Self-hosting on a VPS is wonderful right up until the day it isn’t. Your password manager is on it. Your git server is on it. Your photos, your calendars, your invoices, your “the family will need this if I’m unavailable” docs are on it. And then your provider goes silent for a week, or sends an automated suspension email at 3 a.m., or simply vanishes.
Self-hosting Nextcloud can be both a cost-effective and privacy-focused approach to file syncing, online collaboration, and more. In this post, I walk through how I set up a Nextcloud instance on a Proxmox VM behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, leveraging TrueNAS for affordable, redundant storage. I’ll also cover critical backup plans and ongoing maintenance strategies to keep everything secure and reliable.
As my collection of self-hosted services kept growing, maintaining local user databases for each application quickly became a chore. The moment you want to share those services with family or friends — and especially if any of them are reachable from the public Internet — you need a proper, centralised authentication flow. Authentik solves this in one neat, open-source package.
As operations grow, VMs may exhaust their available storage due to logs, growing databases, or new services. While it’s often preferable to store data on network or dedicated volumes and keep only configuration on the VM’s main disk, sometimes you have to expand the disk in place. This post covers the Proxmox + LVM + filesystem resize chain end-to-end.
Self-hosting an email server has always been a hot topic among homelab enthusiasts and privacy-conscious users. After years of running various services in a Proxmox-based homelab — exposed selectively over the internet through Cloudflare tunnels — my focus shifted to creating a more integrated and privacy-preserving email solution. This post shares the rationale, benefits, and high-level setup details of running your own email server with Mailcow.
After years of dreaming about a corner of the internet to document homelab adventures, rants, discoveries, and occasional tech mishaps — Johnosoft is live. This is the welcome post: what this space is, who it’s for, and what to expect.