The joys of self-hosting and tiny side-projects
Tiny side-projects
Lately there hasn’t been much time in my life for recreational programming but I still find time to create tiny services and put them on the public internet. I’m sure this stretches the definition of “side-projects”, but one advantage of having a VM somewhere in the cloud and a registered domain is you can create your own little kingdom of subdomains. Below are some examples of tiny side-projects, some no more than webserver configuration that either serves a small practical need or written for fun.
| 🌐 ip.jarv.org | Responds with the IP address of the request. |
| 🤯 *.resp.jarv.org | Generates an http response based on the subdomain. E.g., 200, 404, 418, etc. |
| 🔓 nossl.jarv.org | Forces an http connection, sometimes useful for getting to the wifi login page, same as neverssl.com or example.com. |
| 💤 sleep.jarv.org | Sleeps for an arbitrary number of seconds or milliseconds. E.g., 1s, 100ms. |
I was thinking recently about doing little projects like this, and I think that not only does it make learning something new fun, but it is also nice to simply build something that is very small and self-contained. More than anything else it ends up being a forcing-function to learn new things that I wouldn’t learn otherwise. For example, when writing front-end code there is always a bit more I learn about css media queries since I don’t spend much time in the front-end and the landscape is constantly changing. Or another is that I just learned that there is no browser enforced CORS with websockets, and I also figured out how to properly respond to a pre-flight cors request.
Read more about some of these on the post about cool caddy config tricks.
Self-hosting
At one point I would have never considered hosting a simple static site like this blog on a VM but now that I host this static blog on a VM I would recommend it over hosting a static site on object storage or using service like GitHub Pages. For one, you have more control over access, headers, responses, caching, etc. Another reason to consider self-hosting is that it used to be a pain to deal with SSL certificates but this has gotten so much easier with webservers like Caddy that come with out-of-the-box support for LetsEncrypt.
As far as spending money, self-hosting a static site, running a webserver, and running services in Docker containers can be done a small VM for around 5eu/month (or less!). Once you have your own server you can self-host applications you write yourself or select from a large selection of open-source services. I run all of the following on the same host:
- Prometheus and node exporter
- Loki for logs
- Grafana
- GoatCounter
Self-hosting analytics (e.g., GoatCounter) means you know you will be seeing an accurate view of traffic since browser ad-blockers won’t block requests. Collecting metrics with Prometheus, dashboarding with Grafana , and log management with Loki gives a nice consolidated view into all the services running on the host. There is nothing is quite as as simple as running everything on a single VM with systemd managing monitoring, logging and application services with docker.