This article will be concise and largely devoid of pictures since, as you may have noticed, you're on my website and are able to navigate to and see/use all of the services I'll soon describe. However, I wanted to briefly outline some details of how I set up my server and my motivations for doing so.
It occurred to me in late 2021 that I was already somewhat capable of creating my own platform, as I had hosted many game servers and accompanying web forums in high school. In July of 2022 I purchased and assembled the components for my server (an older dual socket ivy bridge era rack with a nice raid card, gigabit ethernet, 64Gb of ram), swapped out the two six core xeons for higher clocked ten cores, configured my SSDs in RAID 5, and installed Debian. I orginally intended on using the server to store and access my music library remotely, but I've found much more use for it than just that. I consistently run a Git server for code and projects, a mumble server for encrypted communication, various programs for managing/distributing my music, and of course a webserver with front-ends to everything mentioned within this sentence. Occasionally I'll host a game server of some variety for the boys, otherwise the system's resources are never utilized beyond 1 percent. My site will be continually evolving as I find the time to create and add features I think of.
My server is the topmost in the above image (R620). It is more compact, but can only accommodate 2.5 inch drives. This isn't an issue in my case as my server makes use of SATA SSDs rather than hard drives.
Status: Completed June 2022