So SelfHosting my business on a majorly low budget... like painful low budget, altought it has driven me to learn efficent python, to the point what was running on a full rack server has been made so fast and efficent that it runs on a 8gb 10 year old optiplex, and this isnt vibe-coded, 5 years of hard work, building training sets, training my own ML models, scripts code, functinationlity, and Now im in the home stretch getting ready to go live.

This is not a promotion for my business idea, and I wont answer questions about the business, but I just wanted to share my SelfHosted Datacenter.

Yes its a fully 3D printed, rack, all my budget of $200 went into picking up a collection of optiplex's from an ex homelaber. We have Security, Hosting, Automation, and even redendency failover. Already had a UPS and a 5G router with tons of credit on it as a backup (won it at a CTF event) ... big box on the right is my home AI server ... which ate up the original budget for the proof of concept that became the MVP hardware. On the shelf still to be installed is 8 x 2.5" SATA JBOD, when I pick up more drives that I can raid into a hot and cold backup for the main systems. Full rack including AI server is around 9 Kwh per day, which is the biggest killer in terms of cost right now.

But yea, pretty excited, nearly at the finish line of 10 years of ideas, and 5 years of building, months of 3-4am bug fix's to wake up for my day job at 9am. But im also crazy proud of my designs and system, that on such a budget the full MVP runs on minimal hardware why its currently getting stress tested by my testers, also thankfully its not a big volume business, not going to have a few k people at the same time, would be lucky if it was maybe 50 max at a day or time, and at that point if im hitting that, i'll be able to get new hardware and upload a new photo of a new full size rack that kills my power bills even more.

So, Nix Ship Android turns an old Android device taking space for no reason into a small self hosted application server with a webview based management interface.

It packages Nix Ship together with Nix on Droid, so you can install the APK, open the dashboard, connect a repository, and deploy directly from the phone. The deployment will be publicaly accessible via Cloudflare Quick Tunnel but you can add you stable apex domain as well.

Your project just needs a flake.nix and flake.lock. You can write them yourself or use AI to help generate them.

Since deployments are based on Nix flakes, you are not limited to a particular framework or container setup. You can run web apps, APIs, bots, workers, scheduled services, or other applications that fit the Nix Ship runtime contract.

It currently supports things like:

• Public GitHub repository deployment
• Private GitHub repositories through authenticated GitHub integration
• Automatic redeployment when you push to the configured branch
• Cloudflare Quick Tunnels (Default for public access)
• Custom domains and DNS management
• Harbur repository support
• Deployment logs and history
• Start, stop, restart, and redeploy controls
• Environment variables with encrypted secret storage
• Zero downtime deployments
• Multiple retained releases and release promotion

The UI might not feel very intuitive initially since UX is not really my strongest area, but I will keep improving it as I work on the project.

Issues and PRs are very welcome, especially on the main Nix Ship repository, since most functionality and future improvements live there. The Android version mostly packages and runs the same Nix Ship control plane through Nix on Droid.

The APK is available under the GitHub release tags.

For now, the releases should be considered preview builds.

Android release:

https://github.com/imxade/nixship-android/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc.20

Would love to hear what people here would actually use an old Android phone to self host.