Hi, I’ve written a somewhat extensive guide on how to reproduce my setup for self-hosting for family and friends.
My objective here has been building a secure infrastructure while solving the problem of not asking much from your users.
I’m currently done writing and done most of the tests but haven’t done one final top-to-bottom test still, this process is based on what I’ve come up with and it has gone through many iterations, a final test is what I intend on doing this Saturday (2026/10/17) live, alongside answering questions and helping people out during each chapter.
I think the only warning is I’m no professional writer, bare with me.
Honestly not a bad write up. I don’t agree with the systemd take… but that’s a matter of taste/opinion and there are already enough posts/threads/rants about that.
From an ease of use standpoint. I would recommend giving caddy a look as a reverse proxy as well. Config file is much simpler and handles letsencrypt with no input form the user.
Also finding a cheap VPS is becoming more and more difficult these days. If recommendations are needed I can currently recommend checking out netcup. They still have some competitively priced options in quite a few markets.
That’s true about caddy! not only does it do the same but it also save on some RAM, considering I’m aiming for end-user easy of use and general low resource uses it would fit in nicely! I don’t know why it didn’t cross my mind before when considering what I should move around to get lower RAM usage.
I’ll leave it like this for now, maybe once I’m done with my current guide write an updated version using Caddy instead, it shouldn’t be a lot of effort, thanks for recommendation!
If recommendations are needed I can currently recommend checking out netcup.
Recommendations for VPSs are welcomed, thanks!
I will also add for anyone looking at VPSs wanting to reproduce my setup, I’m using 400Mbs of RAM and 4.2GB of storage(debian installation is most of it). so consider anything with at least 1GB of RAM, should be mostly anything, the lowest packages seem to be standardized to 4GBs of RAM and 64 of storage around VPS providers.
After some deliberation I will not be streaming tomorrow, I’ll leave the tutorial up for whoever doesn’t really care about saving another 100Mbs of RAM, but my goal has always been getting a comfortable setup for people with 2 and 4Gbs and I think saving a bit more is the breathing rooms someone out there may need.
I will be updating my setup to use caddy instead of traefik.
Turns out caddy doesn’t to TCP, but there is a surprisingly recent project call caddy-l4 that adds TCP and UDP support for caddy, I’ve done some tests and it does both work well while still saving around 80MBs of memory.
I’ve left all the setup commented on a git branch and we’ll leave as an work-in-progress alternative if anyone wants to squeeze the maximum out of your RAM.
I’ve decided to run my whole setup start to finish today, I’ll be live at 5PM UTC(around 3 hours from when this is posted) at live.mosskoi(dot)com if anyone is interested. It should be a smooth ride until some open-rc stuff I haven’t tested much but that is also the least important.