Brody 🚀 Brooks

I wrote about my recent experience replacing common web services I use (Google Drive, GDocs, Pastebin, Dropbox) with open source alternatives and running my own servers.

This was way cheaper and easier to do than I thought! https://brodybrooks.com/posts/2025-digital-homesteading/

Digital Homesteading: A Primer on Running Your Own Web Services

A short guide on starting a server to run personal web services you control, based on my experiences just starting out.

Brody Brooks // Game Developer
Apr 9, 2025 at 5:48pmWeb
Show threadAsher VollmerApr 10, 2025
@brody yessss my hero!!
Show threadBrody 🚀 BrooksApr 10, 2025
@AsherVo Happy to serve 🙇
Show threadTyler GriffinApr 10, 2025

@brody Nice guide! I think Syncthing might be my favorite piece of software ever written: fast, easy, does exactly what it says, and has a ton of customization options. Vaultwarden also works great, with the one caveat that you MUST have an extra-robust backup plan if you're self-hosting a password manager. I think for most of us, loss of the data due to bad backups is far more likely than a hack.

My only little bit of feedback: pihole (while awesome and something I'd highly recommend) doesn't block youtube ads. It can only block domains, and YT serves up its own ads.

Show threadBrody 🚀 BrooksApr 11, 2025
@tyler Ohhhhh, gotcha. That's a bummer, but I can amend the post to make that clear. Thanks!
Show threadJean-Sébastien GuayApr 11, 2025

@brody Nice post! I've been slowly replacing services with self-hosted or self-managed solutions over the last year or so I was interested in your point of view on things.

How did you configure your storage on the ZimaBlade? You said two 4TB drives, but are they in RAID0 or RAID1 or just two bare drives?

I have a QNAP NAS that I'm looking to replace because it's old and uses a version of their OS that I can't update anymore. I use RAID5 with 4x4TB drives (12TB usable) for the redundancy.

Show threadBrody 🚀 BrooksApr 12, 2025
@skylark13 I decided to just use them as bare drives because I was worried 4TB wouldn't be enough. But considering it looks like I'm not even hitting 1TB of stuff loaded in (even with most of my physical DVD collection ripped onto it) maybe...maybe I should RAID1 this bad boy.
Show threadJean-Sébastien GuayApr 12, 2025

@brody Yeah, that was my thinking. I've had some HDDs die on me in the past, so I wanted some redundancy. But RAID is not a backup strategy, so I have another separate drive in a USB enclosure that I backup the entire thing to once every few weeks.

I'm looking to replace the QNAP with something faster and more upgradeable, but I would like to keep my 4 drives in RAID5. I think the ZimaBlade with a PCIe SATA card would work, but I worry the CPU might be a bit slow, and I'd like 2.5gbe ideally...