Ethan's Wiki Update #12
My $4/month self-hosted web server setup
No new links in the past week. I have been writing a new blog post for over the past 2 months. It is finally published!
My $4/month self-hosted web server setup
This blog documented my setup for self-hosting my playground server. It is a web server that power real time, turn-based multiplayer game. The self-hosted server has been running for 9 months now, and it requires little maintenance. I had a lot of fun running my own server and figuring out stuff along the way.
The setup goes through the steps of renting and setting up a virtual machine (VM) from Hetzner, running the web server and database in containers, and then configuring nginx and DNS to expose it to the Internet. Also included other details like SSH configurations, firewall, and monitoring tools I use like netdata and checkly. I wrote down the reasons why I chose a particular option at each step, and how I configure them as detail as I can.
In total, the full setup cost me on average less than $4 a month. Including the cost of renting my own domain, it is still less than $5 per month on average. It’s not that expensive. I was intimated by all the potential cost and complexity before, but after all, it was not that complicated.
Self-hosting gave me a lot of fun to tinker with. I would like to share what I had and hopefully this is helpful for others to get started with hosting your web server.