I’m starting a series of self-hosting stories, where each tool is explained through a small story instead of a dry setup guide.
Self-Hosting Stories #1: The Little Bell That Rang (ntfy)
Story 1 is about Meera, who runs a home server. Her nightly backup script failed for 41 days and she didn’t find out until she needed a photo. The fix was ntfy, a tiny self-hosted service that sends push notifications to your phone from a plain HTTP request.
The story covers
- The basics: topics, publishers and subscribers, using just
curl - Self-hosting ntfy with Docker Compose and a reverse proxy
- Locking it down with users, roles, access control and tokens
- Making alerts useful with priorities, tags, click actions, attachments, delayed messages and action buttons
- Subscribing from the mobile apps, the web, the CLI, or JSON/SSE/WebSocket streams
Read it here: The Little Bell That Rang — ntfy · Self-Hosting Stories
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Self-Hosting Stories #2: The Traffic Cone That Plays Everything
Ravi’s cousin’s wedding video won’t open on any device he owns, the files are old, one is half-copied, and the audio runs two seconds ahead of the picture. His friend Nisha has one answer: VLC.
In this story you’ll see how VLC repairs broken AVI files, fixes out of sync audio, converts old formats, records your screen, and streams video across the house. You’ll also find network radio and podcasts, remote control from a phone, and a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet at the end.
Free, open source, no ads, no account. Read it here: The Traffic Cone That Plays Everything — VLC · Self-Hosting Stories
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Self-Hosting Stories #3: The Doorman Who Fetches His Own Keys
Karthik runs four small services from a rented VPS: a notes app, a photo gallery, a cricket-club wiki and a notification server. One Monday the club captain messages him about a scary red warning on the wiki. The certificate expired because his Certbot cron job had been failing silently for weeks.
This chapter follows how he stops renewing certificates by hand. He puts Caddy, a web server and reverse proxy that gets and renews HTTPS certificates by itself, in front of everything. A working site takes three lines of config.
It also covers the eMudhra incident, when browsers blocked that certificate authority’s keys and it announced its exit from the TLS business. Karthik’s cricket-club billing site was on a paid certificate from that CA, so the story shows why replacing a certificate has to be cheap and automatic. In Caddy, switching authority is a one-line change.
Read it here: The Doorman Who Fetches His Own Keys — Caddy · Self-Hosting Stories
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