I find the idea of self-hosting really appealing and I am trying to migrate frequently used online services to self-hosted ones. In particular, I want to setup a platform for online storage, virtual machine management, web hosting, email, instant messaging, and possibly home automations.

RPi

Web hosting, email and IM are being handled by a Raspberry Pi 3 running FreeBSD. I used various online guides and documentations, but mainly this, this, and this. The most prominent difficulties were to overcome the restricted access to port 25 for outgoing mail imposed by the ISP, to deal with the dynamic nature of the home IP and to correctly configure the servers (certificates, security settings, mailboxes, spam filters).

In previous attempts the web hosting and email (there wasn’t any IM) were handled by a Raspberry Pi 1 and the armv6 architecture wasn’t supported by the FreeBSD project (now it is a Tier 2 architecture), so there was the added difficulty of cross-compiling it.

Syneffo

For storage and virtual machine management, I am planning to setup a Synnefo deployment. The storage service will be, most likely, installed on top of a ZFS/GlusterFS combination.