Getting started (EP-1 of The $0 Cloud)

The idea of having my own server never really interested me until I had a conversation with one of my developer friends.

We were discussing how students can deploy their projects—mainly software applications—to the internet without burning through their wallets on cloud services. For someone just starting out, cloud hosting costs can add up surprisingly fast. That’s when he suggested something I hadn’t seriously considered before: building your own server and deploying your applications from it.

Will it support enterprise-scale traffic? Nope.

But for my own projects, portfolios, MVPs, or small applications? It seemed more than capable. And for someone who’s just getting started building products, that sounded like a pretty good deal.

The set-up

So, I decided to set up my own home server. Luckily, I had an old laptop lying around that no one in my house was using anymore. I grabbed a USB drive, and my next task was figuring out which Linux distro (OS) would be the best fit for a server.

I had a chat with GPT, and it recommended Ubuntu Server LTS. It’s a great beginner-friendly server distro, comes without a GUI, and has excellent community support—perfect for someone just getting started.

Once I settled on Ubuntu Server, I created a bootable USB, wiped Windows completely off the old laptop, and installed Ubuntu Server. After a few minutes of setting up the server name, user account, password, and the usual configuration, I officially had my very first server up and running.

And it was honestly super exciting to set everything up. Using a server without a GUI made me feel like I was in some B-grade hacker movie, just typing commands into a terminal. It was also surprisingly fun installing packages and slowly building up the server the way I wanted.

The dilemma

Turns out my friend had a reason for setting up a home server. He was tired of not having a proper way to host watch parties with friends, so he was building his own personal Netflix-like server with watch party features.

And me? I was just hyped by the whole idea and started building one. Here I was, after setting everything up, with absolutely no clue what I actually needed a home server for.

Then I remembered the conversation I’d had with my friend a long time ago about self-hosting applications. Since I already had a Linux server sitting there, I decided to host my own website on it and see where things went. I also wanted to set up my own media server because, honestly, the idea just sounded super cool.

I thought a home server was something you’d build for one specific purpose. Then I discovered Docker, containers… and an entirely new rabbit hole.