[dmk]

The "start over in an hour" philosophy is underrated. I've been running my own infrastructure for years and the single most empowering thing isn't the setup, it's the peace of mind that you can just nuke it and spin up somewhere else.

Knowing that, I started looking at every SaaS subscription very differently.

[abnercoimbre]

I really care about the teardown / re-deployment workflow. You got any general tips for the beginner self-hoster?

[plausibility]

At the lower or easier end, there’s your standard containerisation tools like Docker Compose or the Podman equivalents. Just move your compose files and zip the mount folders and you can move stuff easily enough.

Middle ground you’ve got stuff like Ansible for if you want to install things without containers, but still want it to be scripted. I don’t use these much since they feel like the worst of both worlds.

Higher end in terms of effort is using something like NixOS, where you get basically Terraform for everything in your distro.

[rschachte]

Ansible, git ops, actually testing it out. Backups with snapshots using restic, encrypted secrets using vault.