Hello. I'm considering hosting a 1-person instance for my personal use.
I'm trying to run on my own hardware, and I have used *nix for quite a long time and maintaining it wouldn't be much of a problem. However, I'm not quite sure what kind of hardware should I run it on.
How powerful should my hardware be? Say, would it be OK on a old PC with Northwood Celeron and 512mb of ram with 384GB HDD? Or maybe an android phone running postmarketOS (Alpine Linux) with MSM8916 and 2GB of ram with 32GB eMMC?
Also, my ISP does not allow opening common server hosting ports, and I'd also prefer not doing so due to security problems. Which ports do I need opened to operate a lemmy instance for my personal use (i'm only going to be connecting from home)? Can I use CloudFlare's cloudflared/Argo Tunnel to do this? (I do know CloudFlare is not great and has problems but I'm not aware of any other similar service, I'm not really able to pay for external servers but if there's an alternative service I'm open to suggestions)
Thanks for reading the post, and hopefully answering.
I have multiple purposes - while I do trust the folks running instances and my current lemmy.world instance they may close service at any time and I wanted to ensure that I won't have to move instances, and I'm also considering to run my own E-Mail in my personal domain later so I thought it would be nice to have lemmy and etc (my online presence) connected to my domain. Also yes, I was thinking I might help reduce server costs for others and stuff but that doesn't seem to be the case..
I would not recommend running your own email server. Major email providers like gmail only accept email from servers that have all kinds of measures in place to make them as trustworthy as possible. That's hard and probably not possible on a home internet connection.
Filtering incoming spam is also a pain in the ass.
It's nice as an exercise to learn how email works, but I would not rely on it.
I currently use disroot mail. Maybe I'll just donate and connect my domain and still keep using that provider.. Though, having your own domain for emails would be cool. Can use all different addresses for signup on each websites. I wouldn't have to worry about spams at all that way.. (Disroot provides aliases, username+alias@disroot.org for receiving but the + sign causes error on some poorly made sites)
I use my own domain and have support for aliases and also have a catch all. No need to selfhost for that.
Which provider are you on?
One you don't wanna join ;) (Google). I'm still on the free tier of what's now Workspace and intent to move, but I'm dreading the work that comes with it.
A year or so ago Google almost killed the free tier (look up gsuite legacy if you want to know more). Back then I prepared to move away and settled on Zoho as my replacement, but in the end Google responded to the community's backlash and kept the free tier free for personal use (although there are some other restrictions put in place, so eventually a move is inevitable). Zoho might also give you the features you want.