A Constantly Updated Guide to Self-Hosting Software, Hardware, and Tools

So you've decided to take your data and services off someone else's servers and run them yourself. Now what? The self-hosting landscape is enormous—containers, VPNs, DNS, backups, monitoring, databases—and figuring out where to start can feel like staring at a wall of unlabeled switches. The Self-Hosting Guide by mikeroyal is an attempt to map that territory, and it's a genuinely useful place to begin.

What It Does

At its core, this is a curated guide for getting started with self-hosting, covering both software and hardware. It's a single, comprehensive markdown document organized into a detailed table of contents that ranges from the basics (containers, CI/CD, web servers) through infrastructure concerns (DNS, VPN, SSH, LDAP, log management, service discovery, security) and on into applications (cloud storage, databases, communications, collaboration, analytics, RSS, and more).

The guide also touches on newer territory you might not expect in a self-hosting resource—there are sections on large language models, ChatGPT-style chatbots, and Nostr. The author notes that the guide will "constantly be updated with new info as becomes available" and invites readers to open an issue if something should be added. It's maintained (the badge says 2024), and there's a practical touch: you can convert the markdown to a PDF in VSCode using the Markdown PDF extension if you want an offline copy.

Why It's Cool

• The scope is the selling point. Rather than being a tutorial for one tool, this is a breadth-first index of the entire self-hosting problem space. You get containers, configuration management, cloud providers (Linode, Nextcloud, DigitalOcean, Back4app, MinIO), SQL and NoSQL databases, password management, monitoring, dashboards, notifications—all in one place with anchors linking you straight to the section you need.

• It treats self-hosting as more than just running a server. The inclusion of categories like business management, collaboration and synchronization, encryption, backups, and snapshots management acknowledges that self-hosting is really about replacing a whole stack of cloud services, not just one.

• The hardware angle. The README frames this as a guide to "devices including software and hardware," which is a nice reminder that self-hosting starts with a box in your closet, not just a docker-compose.yml.

• It's honest about being a living document. The explicit note that it will keep growing, plus the invitation for issues, sets the right expectation: this is a starting point and a reference, not a finished textbook.

• The PDF conversion tip is a small but thoughtful detail—useful if you want to read it away from a browser or share it with someone who prefers a static document.

How to Try It

There's nothing to install. This is a guide, so "trying it" means reading it and following the links.

1. Head to the repository: github.com/mikeroyal/self-hosting-guide.
2. Start with the Getting Started with Self-Hosting section, or jump directly to whatever category you're tackling first using the table of contents.
3. If you want an offline copy, open the markdown file in VSCode and use the Markdown PDF extension to export it.
4. Found a gap or a tool that should be listed? Open an issue—the author explicitly asks for that.

Final Thoughts

This isn't a hand-holding tutorial that walks you through your first Docker container line by line—it's a map, and you'll still need to do the navigating. But if you're past the "what even is self-hosting" stage and want a single reference that covers the breadth of the ecosystem without forcing you through ten different blog posts, it's a solid bookmark. It's best suited for developers and homelabbers who know roughly what they want to build and need a well-organized index of options. Given that it's actively maintained and open to contributions, it'll likely only get more useful over time—which is exactly what you want from a guide like this.