How I Host | Dave PeckMay 23, 2026<br>How I Host<br>Not long ago, my online presence was served variously by Heroku, Fly, AWS, GCP, and GitHub Pages. This evolved organically, over a decade, and became a recipe for unpredictable, expensive sadness.
Meanwhile, the world marched on. My home gigabit fiber proved to be remarkably stable. Its uptime over the past year absolutely trounced GitHub.
The answer was clear: I had to run a server at home.
My read is that there are, roughly, two types of home server admins in the world: those that want to experiment with every shiny tech toy under the sun, and those that want soulless set-and-forget. Spoiler alert: I’m in the boring bucket. If you’d like to be regaled with tales of Raspberry Pi k8s clusters, high-availability Proxmox configs, or obscure Tailscale topologies… well, Reddit is your friend.
Most of my websites had long since served their purpose and remained online only through inertia. My first step was to shut down everything I didn’t want to maintain. Deleting websites, like deleting code, is cathartic and fun. I did a bunch of it.
That left me with my blog, my daughter’s site, a website for playing Go that I’ve run since 2009 and that sees real daily traffic, a project I built for the Girl Scouts, an upcoming service I’m developing, and my self-hosted ATProto PDS and Mastodon instances. In other words: two static websites, a few CRUD apps, and a couple third-party oddballs.
While I simplified my online presence, I spun up several Ubuntu virtual machines and worked through the deployment landscape: old-school sysadmin, hand-rolled Docker compose, lightweight Kubernetes (microk8s, k3s), “Heroku in a box” platforms (Coolify, Dokploy), deployment tools (Kamal), and config management (Pyinfra). I finally settled on the not-so-fancy Dokku, a CLI-only tool that does just enough to cover my needs, while still having a repository readable by mere mortals. My experiments gave me confidence that Dokku reliably did what its documentation claimed it would and that its error messages were merciful.
Deployment settled, I went shopping for a server! I wanted a no-fuss, no-frills machine that would run silently, sip power at idle, and give me room to grow. What I learned is that the mini PC market has been a chaotic mess ever since Intel abandoned its NUC platform. Luckily, Reddit nerds and mini-PC obsessed YouTubers like Robtech helped me cut through the noise and discover BeeLink. I eventually bought their excellent SER8, which now sits in a corner in my basement and has run reliably without intervention for the better part of a year.
Did I mention I wanted a server with “room to grow”? The tiny SER8 is an absurd powerhouse compared to any cloud instance I’d care to pay for. It’s got 8 cores and boosts to 5GHz, sports 32GB of RAM (lucky me, I bought it before RAM prices went haywire), and has plenty of SSD storage (1TB internal, 4TB external for backups and more). My Go website measures in writes per second; it barely touches a single core. A comparable Hetzner instance, like the CCX33, would run ~$70/month.
Self-hosting strikes me as pretty vanilla in 2026. Exposing a self-hosted machine directly to the public Internet, however? Pure madness. After considering Tailscale, I decided to proxy my services through Cloudflare tunnels. For all of $0, this puts my websites behind a global CDN and lightweight WAF. Even when the rare Seattle thunderstorm knocks out my home network, my (dozens of) blog readers will probably see cached content. As a result, my effective uptime will almost certainly beat some of my previous hosts. Because I hate captchas, I tuned Cloudflare’s anti-bot rage down. If I need to leave Cloudflare entirely, I have plenty of options.
And: that’s it. You’re reading this blog on a mini PC sitting under my desk in my basement. Boring. It runs Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Boring. It sits behind a trusted proxy and CDN. Boring. I mostly don’t think about it. And that’s the most delightful thing of all.