Selfhosted

I'm a 26 year veteran systems / infrastructure engineer and often work on large scale data / server migration projects. My homelab is larger and more robust than 95% of the client sites I service; everything is enterprise class hardware and software. I self host my own RMM, VPN, and various data and entertainment services. Most of the things I run here are to make my life better or easier for myself and my family.

My formal education is in business administration; I did not go to school specifically for an IT Degree. It's just something I love. I went to school to understand the business side of the thing I love, which has been very helpful. If you find a job doing what you love, work can feel like an accomplishment instead of a burden.

Never stop learning!

Have a server and 2.5gbe network setup, have my own custom router, 2 small game servers and one big media server(240tb). Never had any sort of IT or networking job. This is just fun to do things never worked in the field

I imagine most people that do this are already IT professionals. Or if they can do this they should be IT professionals. The difference between what I get paid to do and self-hosting is generally the scope and cost of the hardware. That’s about it.

Never in an IT profession, but I did show a colleague how to cut and paste using keyboard shortcuts and he asked if used to work in IT.

My self hosting hobby is why I got into my career in IT.

I've been in film/television/video production my entire career. It's a creative field that also relies heavily on ever-changing technology, so I'm not too outside of a tech field. But I've always been a geek. Eventually the enshittification comes for us all, and I said, fuck this, I'll just figure out my own music server. Then, I'm gonna support the right to repair (Framework). I'll use Linux, I'll focus on privacy. And then it snowballed...and now I'm just the meat bag that keeps the 42U rack in my basement working :)

I learned everything I know in IT from tinkering/research. Higher education was absolutely worthless for my IT career, but at least it was free and I didn’t get myself into debt. Of course I got into computers in 1994 when people started buying home computers.

Yes

I professionally work in IT without formal education or any related career. It's one field where you can really teach everything yourself with free online resources.

In fact my self hosting journey has taught me things that were later useful for work. I consider it part of my informal education.

I have no education i learned all through trial an error an google

i might be a more typical nerd. i have a phd in physics and took a bunch of computer science course out of interest/boredom.

but i never learned anything that is really related to hosting. containers were not really a thing at the time and most courses i took were much more fundamental, like basics of networking or cpu scheduling. programming a learned on the fly to solve a problem, never as actual task in itself (what is very typical in my field and leads to horrible program code/collaboration scheme)

Yes, I'm not an IT professional and don't have education in anything related to computers. Has always been a hobby for me. I don't want to do my hobbies for work because I fear it would take the fun out.

Yes. I have no education at all in IT. I have a masters in classical double bass and a career as a musician, working in an opera house now. Computers have always been a hobby and was my second choice for "life path". Could have easily been the other way around, professional nerd and amateur musician. I am very happy as is, though.

I have three degrees, none of them have focused at all on programming. I had one c++ programming class in uni.

In my experience, most of the IT stuff is easy-ish, if you start trying. Most people have some psychological barrier with anything looking like code. I'll give you two examples.

My wife would refuse to fix small issues in our home lab, but once I explained, everything we have is backed up twice. And wiped homelab to assure her that we can't fuck up by accidental edit, we'd have a way to restore it she started trying, and she is decent at it. She even started our paperless container on her own. I had to help a bit in configuring it, but a bit. Soon she maybe able to manage everything. On the other hand.

At work I have this junior, I'm training. First I had a json file, he got scared editing and would bug me everytime. Then I made a simple text file, variable_name space value. He was scared of that too. I finally made a csv that he would open in excel, then he felt comfortable. He refuses to even try 2 years in, because our job in not really technical and I'm not his boss.

TLDR: start trying with simple things, backup everything, you may fail a bit, but it's not that hard to get started with basics.

It's always interesting when someone asks this question because while I do have a formal education in computer science. I've had this hobby since before I had that formal education. Linux and self hosting are what made me pursue the formal education part and not the other way around.

I have no formal training but have been in IT for over thirty years.

I don't do any self-hosting anymore, but when I started I only had a couple uni classes that were related (I quit after about 9 months as uni wasn't for me when I was 17). I somehow got recommended Gentoo linux back in the early 2000s and stood up my first server not long after (and got a lot of lessons in dealing with email servers). Now, I just don't have the time to do it as a hobby and certainly not the money for any hardware in this economy. I thankfully never had any real security/hacking issues thanks in part to good guides even back then. It actually taught me a lot about both linux and many other things. I'm now a software engineer for a living, but mostly just doing backend work with little exposure to the infra side.

I don't have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷‍♂️

I'm gonna speak generally and it doesn't quite generalize. Sue me.

Formal education in computer science is a waste, unless you want to be in academia. A formal education in computer science will either prepare you for higher education in Computer Sciences, or it will drill into you some best practices on how to be a good programmer. You can get the latter through brute force for free.

That said, I have a formal CS education. It has helped my career 0. I'm 10 years into my career and am the 1 man cybersecurity team (plus my boss and my coworker who does most of our networking stuff unless he's too busy, then that's me as well) for a fleet of ~4000 devices across ~1500 folks.

I have never once needed to explain to someone what von Neumann architecture is, and how it differs from Harvard. I have never once needed to explain two's compliment or how to represent negative numbers in binary. Knowing what an xor swap is and why it's used has only helped me solve a leetcode problem exactly ONE TIME. I have explained to many people what P vs NP is (no your suno track will not be the next cultural phenomenon) but nobody cares.

The stuff that did serve me was like, making the card game of war in Java. Even the GUI. That's a project I would have never done because who TF would. But it forces you to implement recursion (war within a war), it entails some good validation checking practices, etc. the truth is though, I did not need a college education for that project.

At the end of the day, technical projects teach technical skills. Not PowerPoints based on textbooks.

If you wanna learn how to harden your servers, I recommend freemium hands on learning platforms like tryhackme or hackthebox.

Hack the box has a module on server hardening. It's my go to for hardening servers. Happy to share the bullet points. It's not too much. Basically just disable root auth, disable ssh except key-based, enable MFA (I use authelia) and you're harder than 90% of boxes in the wild. Then just setup Fail2ban and you're more or less golden for a home server.

Yeah, my education is in electrical engineering and industrial automation. I've grown up using computers and like to learn, but I've never had any formal education on the subject except for high school programming classes, an intro CS course using Scheme, and a Python 3 bootcamp on Udemy. Everything else that I know is just from hands-on experience and using a search engine.

For hosting services and managing my domain, only a basic understanding is necessary, so I don't feel held back by it. I do wish that I could contribute to my favourite projects, though.

I'm a welder-turned-health and safety manager. What I'm learning from self-hosting I'm using to make our h&s reporting more efficient than it was before.

Well, I've had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don't conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I've had no formal training, even tho I 'ran' the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

Sysadmin here. I've been responsible for huuge systems, and been on call.

I'm just lurking. I have a VPS but I happily don't have any servers at home to maintain

I'm a social worker. I have yet to find another in my field who does this, but I'm always searching. When I find them, I'll form a joint practice with them. With our powers combined we will take over the world.

I was that guy. And then ended up with that career partly because of it.

Yep! I am a mechanical engineer and manual machinist.

My experience with my own self hosting has led to my current added responsibility as IT for our 6 person startup. But 90% of my time is mechanical engineering.

You write "participate" which sounds like a free choise, but I don't do it out of my own free will. I do it because the web is so enshittified, that it forces me to selfhost more and more of my own websites that only I use.

I fucking hate doing any devops. I think it's the most boring, soul sucking task there is. Fucking yamls and .env and config files in different places for every app with it's own syntax.

I tried passing it to an LLM but it's always subtly wrong, so in the end I still have to read everything, correct everything, generate keypairs, configure something on each client etc.

Every day a million bots are hammering my services, so I have to run crowdsec and fail2ban and make sure there are no ways in, everything is behind a login, up to date, constant manual migrations to newer versions cause one of my hunders of apps always has a breaking change.

I've written more devops and security related stuff on my CV than my carreer programming experience. I got a job because now I am not just a fullstack developer, but a fuller stack devsecops-veloper. Showing my homelab and docker setup during a fucking java + react interview landed an immediate yes at the wage that I wished.

I fucking hate devops. Now I have to do it in my free time and at my job. Why does the world force me into devops? Please take it away. Let somebody else handle it. I want to enjoy my life again.

/notsarcasm

I picked up programming using "C for Dummies" book at age 13 and absolutely fell in love with developing/tinkering. My school didn't offer any IT lessons (yes I am old) so I couldn't wait until I got to a college that offered CS classes. Once I started these classes, I started absolutely hating development, to the point I dropped the course six months in and ferverently avoided anything IT related for the next decade. Eventually I found my way back to it via homelabbing for my own projects through organic need.

The point of my long winded anecdote: a formal education may actually hinder your IT learning more than it helps. The best teacher I found was in fact necessity or passion. Formal education will also teach you next to nothing about skills needed for selfhosting.

Does anyone else here participate in the selfhosting hobby without a formal IT related education or a career in a similar field?

Yes.

Sometimes I regret not pursuing an education in IT/programming

I've thought the same for most of my life, but right now, not so much. All of my friends in the field are being laid off.

Yes, I'm a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I'm simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.

IT started as a hobby for me. My initial career was digital art/design. When I was 12/13 my dad let me have a pc, that I had to build from a box of scraps he got from work. I kept adding/upgrading that pc until windows pissed me off. Years later I kept it up on ppc and Intel Macs, when I started college. (No degree at all, went to a fancy art school and they ended up killing my program, so I just got a job instead)

I pretty much got my current job by already running a few various servers at home on arm boards and a NAS, helping with basic o365 admin tasks, and being able to crack open/max out the MacPro6,1s at work. I was only supposed to resize art files lol By the time we named a CTO, he just straight up asked me to run IT for him.

Yes, i would never work on computers for a job. I am too strongly a PEBKAC.

I got into Linux while earning a degree in social sciences. That led to self-hosting, which later led me to a job in IT.

I have no formal training and work in real estate so I’ve taught myself GNU/Linux CLI commands, docker and basic networking stuff with the help of the Internet, YouTube and some LLM assistance. I now self-host around a dozen services via docker on an old Dell XPS laptop for myself. This did lead me to consider a career change and I applied for and got into a free study course for the CompTIA Network+ and Security+ certificates so we’ll see if that ends up just becoming extra help for my hobby or a means to get into IT more broadly.

No. But I wasn't doing anything particularly complex, just a LAMP stack server for some game forums. Think I had a Dell desktop. Was a dishwasher at the time.

Took a few days fumbling through tutorials but I eventually got it up and running. Repeated that a few times over the years, once to host a blog, stuff like that.

Would like to get into it again but all I have now is a tablet.

Ive been self hosting for years, have a 24/7/365 web server public facing, with 20+ services hosted, including a Lemmy instance. No formal education, qualification or any actual experience in any way. Never had a single course or anything. I work as a commercial manager on complex and large infrastructure construction and engineering projects.

I do have formal education in the field, but that doesn't mean that I'm easily capable of e.g. writing a module for Nginx or even most website frameworks or knowledgable enough about administration to feel comfortable exposing a dynamic website (as opposed to static HTML+CSS) to the internet.

A lot of it is learning by doing, though, and for a lot of things books are a great resource (some stuff is outdated as soon as it's published, but general system administration or programming knowledge doesn't get outdated that fast).