Understood.

Use afraid.org or another forever-free dynamic dns service using their free subdomain, set up a computer, pi, or vm in a “demilitarized zone” on your router and forward ports 80 and 443 to it.

Put your files on that machine and back them up incase it ever gets hacked. Install one of the many web-based self hosted file servers, or, like I said, just caddy pointed at a folder of files, and set up some sort of monitoring for the systems cpu load and network bandwidth. Set up auto-updates.

Old-school, zero service cost, and zero cloud service dependency. Downsides are required monitoring, users see your home IP, and if it gets hacked, you have to wipe it. Did it that way for years.

A dns challenge requires no inbound connections. You misconfigured something.

A reverse proxy like Caddy can get a ssl cert via dns challenge and add ssl to all your internal self hosted services, provided you have a domain hosted somewhere supported.

Another option is a $5 vps and domain. Install caddy on it with caching, and point it at your local storage using SSH. Meets your criteria of self hosting the storage, but only caches on the VPS for performance. You could even use rclone to mount the files if you want.

More manual than the other options, but much simpler mental model and an excellent platform to learn how things work. Gives you the chance to also host a static website too.

This makes a difference on Forgejo: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/34024

Also, obviously, a caching reverse proxy. Forges and wikis are hard because the bots drill down into the thousands of version control pages that get generated on demand and cant be cached.

With the recent bs, I have noticed that most all of the off-lease usff boxes get stripped of ram and nvme disks before posting. 8gb is more common now.

You can do a lot with limited ram if you use containers instead of VMs. Less isolation, but you can look into rootless podman containers for some improvement.

I dont think I have ever seen his paintings in a gallery. Why? Because Bob Ross’ art form wasnt painting, it was performance. The paintings were formulaic because the goal wasnt to create paintings but create painters.

Everybody tests their backups. Some people even manage to test their backups before they need them.

Sorry. The techbros will get bailouts. Its the pensioners that will starve.

Yes. Choose those only for temporary projects.

Most of those free dns settups use subdomains already. Unless you cant, for a temporary domain name, I recommend just creating an account at a mainstream/reputable dns provider and buying whatever is on sale for a dollar or two per year. Dont plan on renewing because those ones shoot up.

Hopefully the .self tld becomes a thing because it is supposed to be free: https://hccf.onmy.cloud/2026/06/21/reclaiming-our-digital-selves-hccfs-vision-for-a-human-centered-top-level-domain/

They are trying to get restrictions put on small, open models because that scares tbd shit out of them.

They are not as small as would be required to do this, but they want everyone clammoring to put restrictions on small open-weight models nonetheless.

They are railing against open models here… their competition.

Machinery already replaced nearly all the jobs in places like coal mines (in the west). It did increase the safety for the remaining workers, who are mostly machine operators now.

Turns out that a huge-ass loader does more useful work than a LOT of humanoid forms. Optimus is about dreaming of never having to deal with servent classes. Its the modern dumb waiter.

Its about balancing your priorities for availability with recouverability. A business loses a lot more money than I do over a couple days downtime.

Mirrored drives are not backup drives, and vice versa. Though ZFS can definitely start to blur the distinction with automated snapshots and especially offsite mirrors.

Ram is expensive… so all my 24x7 things are containers (docker compose on Alpine Linux) or FreeBSD jails.

Theoretically, they need tl be re-written every few years at most. Read everything off, format and re-write. Checking for corruption would be adviasable when you do it.

Restic’s dedupe is very good. I used to take uncompressed tars of whole systems and it would add only megabytes to the storage repo each time. Almost everything got deduped despite being in various tar files and very fast.

Do you use plain webdav for all your files? Mounted on your computer or via libreoffice somehow?