & video calls. Has been working fine & reliably for the past ~6 years or so. Took about 1.5 minutes for them to get used to the clients.

I’m slowly opening it up for friends too, so friends, neighbours, classmates, etc can chat with us too. It’s going great so far, no complaints.

Not sure how that’d help?

If I don’t use stock Android, the bank app doesn’t work, no matter what else I install on it, or what store I use.

1. Email

I self-host my email using postfix, dovecot, rspamd and others. The only tradeoff I had to make here is that some of the entities I have to communicate with via email use an allow-list, so some of my outgoing mail is sent through a relay (SMTP2Go).

2. Cloud storage / file sync

I self-host a minio for cloud storage. I don’t need file sync, so nothing there. If I would, I would likely use syncthing.

3. Maps & navigation

OpenStreetMaps & CoMaps. Works much better than Google Maps did.

4. Search engine

Currently a self-hosted YaCy. I have my own index. Not entirely happy with this setup, will switch to something else (still self-hosted, I have no need for a general purpose search engine that indexes the entire internet of slop).

5. Web browser

LibreWolf

6. Calendar

I’m using Emacs & Org for most calendaring. Wife’s using GNOME Calendar & a Calendar app I found for her on f-droid (unsure which one).

7. Contacts management

Nothing on desktop, some random contacts app from f-droid on the phone. I do use EteSync to keep a backup, and potentially sync later. (EteSync syncs her calendar too)

8. Notes / to-do lists

Emacs & Org.

9. Office suite (docs, spreadsheets, etc.)

Most of my “office” needs are covered by a combination of Emacs, Typst and Zola one way or another. For the rare case where I need Office compatiblity: LibreOffice.

10. Messaging / chat

XMPP. Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android. I use Matrix too, from time to time (Element), and have Signal too. Not a big fan of the latter two, because it isn’t practical to self-host those.

11. Video calling

XMPP. Dino & Conversations. If I need to video call with someone else, I’ll use whatever they use, usually.

12. Social media / microblogging RSS reader / news

For social media, the Fediverse is my only social media. I’m using Tuba on desktop, Tusky on the phone for it. For RSS, self-hosted Miniflux. For Lemmy, the web ui on desktop, Voyager on phone.

13. Music streaming / podcast app

Lollypop & Shortwave.

14. Video streaming / YouTube alternative

FreeTube or yt-dlp if I need to watch youtube, PeerTube otherwise.

15. Password manager

Bitwarden (via a self-hosted Vaultwarden on the server side).

16. VPN / DNS / Firewall

The only VPN I use is WireGuard between my systems, but I don’t tunnel everything through it. For DNS, I’m using unbound on my VPS, which in turn dispatches to Quad9. Firewall? nftables.

17. Launcher / Android OS (if you use custom ROMs)

I haven’t de-googled my phone, because my bank app refuses to work on rooted phones, and I unfortunately need that for the bank’s 2FA. No, I am not changing banks. I do use a custom launcher (Nova), though.

18. App store / APKs

F-droid.

19. Photo backup / gallery

I manually copy photos from the phone to my PC, and it gets backed up with the rest of the stuff. I do my backups with restic, and save a copy on my own server, and another at BorgBase. I’ll have a third copy at a third place later.

20. Weather

wttr.in, mostly.

21. Smart assistant (if any)

My wife. <3

22. Anything else you’ve replaced?

Not strictly de-googling, but I’m using Codeberg & my own self-hosted Forgejo instead of GitHub. I replaced LibreWolf’s bookmark manager with Readeck. For push notifications on Android, I’m using a self-hosted nfty.sh.

Would love to hear about your setup — both what works well and any trade-offs you’ve had to make. Always looking for better FOSS or privacy-friendly alternatives

Oh dear. Strap in, for you’re in for a Journey! The entire configuration of both my desktop and the rest of my fleet (my VPS, my homelab server, and my Mom’s miniPC at the moment) are all free software. Based on NixOS, declarative configuration written in a literate programming manner using Org mode. There is a lot of documentation.

LibreOffice, because it is local. If I want to collaborate, I’ll share the file in whatever way is most convenient for the other parties. Since most people I collaborate prefer editing locally, this works out quite well.