Thanks to the magic of the internet, I've been able to work-from-home in rural Finland this past week. As spring has been slowly showing itself, it reminded me that growth never needs to be lightning fast, just something taken in the smallest steps.

I've had big self-hosting plans for a long time - dreams of a homelab with Cloudflare tunnels, Proxmox, the whole works. Unfortunately, my living situation is just not there yet and that's been the big blocker to the dream. I don't live somewhere at the moment with enough permanency, space or network freedom to have justified beginning this adventure.

Part of my desire to self-host comes from a love of open source software and the concept of data ownership. I don't want my data owned by a faceless American corporation, subject to loss or, more realistically, underhanded selling. But what I realised recently is that not being in a position to physically own my data yet doesn't mean I can't begin to be more in charge of it.

Enter Hetzner. I read a post on Reddit where someone was talking about a dedicated server they were renting with them through their server auction system, where older-spec servers find use rather than going to waste. I was already a customer of Hetzner for the odd VPS here and there but the idea of a dedicated server and IP that wouldn't break my bank account each month really intrigued me. It wasn't long before I found a perfect fit and I was now the proud owner - or, well, renter - of a dedicated server.

So no, I don't technically own the data. But at least I know where it is. And funnily enough, it's in Finland where I also happen to be at the moment. So I know where it is, I know who owns it and I am in charge of what happens to it. This is already a much better situation than I was in before, despite it not being quite the full dream yet. But that can come another day.

The first thing I did with the server was format it and install a fresh copy of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, configure SSH and the firewall, and then set up Coolify. It was my first time trying Coolify as a container management service but I've been very impressed. It's made managing this server so much easier. I just set up a wildcard DNS record for my private development domain and was able to have services spin up at some-service-name.my-private-domain.dev in no time, with Coolify handling proxy routing and SSL certificates via LetsEncrypt automagically.

So that's where we are now. I've been gradually getting more and more things spun up on the server and away from the nebulous "clouds" of American corporations. You're even reading this new Ghost blog on the server, all set up via Coolify. Neat.

I'm excited to see what else this server will bring me, and what I can reclaim of my data and, in the process, of myself.