Hey there. I have for the past year tried myself with some selfhosting of mainly a personal Nextcloud Instance. I also installed and used an RTSP-Server for Livestreaming, Traccar for Live-GPS sharing and Recording and a Paperless-NGX Server and Jellyfin. I use many of those Services daily.
Currently for my OS I am using Ubuntu 22.04, but I am not happy with my Setup. It’s difficult to setup, because I am not the most skilled in everything Linux and Serveradminstuff.
My Nextcloud Instance is just running without Docker, some Services run with Docker and some with Docker Compose. I try to use reverse Proxies but can’t get some things to work. (I use Nginx) (I ofcourse have a Domain as well with subdomains for everything)
So, my Question is: Is there a more Userfriendly and/or streamlined Approach or Server/OS that I could give a try and use? My Question goes not really in the Direction of which OS specifically, but maybe if there are Solutions to make it easier? I’ve read about Ansible-NAS, Unraid, Proxmox, Portainer, etc…
It is all currently running and mostly secure, but I just wish to make upkeep and stuff like that easier for myself.
Personally, I think Ubuntu is the most friendly distribution when you’re starting out, just because there are many tutorials written for it. I also think more things work out-of-the-box than on RedHat-based distributions.
I like Alpine Linux for my VPS servers, but that’s because it’s very lightweight, not because of ease of use.
For user friendliness I’ve heard really good things about Yunohost, which runs on Debian and lets you manage a lot of different software, Nextcloud included
I go the Debian route as I find it much less bloated than Ubuntu, which I started out with when I moved to Linux. When I say bloated I mean extra packages I feel are not needed, not annoying or junk packages like that. Ubuntu is pretty good about reviewing packages before including them in the base install. I like installing just the packages required.
I run my Nextcloud instance in a Docker container on my file server.
Server 1: Gigabyte BRIX w/ Debian 11
- Home Assistant
Server 2: Asus Mini Desktop w/ Ubuntu 22.04 Docker:
- Portainer
- PiHole
- Roundcube
- Monica
- Nextcloud
- Dozzle
- Bitwarden
- Tandoor Recipes
- Log Analyzer
- Plex
- Ombi
- Prowlarr
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Readarr
- Lidarr
- SABNzbd
Native:
- GlusterFS
- Fail2Ban
- iPerf3 Server
- Keepalived (AWS hot standby for some services)
Specific to your proxy issue, I’d highly recommend nginx proxy manager, it’s a gui for nginx and helped me with a lot of issues getting other proxies to work initially. I still use it a couple years in simply for the ease of use
I use Yunohost, so you start with a Debian install and run their script. YNH makes self hosting very convenient.
