The best "bang for the buck" in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).
As for your domain question:
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You should use any computer you'd like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any "funny business" stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).
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Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won't be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I'd recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).
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Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don't block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you'll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that's typical of DOCSIS modems won't cut it. Outside of these concerns it's all about making sure you isolate your server from your "home stuff" to keep things secure.
With today's announcement, I'm super happy you did this 4 days ago. Time to make a few clones myself.
Paywalled. Can anyone paste the text here?
I mean sure maybe 10 years ago. But most static sites like blogs and such can fit entirely on a cloudflare page worker under the free tier. Or heck, even the free allotment on AWS S3 or other object storage providers.
I mean, perhaps this isn't a static site and it's built on some sort of CMS and has a postgres database in the background. In that case it probably runs around $5 to $10 a month.
Of course, this all presumes that the person setting this up is fairly savvy about the offerings available. I see a lot of people making silly decisions in this space, thinking that they need some full fat virtual private server, when all they really need is an object storage bucket behind a DNS c-name.
I guess I didn't really see the pressure that they were under.
I hope they heal! But it's a bummer that such an excellent resource will be taken down.
I wish more creators were willing to hand their creations to someone who wishes to continue it. But oftentimes, I fear that it's far too entwined with a person's identity for that to be common occurrence.
I'm really skeptical that this would work. Rural folks have been brainwashed to view college education with extreme cynicism. Their children can only do so much to reverse that.
Source: Grew up in a Rural News Desert
I've tried it before, it's fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.
kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I've used it.
He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you're working on. Unfortunately I don't really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking "Oh my god, that would save me SO much time".
Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.
Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven't bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days...
No kidding. One of the YouTubers I followed was really shilling Zed editor. He didn't seem to mention that it was Mac only.
Well, I guess it's back to neovim on kiTTY terminal for me.
Sometimes I swear Mac based developers think the world revolves around them.
I'd argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It's basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.
I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to "gigabit cable" with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn't good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.
Also agree that it's not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.