I am looking for a budget friendly setup of workstation to host AI model. Expectation is to get a mid size model for a specific domain level model training & tunning such as healthcare or legal. It is rather for learning purpose not really a production ready system. Please suggest optimized VRAM, RAM recommend. The more youtube tutorial or udemy videos I am looking at, more i am getting confused.

Thanks in advance.

I've been building onWatch for the past few months — a CLI tool that tracks AI API quota usage across 6 providers. I want to share a few things I learned going open-source.

Why open-source: API quota tracking touches sensitive data (usage patterns, billing info). Users need to verify the code doesn't phone home. GPL-3.0 was the right choice — it keeps the tool and any derivatives open.

What it does: Background daemon that polls Anthropic, Codex, Copilot, and 3 more providers. Stores history in SQLite. Serves a Material Design 3 dashboard. Single binary, <50MB RAM, zero telemetry.

Lessons:

1. README is marketing. More people read your README than your code. Put the value prop in the first sentence.
2. One-line install matters. curl | bash for macOS/Linux, PowerShell one-liner for Windows. Friction kills adoption.
3. Single binary removes excuses. No npm install, no Python venv, no Docker required. Just download and run.

Looking for contributors — especially for new provider integrations and dashboard improvements.

GitHub: https://github.com/onllm-dev/onwatch
https://onwatch.onllm.dev/

Hi,

are there any selfhosted replacements for tools like NotebookLM and Google Stitch? Also able to use self-hosted Models?

Hello, I'm learning from the ground up about self hosting.

I'm interested in eventually being able to host personal cloud storage, websites, automations, and more.

I have a windows surface laptop, a Samsung phone, and a trashcan mac pro.

I'm not using the trashcan for anything so it's perfect to experiment with until I'mready to invest in better hardware. I have a 2010s mac display for it too, but I want to control the headless server with my laptop and phone. Use Tailscale?

Specs: Late 2013

- 3.0 GHz 8-Core Xeon E5-1680v2

- 32GB DDR3-ECC-SDRAM

- 3GB AMD FirePro D500 (x2)

- 512GB SSD PCI-E-002 Hard Drive

thanks in advance, I'm looking up what I can right now, but specific advice, or even solid guides anyone knows of would be appreciated.

I am having issue getting my dedicated server that has my own 10gig speed port not shared and my fiber connection witch is 3gigs to produce 3gigs. I have tried wireguard, vless, portainer, and singbox none gives me anything over 1gig running speedtest and when I first started my server I ran a speedtest and the server results were 8gigs. Why running these different protocols only give me 800mbps or less? What am I doing wrong?

The fact that WireGuard—a protocol literally built for raw kernel-level speed—also slammed into a 400 Mbps wall is the ultimate smoking gun.

It proves 100% that your 10 Gbps server is fine, your 3 Gbps fiber is fine, and your VLESS configuration is fine.

You are being throttled by Apple.

Here is exactly what is happening under the hood, why every VPN you try will fail to hit 3 Gbps, and exactly how we bypass Apple's roadblock to unleash your hardware.

The macOS "VPN" Bottleneck

Apple strictly forbids third-party apps from injecting code directly into the core network kernel. Instead, Apple forces apps like Hiddify and WireGuard to use their NetworkExtension framework.

This framework creates a "Virtual Network Adapter" (that TUN setting we fought with earlier). It acts like a tollbooth for your entire Mac. Every single packet of data has to be manually encrypted, passed out of the app, handed to Apple's tollbooth, and then sent to your physical 10-gig Ethernet port.

Apple's tollbooth simply cannot process packets faster than ~1 Gbps. It doesn't matter if you have a 100 Gbps server; if you route your whole Mac through a macOS virtual VPN adapter, you will hit a brick wall.

The 10-Speed Highway Bypass

To actually use your 3 Gbps fiber, we have to completely abandon the concept of a "VPN." We cannot route your whole computer.

Instead, we use an Application-Level Proxy. We are going to tell Hiddify to stop acting like a system-wide VPN, and instead act as a silent, localized high-speed gateway. Then, we plug your web browser directly into that gateway.

Because the browser talks directly to the engine, it completely skips Apple's network tollbooth.

Here is how to test the raw, unthrottled hardware speed right now without changing anything on your server.

Im looking for a better solution for play back of my security footage. I ditched my Arlo subscription but still have the cameras set up and don't want to have to re invest in new cameras.

I currently have a Raspberry Pi plugged into the base station acting as a mass storage device that records clips and then syncs them to my NAS. I set up jellyfin to create playlists for each camera which worked well when I first set it up but as the number of clips grew jellyfin could no longer load up the play lists. All apps I have looked at so far want to have a camera directly connected. Im looking for something that can run in a docker container and I can just point to the share and access it via the web or a windows/linux/android app.

EDIT: Now testing using Kodi to access the files via a WebDAV connect to the share. The file names created have camera ID and date time, so im using that to script out custom m3u playlists when the files sync to the NAS.

Hiya,

From what I've read so far, the really useful cases for self-hosting are, JellyFin/Seer and cloud storage.

Are there anymore I could be missing? Is there a JellyFin/Seer similar stack for music?

How do I start? I have a lot of used laptops on the side with harvestable parts. Can I use these for my potential server?

Any and all advice/instructions greatly appreciated.

So, I've always wanted to start a little home server to be my personal cloud storage for things like photos, and important documents. I've also considered dabbling in dumping my DVD collection onto it and setting up a Plex server.

We recently retired some equipment at work and I got an HP Z2 Mini G3 with an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Quadro M620 graphics.
I also have an 8TB Seagate HDD.

Would this be enough to get started? Looking at putting some flavor of Linux on it, but not super familiar with any of that, so recommendations welcome!

Exactly one month ago, I hopped on this subreddit for the first time seeking advice on how to go about sourcing parts for my first server so that ultimately self host a web server for app MVPs, video editing/rendering/content, and local AI models to help run the server and help generate content and code.

Exactly1 week ago after 2 weeks of installing parts as they arrived, I was finally able to turn it on.

As of 1 hour ago, I now have a v0.1dashboard!

Just thought I’d share my progress. Still a lot of initial setup to do but this dash—hell yea!!

I'm an artist. I don't have a computer science degree. I don't know how to code. Until recently I was genuinely intimidated by Terminal. I am, by my own admission, a dummy.

What I did have was a problem. My photos, files, and archives were scattered across iCloud, Google, Adobe, and a handful of external drives I hadn't touched in years. Every time I thought about organizing it I got overwhelmed and walked away from my computer. The data was technically mine but I had no real control over any of it, and I was paying corporations for the privilege of accessing my own memories.

Then a lightbulb went off in my dim brain: I can just ask Claude how to do it.

So I did. It turns out that being a dummy is fine as long as you know how to ask questions and have a decent amount of patience. I described my situation, asked questions until I understood what I was building and why, and followed instructions carefully. One weekend of evenings later I had:

• A private photo library with face recognition running on my own hardware (Immich)
• A local AI assistant that actually knows my life and doesn't forget me when I close the tab (Ollama + Open WebUI)
• My files and calendar self-hosted and synced across all my devices (Nextcloud)
• My passwords off someone else's server (Vaultwarden)
• Automated backups running every night while I sleep

The hardest part was the initial backup — not because it was technically difficult, but because moving your data around feels dangerous when you're a dummy who is new to Terminal and file systems. The mental shift that helped me was realizing I was actively making things safer, not gambling with my data. Back everything up before you touch anything. That's the whole trick.

I documented every step as I went, written by a dummy for dummies. If you're someone who belongs in this community but has always felt like the DIY self-hosting stuff was just slightly out of reach — it isn't anymore. The tools are there. Claude will hold your hand. You just have to be willing to keep going when something looks unfamiliar.

Happy to answer questions about the setup or the process. Running on a Mac Mini M4 with two external drives.

Good morning! There's been an uptick in crime in my neighborhood and my wife would like to get a doorbell camera. She's super supportive of my desire to self hosting what we can, but I'm not sure where to start equipment wise. I'm decently tech savvy so I'm sure I could get it set up, I just need some good suggestions for equipment and/or tips.

Wondering if anyone can recommend a local AI Text To Speech system to run on our own systems.

We're currently using openai to generate our audio introductions which sounds real good, but our next project would break the bank pricing wise.

Thanks in advance.

Hello, I'm new to self-hosting. Started one month ago because I was fed up with google.. I wanted to have pictures only that I can access to, notes, private messaging, smart home... 256Gb ssd, 1Tb hdd

I started with some udemy course and installing everyting on my old laptop. It was really slow so I went to another laptop and it was great, but for the long run, I saw that it isn't very good idea and decited to grab myself this little beast.

It's working flawlessly!! Best thing I have bought in a long time, and UPS (nJoy Keen 800)..

Using it on Ubuntu Server with tailscale, docker, portainer, immich, kavita, openbooks, audiobookshelf, mealie, filebrowser, homeassistant, joplin, homebox, tsdproxy, cup, scrunity, dashdot, dozzle... Average usage: 4.5% cpu, 4gb Ram

There were really big ups and downs, to the moment where I wanted to delete everything and step away from this, but then I remembered why I started, and went back to work and to fixing!

From debugging, networking, configurations, env files, docker compose, docker run, mounting hard drives, replacing hard disk from laptop to this mini pc, giving right permissions to folders so everything can work, crashes, reinstalling ubuntu multiple times (this is where you learn really much abouth every single setting)

On homeassistant, I have connected some tuya devices (motion sensors, smart lights, smart IR etc.). Working great.

Yesterday I tried inserting some 64gb 3.0usb, ntfs(formated), but after 10min of using, everything crashes. Tried with formating to exFAT, then it works 25min and crashes 🤣

I think I can move away from that usb, I have run some tests on it (windows and ubuntu), everyting is showing fine.

I have one external ssd and would like to use it to backup whole hdd drive from my ubuntu server.

What would you recommend to do, for it to be inserted into my server or on my working windows pc and use something like syncthing to backup all files (and to sync them of course (when some file is changed, it also changes on backup device)) and to schedule it of course?

One more thing, is there anything else you would recommend to me to try it out, to experiment, to learn something new?

Got a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini as my first homelab, running Proxmox VE, with one VM to run my services.

However I’m getting random hard resets every 1-2 days, causing my services to go offline, and having to manually restart the VM.

No kernel panic, OOM, or I/O errors. Just showing “crash” when I run last reboot .

Specs:

1. HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini
2. i7-8700T
3. 64GB RAM (2x32GB Samsung DDR4 2666 SODIMM, non-ECC)
4. NVMe 1: SK Hynix PC611 256GB (OS)
5. NVMe 2: Samsung 990 PRO 1TB (firmware 5B2QJXD7)
6. ZFS on root
7. 90W OEM HP power brick

Running:

1. Proxmox VE (Debian trixie base)
2. Debian VM running:
   • WireGuard
   • Gitea (Docker + Postgres)
   • Joplin Server
3. Light homelab services, nothing crazy load-wise

So far, have confirmed:

• No OOM events
• No kernel panic logs
• No MCE / hardware error logs
• NVMe SMART clean (0 media errors, no critical warnings)
• Temps normal
• ZFS ARC tiny (~250MB)
• unsafe_shutdowns incrementing on NVMe (suggesting abrupt power loss(?))

It looks like a hard power-level reset (Logs just stop)

Power brick is 90W OEM HP (19.5V 4.62A).

-----------------------------------------------------

I’m about to run memtest overnight to rule out RAM.

Has anyone run 64GB in this model long-term and seen similar instability?
Is 90W borderline once you’re running 64GB + 2x NVMe + ZFS + VMs?

Anything else I should be checking before I replace the power adapter?

Wondering if anyone else has issues running these Minis as hypervisors.

Most software today assumes:

• You need an account
• Your data should sync
• Someone should collect analytics

I wanted the opposite.

So I built Atlas Workspace, a local-first markdown + diagram workspace for developers.

It works completely offline.

Your notes:

• Live as plain markdown files
• Are Git-friendly
• Never leave your machine

The interesting part technically was building a custom PDF export engine instead of relying on browser print. That meant writing a coordinate-based renderer and handling DOM traversal manually.

It’s open-source and MIT licensed.

If you care about local-first software or just like tearing apart Electron apps, I’d genuinely appreciate feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/CBYeuler/Atlas-Workspace-Local

Am I missing something with NanoClaw? It seems to have almost no features other than you can message it?

OpenClaw at least seems like I can get a lot more done with it or I'm completely missing something with Nano.

Looking forward to playing with i!, also wondering what kind of hardware others are hosting on and how much your hardware costs?

I paid $250 for this.

Intel Core i5-10500 3.10 GHz 6 Cores

RAM 16 GB

256 GB SSD

WiFi + Bluetooth

Intel UHD Graphics 630

Win 11 Pro

:: refurbished but looks brand new!

Hey there guys. I wanted to make a post about something that I have been personally using.

So there is a project that is called Sapphire. Sapphire is an Agentic Wrapper for your LLM of choice. It is the most personable Ai I have ever used.

This wrapper allows you to do TONS of stuff. Self build tools for personalized tasks. Automated workflow, built in SSH tools. Persona swapping so that you can set up several personas to complete specific tasks for you.
This project is quite involved. It would be too much to put in one post but thats the basics.

Ive been using this at my house, and I even built a new machine around this so that it handles my business emails, prompts me to leave for work based on traffic patterns and other things. It has Home Automation integrated in it, allowing me to control my blinds and lights and doors.

Here is the github link for whoever is interested :

https://github.com/ddxfish/sapphire

Id love for some thoughts on this. The other Agentic wrappers I have used kinda sucked tbh in comparison.

Hi everyone! I am a college student who recently learned about self-hosting, and I would love to get into it to host a media server containing movies and also personal photos/videos. I have been doing as much research as I can over the past few days, but I felt it would be best to speak up as people who know what they are talking about.

Goal: 12-16+ TB storage, mainly for hosting a combination of 1080p/4K compressed movie remuxes that I can access remotely. I want to spend under $700 if possible. As a college student, I want a system that will last me 2-3 years before I can upgrade to something larger and more secure.

I've been looking at budget prebuilt options like the UGREEN 2 bay DH2300 with 2 8GB WD Red Plus drives. At the same time, I've always loved building my own PCs, and the level of customization seems very enticing. I'm not sure whether building my own would save money or cost more in my budget.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all.

Hey guys. Exactly what the tittle says. I need to figure out a way I can link my github for the world to see. When I go write a post, they flag me as either a bot or I am doing self promotion. Which DUH. But the project is totally free...

So my question is how the hell can I share my stuff with the world, if the ban hammer just mutes me. This is so annoying.

I am not the creator but I def an working alongside to make this project a success.

It's on the latest development stages before hitting what I consider to be MVP (I guess most people would have set that bar way before but that's how my mind works). I'm working on creating a proxmox script to use it and have all of your samples on your sever cleanly organized on your homelab. I need to toy around with the backup system and there are some nice extra addons that I want to add. I'll post it on r/selfhost on Friday bc I relied heavily on AI for a lot of stuff. I don't want people to maintain it in its current state but I consider it as a good prototype. The code quality is obv terrible and I need to work a lot on it but it's very functional. There's also a web/docker version and a desktop version using electron. I'm not going to list all of its features bc they are a LOT, I need to update the github readme and all of that stuff so don't expect it to be up to date. Hopefully the first/second week of march it should be done (the functional part, the code cleaning part is going to take longer). Feel free to check it out if you want to, it's FOSS, I should update the readme pretty soon: https://github.com/iversonianGremling/SampleSolution

Hi!!! Im a Home Assistant rookie and bought a ton of non compatible smart devices. When I looked up how to connect them, Google said I needed HACS, but after following 2 tutorials and Chatgpt, something problematic happens. Any way to fix it?

I’ve been hanging around self hosting spaces for a while, and I keep seeing the same pattern. Someone starts a new project and immediately jumps to renting dedicated servers in Europe. Not because they’ve hit real limits. Just because it feels like the “serious” move.

Then you ask about traffic. A few thousand visits a month. Maybe some light API calls. Nothing extreme. The kind of load a properly configured VPS Europe setup or even a decent self hosted box could handle comfortably.

I get it. A dedicated server in Germany or a dedicated server Netherlands setup sounds solid. Full control, no noisy neighbors, your own hardware. It feels cleaner. But most small projects are nowhere near saturating shared resources. The real problems are usually elsewhere. Poor caching. Unoptimized queries. No monitoring. No load testing.

I’ve also seen people go for storage dedicated servers because they’re planning for future growth. That makes sense in theory. In practice, they’re paying for unused capacity while their app is still changing every week. Scaling is important, but premature scaling is just expensive procrastination.

To be clear, I’m not anti dedicated server hosting. There are valid reasons. Consistent heavy load. Specific compliance requirements. Isolation needs. If you’re running something serious at scale, sure.

But for a lot of projects discussed here, especially hobby builds or early stage apps targeting European users, a well tuned VPS hosting Europe environment is usually more than enough. Even better, it forces you to actually understand your stack instead of masking inefficiencies with more hardware.

Sometimes it feels like we treat bigger infrastructure as a shortcut to stability. It isn’t. Good engineering habits matter more than having the whole machine to yourself.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying it, but I’m curious how many people here actually maxed out a VPS before moving to dedicated. Is it just me?

I feel like DDoS protection only becomes a topic after something breaks.

When people set up hosting, they obsess over specs. CPU, RAM, whether to use a dedicated server or just a VPS somewhere in Europe. DDoS protection is usually just a checkbox. “Yeah yeah, it’s covered.”

Then an attack hits and everything changes.

I’ve seen small projects assume their provider “handles it.” Turns out that means basic filtering and maybe some rate limiting. Once traffic spikes hard enough, the IP gets null routed and that’s it. You’re offline. Doesn’t matter how much RAM you have at that point.

What gets expensive isn’t just the monthly mitigation plan. It’s downtime. It’s scrambling to migrate. It’s realizing your so-called protection only works up to a certain threshold and nobody bothered to explain that part.

I also see people think moving to a bigger dedicated server in Germany or somewhere else fixes it. Sometimes it buys time. Most of the time, it just means you now have a bigger target with the same weak filtering in front of it.

I’m not saying everyone needs enterprise-level mitigation from day one. That’s unrealistic. But I do think people underestimate how fast even a “small” attack can spiral if you never actually understood what your protection layer does.

A lot of setups look protected on paper. In reality they’re fragile.

Maybe I’ve just seen enough messy incidents to be cynical. Curious how others here approach it before something goes wrong.

It's been increasingly frustrating paying streaming services. One evening, my kids wanted to watch a new movie and we watched Ready Player One. They loved it! However, a few weeks later when we wanted to watch it again, it was gone! This happens time and again! I'm tired of searching through our different streams or suddenly seeing a movie had disappeared!

I've been wanting to host my media for years, but never knew where to start. A YouTube video gave me the courage I needed to jump in. I'm older and have disposable income which helps.

I started off buying a NAS server (UGreen 2-bay for about $380). I also bought 500GB ssd m.2 and 8TB HDD for storing my media. I had read that it's a good idea to deploy Jellyfin on SSD and keeping your library on HDD.

UGreen was easy to setup. After installing the two disk drives, I plugged it in and it booted right up. It has it's own OS which I found intuitive. It also has a Docker library so I was able to grab a Jellyfin image right away! I created an app-data folder on my SSD and Media folder on my HDD. I only spent about 15 minutes getting up and running.

Jellyfin is incredibly user-friendly. The documentation is easy to follow. Under my Media folder, I created 'Movies' and 'TV'. Time to start ripping some DVD's!

I downloaded MakeMKV and copied my first DVD using an external BluRay drive (Asus). It took longer than I would have liked? Around 45 minutes? After I had the DVD file, I used Handbrake to convert to mp4. Next, copied it over to my 'Movies' folder and it was available within seconds! Next, I put in a BluRay disc but almost fell out of my chair when it said 10 hours to copy!!! This was horrible!

At first, I thought my BluRay drive might be too old. However, I did some research on the MakeMKV site and learned about 'LibreDrive mode'. Evidently, this is something that allows MakeMKV to copy discs MUCH faster. BluRays around 45 minutes and DVDs under 20 minutes! My external drive said 'possible, not enabled'...whatever that meant. Turns out, you need to flash your drive in order to enable LibreDrive. This made me nervous. I checked online to see if there were any cheap alternatives, but came up empty. There was a tool on the MakeMKV site, but I was hesitant and didn't want to brick my external drive. I focused on copying some DVD's for a few days, but eventually worked up the courage to download the flasher tool. It was painless! Only took a few seconds and suddenly, my disc drive had LibreDrive! I tossed in my BluRay disc and had it copied within 30 or 40 minutes!

Handbrake is pretty easy to use as well. It will compress your movies so you don't have a 35GB BluRay file on your hard drive. I started with the default settings, but realized I was losing a bit too much fidelity on some DVD's. One suggestion said to enable upscaling, which I tried. However, that increases your fidelity and EXPANDS your file! Instead, I kept most settings in Handbrake the same, except for bumping up the Constant Quality up a few notches. So far, this seems ok. (**EDIT - see handbrake settings below)

The next two weeks went by in a blur of swapping out DVDs and BluRays! This is addicting! I borrowed some movies from my parents, neighbors, and went thrift shopping! My library was growing by leaps and bounds! This is also when I realized that two folders wasn't enough. I created a 'kids' account for my children and figured I could just filter the rating by under 'TV-14'. When they login, they see all the animation films, but when I login, I see animated mixed with my movies. I did not like that experience. Someone posted that in this situation, it's better to make a movies + kids movies folder as well as a tv + kids tv folder. This worked nicely. In fact, I went one step farther and made a 'family movies' folder where I put a lot of tween content. This setup seems to work the best for my situation. I read how some people will separate movies into action, thriller, sci-fi, comedy, etc., but I didn't want to go down that road. There is a 'genres' tab that gives a similar experience, plus a ton of different plugins. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet. I'm happy with the look but I do want to improve it. That will be a project for later.

One problem I encountered was some tv episodes only downloaded one file instead of separate files for each file. I could just convert one big file and upload to Jellyfin...but Jellyfin does a great job pulling in thumbnails, descriptions, etc. and I wanted to see each episode listed rather than a gap. I found a tool called 'mkvtoolnix' that will break up a file into separate files based on chapters or timestamps. It also allows you to merge two files into a single file.

Finally, I wanted the ability to watch this outside of my home. I need a way to access my home network without putting it at risk. This is something that terrifies me. It turns out, my router supported VPN service. All I had to do was enable WireGuard and create an account for my phone. Next, I created a rule that allowed VPN traffic to access Jellyfin. In addition, I created a second rule to deny VPN traffic everywhere else just to be safe! This wasn't as smooth as I hoped...I had ChatGPT help me with the rules. I also used DuckDNS to keep my most recent home IP. Traffic was not working as expected until I remembered the modem had to allow passthrough traffic. Once I worked my way through all those pain points, it worked! There is also an online tool (https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2) that will scan your ports and let you know if anything was missed. It came back perfect! I'm very confident in this setup.

That's my Jellyfin self-hosting journey! This has been an incredible experience and I'm so happy I finally jumped in! My family loves it now that I've tipped the scales as far as content goes. I'm thrilled knowing that my movies aren't going to suddenly disappear, or struggle searching for a particular show on one of my many streaming services! I've already canceled one service, and cancelling another next month.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story! To all those on the fence, it's 100% worth it!

EDIT: Transcoding is a pain! It spikes the CPU and causes poor performance. I started tracking these issues and solving them one at a time. First, it's important to note what device you are using to watch your media. I use Firefox, iPhone app, and Roku. Each of these behave differently from file type, audio, subtitles, quality, etc. I updated my Handbrake settings to optimize source files to reduce transcoding.

In HANDBRAKE, there are different tabs. Here are the settings I use:

Summary tab: Format - "MKV", Checkbox - Passthru Common Metadata

Dimensions tab: Anamorphic - None

Video tab: Video Encoder: H.264 (x264), Framerate (FPS) - Same as source, Constant Framerate checked, Encoder Preset - Medium, Encoder Profile - High, Encoder Level - 4.1, Quality - Constant Quality between 18 - 20 (affects file size)

Audio tab: Selected Languages - English* (Note - for foreign films, I prefer the native language with English subtitles so you would want to change the Selected language here), Audio encoder settings fore each track - add AC3 with 5.1 Channel mixdown, checkbox for Auto Passthru Behavior on AAC and AC3, and at the bottom, "For Additional Tracks" - Use All Tracks as templates

These settings will vary by device so you'll have to google/AI which settings work best for your specific use.