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YOU Should Own a Server!
5/9/2024
First of all let's quickly get rid of a misconception. A "Server" can be anything. Any computer that serves content over a network is considered a "Server". Could be a laptop, a raspberry pi, a desktop PC, your PHONE, or expensive rackmounted enterprise hardware. Also, no, not everyone needs a server. I just wanted a good title LOL. But for real though, I do think everyone should at least toy with the idea of self hosting things. Having a spare computer around has a lot of benefits, even if you don't use it all the time.
For starters, the classic, hosting media such as music and movies off of your own computer, can be a great way to become more independent of subscription services. You can start by ripping all of your old DVDs and Blu Rays and making archival copies of them. These movies are basically yours forever. You can keep finding new media you like and then purchasing physical editions to rip and digitize for your convenience! As for music, you can do the same thing, but its even better since there's a lot of services that let you purchase high quality or even lossless albums digitally for you to own. Just remember to legally acquire everything you back up. I would never EVER encourage anyone EVER to pirate ANYTHING ever. I would never. I'm just gonna leave this totally innocent link here, absolutely nothing going on here.
Now on to more technical stuff, having a physical server at home is also useful for doing a myriad of things, say for example, hosting a game server. It's so much easier to just spin up my designated minecraft server VM and set up a new server in there, than it is to get on a free hosting service and play with terrible ping and lose the world file if I forget to archive it after we're done, and its also better than using a paid service. Also, if you have multiple drives of the same size, you can make them work together as a single drive with redundancy, which means if one of them dies, your files are intact and you can replace the drives. This means you have ultra reliable at home storage for all your things, like phone backups, photos, games, roms, coding projects, and all kinds of stuff! Take a look at this for example:
Here you can see I have highlighted two drives on my PC, but these arent actually hooked up to it. They're actually shared folders from my server that I've mapped as "Network Drives". I can access them as if they were actual drives on my computer, this is how I play my music and develop my website. I dont have all shared folders mapped, but I do have a buncha photos backed up and I also have pretty much all my roms saved here. Legally dumped ones *wink*.
Another use I've been getting off of my server is a self hosted VPN, kinda. I use a service called tailscale that establishes P2P connections between my computers on a virtual network that lets me access my server resources outside of my house, it even lets me route my internet traffic through my computer at home so it works optionally like an actual VPN! But I use this to be able to connect remotely to VMs running on my server (such as the minecraft vm, or my delightfully retro Project 2000 VM). I've been thinking of making a jellyfin VM recently too..
My point with all of this is.. computers are cool!! You should have more of them :3