Read Old Man’s War.

You don’t even need a star cert… The DNS challenge works for that use case as well.

I use Traefik as my main reverse proxy as well for the same reason—container niceties. But then I actually also use nginx… inside container images, like for containers that just serve static files for example.

Use the right tool for the job!

I develop a moderately popular open source project and self-host it on Gitea. But I also mirror it on GitHub and accept PRs there. And one PR submitter on GitHub said they preferred to contribute there because that’s where potential employers look for open source activity.

Could employers also look on Gitea/Forgejo? In theory, yes. But some of them literally ask for your GitHub profile on their application forms…

I haven’t used an out-of-the-box self-hosted solution for this, but I agree with others that blog or static site generator software could work. I think the main challenges you’ll find though are: 1. Formatting the content/site for long-form readability, and 2. Adding a table of contents and previous/next chapter links without a bunch of manual work.

Fortunately blog and static site software have plugins that can add missing functionality like this. Here’s one for WordPress (that I have no first-hand experience with): https://wordpress.org/plugins/book-press/

I also want to ask: What’s your plan for discovery/marketing? Because one of the benefits of the non-self-hosted web novel sites is that readers can theoretically discover your story there. But if you instead just post it on your own site, how will readers ever find it?

Maybe…? I’m not familiar with that router software, but it looks plausible to me…

Since this is on a home network, have you also forwarded port 80 from your router to your machine running certbot?

This is one of the reasons I use the DNS challenge instead… Then you don’t have to route all these Let’s Encrypt challenges into your internal network.

Wait. Signal was an SMS client. It wouldn’t cost them anything for a user to send an SMS message. IIRC, they nixed the SMS feature for security reasons, not cost.

Since I use Docker Compose with Podman, I just make a single systemd service to run Docker Compose on boot, thereby starting all my containers at once.

It deduplicates aggressively at the block level. So if your files don't change much, each additional backup takes very little space. And if a file changes a little, Borg only backs up what's changed instead of the whole file again.

Borg also has a rich ecosystem of wrappers and tools (borgmatic, Vorta, etc.) that extend its functionality and make it easier to use.

Borg Backup would also fit the bill for backups going forward, especially if OP is still backing up to a local server (as opposed to cloud object storage).

I don't think Docker's API and CLI are historically where it's had problems…

It's not the "official" way to do it, but you can make systemd run Docker Compose (talking to Podman instead of Docker), which is pretty close to what you're talking about. And then you don't have to write stinky systemd INI files for each container.

Yeah, the constant Docker breakage was one of the main reasons I switched to Podman. FYI you can use Docker Compose directly with Podman.

Ooh, lucky you! Maybe it was both the rDNS and the SNDS. Part of the problem IMO is it’s such a black box…

I’ve had similar experiences trying to send mail to Microsoft-hosted email addresses. My current “solution” is to send all outgoing mail directly from my VPS-hosted Mailu server… EXCEPT for Microsoft-destined mail. For those messages, they get transparently relayed from Postfix to a third-party email sending service that Microsoft apparently trusts.

The upshot is I can still use my own Postfix daemon for all mail sent to sane (non-Microsoft) providers.

Many folks use a centralized monitoring solution like Healthchecks to monitor backups across all of their servers. And borgmatic integrates directly with Healthchecks among others.

You mentioned Borg and all of its command-line options, but have you taken a look at borgmatic? It should be much easier to learn and use than Borg, while still retaining Borg’s features. Just note though that borgmatic probably doesn’t hit all of your stated requirements (e.g., no GUI).

Wow, that’s pricey!