Cirriculum Idea for Streaming : Roll your own Servers

I have an Idea for a streaming series that would give others the knowledge on how to roll their own server or servers that others can access with minimal cloud resource utilization.

Benefits:

-Inexpensive way to get your own content, site, app whatever on the internet.
-You control the content as it resides in your apartment, house, etc.
-You don’t need a business internet account or special firewall rules on your router to make it work.
-If you lose the small cloud VPS service you have, you still have all your data and can easily find another.
-You control the content and who can access it.

Here is my rough outline.

1. Introduction to Virtualization on your own hardware
2. LXC Containers versus Full VMs.
3. Building your first Linux Server VM that can host websites, E-Mail
4. Finding a Cheap VPS Host that will act as the internet gateway for your server.
5. Registering a Domain and configuring Basic DNS setup for A, CNAME, and TXT (SPF / Domain Validation) records.
6. Configuring an e-mail filter appliance VM to reduce spam.
7. Requesting configuration from your VPS provider for E-Mail (Port 25 and Reverse lookup records)
8. Building an OpenVPN bridge between your Linux VMs and your VPS with forwarding rules so that your Website, E-mail, etc are accessible to the internet at large.
9. Backing up your Linux VMs to external media.
10. Bonus Proxmox Backup Server using S3 storage so you can have a 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies. 2 different media types, 1 backup is offsite.
    PBS allows backing up to S3 targets such as bit bucket. While this adds cost to the setup it ensures that you have a copy of your backups in another location if something like a surge wrecks your hardware.

I have done this setup myself when I couldn’t afford to rent a Physical Server from a company since Business internet with static IPs cost a mint.

Here is a breakdown:

Business Internet with 5 Static IPs $400/month
-Expensive but grants essentially unlimited bandwidth with a 24/hour SLA if it goes down.
-Still need to buy your own hardware and provide redundant electricity.

Rented Server (Interserver.net) $93+ depending on configuration.
-Less expensive with the same unlimited 1GBps Bandwidth. With options to go all the way up to 100Gbps bandwidth.
-Redundant power without needing to buy your own generator.
-Backup can be done to a Backup server running on some lower end hardware at your house / apartment.
-Can be more expensive than Business internet if you need something stupidly beefy.
For context, I rent a 12 Core /24 Thread Ryzen 9 Server with 128GB of RAM with 4 TB of Redundant High Speed SSD and 10 IP addresses for $174/month.
-Best if you need something with high uptime but don’t want to invest heavily in redundant power / internet which can cost several mints. I fall into this category. I neither have a mint nor the space to set up that type of equipment.

Hosted VPS with OpenVPN connection to a VM at your residence.
-Cheap. A single VPS on special from a place like RackNerd with 1 IP and 3000GB of bandwidth per month is $22/ year
-The VPS host likely has redundant internet connectivity.
-The setup is more intense from a technical point as it involves understanding more advanced networking setups.

In all 3 cases you still have to buy a domain from a registrar like nearlyfreespeech.net or whois.com which can run anywhere from $13-$30 per year depending on what type you want.
For most things I use whois.com for Domain and DNS. They do not charge for DNS service though their service does have limitations like a minimum of 2h Time to Live for records which makes changes take longer to propagate.

Why do this? Well I’ve noticed that its getting harder and harder to set up your own stuff that you retain control now days. As tech commerce in general progresses towards a “you will own nothing and like it” mentality, I would like to provide a cheap alternative that others can use to set up their own creative space where the only rules on content are laws, they retain ownership of the data, hardware, and backups. The cost is reasonable, etc.

I’m an old folf (fox-wolf) that has had to keep my own stuff afloat during hard financial times. I’ve been asked by clients for an enterprise experience under 10k of hardware. I’ve experienced my own data loss and see other creators give up when some platform deleted all of their work due to a glitch and they had no way to restore that content. I want to give back and pass on what I had to learn by necessity and determination.

What do I get out of it? The joy of seeing others’ lives improved. I will get better at teaching others which is something i sorely lack and need to get better at as my age is slowly reducing my ability to pull off long overnight stints that are required for doing this kind of work.

Thoughts?

Kavin