Selfhosted

I'm running a TrueNAS server on bare metal with a handful of hard drives. I have virtualized it in the past, but meh, I'm also using TrueNAS's internal features to host a jellyfin server and a couple of other easy to deploy containers.

I'm doing this on a couple of machines. Only running NFS, Plex (looking at a Jellyfin migration soon), Home Assistant, LibreNMS and some really small other stuff. Not using VMs or LXC due to low-end hardware (pi and older tiny pc). Not using containers due to lack of experience with it and a little discomfort with the central daemon model of Docker, running containers built by people I don't know.

The migration path I'm working on for myself is changing to Podman quadlets for rootless, more isolation between containers, and the benefits of management and updates via Systemd. So far my testing for that migration has been slow due to other projects. I'll probably get it rolling on Debian 13 soon.

I thought about running something like proxmox, but everything is too pooled, too specialized, or proxmox doesn't provide the packages I want to use.

Just went with arch as the host OS and firejail or lxc any processes i want contained.

my two bare metal servers are the file server and music server. I have other services in a pi cluster.

file server because I can't think of why I would need to use a container.

the music software is proprietary and requires additional complications to get it to work properly...or at all, in a container. it also does not like sharing resources and is CPU heavy when playing to multiple sources.

if either of these machines die, a temporary replacement can be sourced very easily(e.g. the back of my server closet) and recreated from backups while I purchase new or fix/rebuild the broken one.

IMO the only reliable method for containers is a cluster because if you're running several containers on a device and it fails you've lost several services.

Depends on the application for me. For Mastodon, I want to allow 12K character posts, more than 4 poll question choices, and custom themes. Can't do it with Docker containers. For Peertube, Mobilizon, and Peertube, I use Docker containers.

Well, that is how I started out. Docker was not around yet (or not mainstream enough, maybe). So it is basically a legacy thing.

My main machine is a Frankenstein monster by now, so I am gradually moving. But since the days when I started out, time has become a scarce resource, so the process is painfully slow.

This reminds me of a question I saw a couple years ago. It was basically why would you stick with bare metal over running Proxmox with a single VM.

It kinda stuck with me and since then I've reimaged some of my bare metal servers with exactly that. It just makes backup and restore/snapshots so much easier. It's also really convenient to have a web interface to manage the computer

Probably doesn't work for everyone but it works for me

I'm running Kube on baremetal.

My file server is also the container/VM host. It does NAS duties while containers/VMs do the other services.

OPNsense is its own box because I prefer to separate it for security reasons.

Pihole is on its own RPi because that was easier to setup. I might move that functionality to the AdGuard plugin on OPNsense.

I'm selfhosting Forgejo and i don't really see the benefit of migrating to a container, i can easily install and update it via the package manager so what benefit does containerization give?

Obviously, you host your own hypervisor on own or rented bare metal.

All I have is Minecraft and a discord bot so I don't think it justifies vms

It depends on the service and the desired level of it stack.

I generally will run services directly on things like a raspberry pi because VMs and containers offer added complexity that isn't really suitable for the task.

At work, I run services in docker in VMs because the benefits far outweigh the complexity.

After many failures, I eventually landed on OMV + Docker. It has a plugin that puts the Docker management into a web UI and for the few simple services I need, it’s very straightforward to maintain. I don’t cloud host because I want complete control of my data and I keep an automatic incremental backup alongside a physically disconnected one that I manually update.

Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it's something that is trivial to setup and maintain.

Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.

Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.