Hey /c/selfhosted! Reddit refugee here with a couple questions on things I’m a bit uncertain about. I’ll try to keep it brief, but I can clarify anything that needs clarified.
I came into a little money recently and I’m coming into some more in the nearish future. My plan is to put some of that into a new server build that I’ll use to host VMs running Docker, Portainer, and Nextcloud for starters. Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, Gitea, and some kind of dashboard site will come once I get NextCloud in a good place (I’m torn between Dashy and Heimdall, so if anyone’s got opinions I’d love to hear them.) I plan to add more once I’m more comfortable with Docker, and once I have a better idea of how to keep all these things organized and backed up.
I have two domains I’m going to use for these, one for test and one for “prod”. I use quotes because all of these things are for me only until I’m confident enough to invite my family. I don’t plan to make anything that’s going to be used by more than a handful of people overall.
I’ve been trying all this with an old server I got off Craigslist which I installed Server 2019 on. I know IIS is a thing, but I’m not certain how or even if IIS plays with Docker, which has me questioning if Windows Server is even worth messing with on the new hardware. Right now, I have a VM set up in Hyper-V which is hosting Docker/Nextcloud in what I’m considering a test environment, but it’s not accessible outside the home. Mostly I did this to learn Hyper-V for work, so I’m not married to Windows Server or even Windows for all this.
The other problem, of course, is DNS. It does appear that my ISP has given me a static address (or at least they haven’t changed it since I moved in 6 months ago). Assuming that’s true, I’m not certain how I’d go about configuring a DNS server at home and making it accessible outside my home. If anyone’s got any resources they want to recommend for setting up a DNS server in-home for this kind of thing, I would love to see them.
tl;dr
- Is there any advantage to using Windows Server to host VS some flavor of Linux or even Windows Pro, or am I just wasting my time (assume cost is not a factor)
- Am I making my life harder trying to manage DNS through Windows Server, and is there an alternative if so. Linux alternatives also accepted
I’ve been self-hosting a wide variety of things including nextcloud (which is one open source project I advocate everyone look at, especially on a web domain so they can access it from anywhere)
Go linux for hosting your open source projects. Just do it. I’m not saying that because windows is inherently worse than linux, but because everything out there is documented as if you’re hosting off of linux. In fact, you should really consider using Ubuntu-server, because most things have documentation specifically for ubuntu.
Going with windows server as mostly just s hyper-v box with your linux installations inside, that might be worthwhile.
If your IP address appears static, then you can probably just directly configure dns through the web interface of your domain provider. There’s a great script out there for doing dynamic dns using different providers such as godaddy, that could be some insurance to make sure you don’t end up with a non-working social media network.
One thing you should consider is running one virtual host as your reverse proxy that redirects different subdomains to the different individual servers running your services. The reverse proxy server running something like nginx would then deal with all your subdomains, and if you work on say your nextcloud and need to reboot it won’t take all your services down at once because your reverse proxy continues to function for all your other services.