Is there room for Windows selfhosters?
from GatesMcBalmer@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 03:57
https://lemmy.world/post/48155279
from GatesMcBalmer@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 03:57
https://lemmy.world/post/48155279
I’m a Windows guy since forever and I recently got into selfhosting. So far its a blast! Are posts about that welcome here?
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Sure are. I started self hosting with a VM on Hyper-V.
Nice to hear it!
Oh, I’m sorry. Lol.
Hyper-V is just so bad. Decided to run it for a while as a test, I couldn’t get back to ESXi fast enough, haha. And I come from the Enterprise world where Hyper-V is common.
Honestly I find hyper v to be easier to work with then virtual box for home stuff and with what Broadcom has done to VMware I am staying away from it.
Yea, the Broadcom crap really sucks. I feel bad for businesses being held ransom by them.
Hyper-V just isn’t an option for small businesses, unfortunately (it’s really designed for Enterprise where internal expertise is the norm).
I can ignore their nonsense for my home setup., fortunately.
Have you tried XCP-NG or Proxmox?
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/ee1a8625-6dbe-4b2c-80d7-5dffc06d3fd8.jpeg">
I love that movie lol its a family fave!
I don’t think that Linux is in the title or description of this community!
You pick your own poison …
Mine is Gentoo Linux all the way, yours is Windows. Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us! We are kind of the two extreme of the spectrum…
Welcome!
So true! I met a friend of a friend at a church social last week and he spent the whole time trying to convince me to try FreeBSD instead of selfhosting on Windows. I might try it someday but as polite as he was about it he just couldn’t get the hint lol
Yeah, but you’ll probably figure it out eventually.
Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).
I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.
With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.
Gentoo taught me a lot. I ran hardened gentoo with grsec, pax, and selinux ~20 years ago. That was really a nag. I’m glad for the experience though, I’m never afraid to compile my own kernel now. I just prefer the convenience of debian or fedora based distros now.
When I do a hardware refresh on my self hosted machines(typically over 5 years) I usually wait for a bleeding edge brand new socket, and have to compile the latest kernel for reasonable performance and stability until maintainers backport or the distro moves forward.
How does Gentoo work for you? Is it true, that an update takes like a week, because you have to compile everything from scratch?
It’s a myth.
Yes it takes longer, but specialy on headless server updates are pretty fast
Big boys like LibreOffice Firefox have also pre built binaries if you so prefer as well …
I use Gentoo since amd k6-400 MHz times so today build times feel like no wait at all
My homelab is a mishmash of Windows and Linux machines. The primary game server is Windows and the rest others are Linux.
That’s so cool! Have you ever tried a BSD?
I’ve experimented with OpenBSD in the past, but it was back when I was solely a Windows kid before embracing and clicking with Linux. It just never really meshed with me.
Windows is what I already but I’m also curious to learn linux and bsd at some point.
I was at this point for a while, believing gaming on Linux wasn’t up to par, until I discovered that Linux has a decent translation layer (Proton/Wine) that means even though the vast majority of Steam games are Windows only, Steam or other launchers like Heroic just run them in a container, and from my experience none of my games have had issues. This has only improved massively over the years.
Oh don’t misunderstand. I run Linux on my personal machines. Arch on desktop and Cachy on laptop. My game server is only Windows because the Linux Palworld server software would just not recognize the server files from the Windows machine and I eventually just gave up trying to transfer. We are endgame and unless everyone decides to start a new server with 1.0, it’ll remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Linux is favored because the ecosystem is more open but you can also run it on low power devices which isn’t really the case with Windows (and getting worse over time) and it’s free with Windows, to be legal, you need to license the cores/VM. Now does anyone actually do that?! I wouldn’t think so.
Sure ! But… How !? I don’t have even the first idea how you’d host… Almost anything on Windows 😅 and I would be concerned by the power consumption of any non-minimalist OS.
Windows Server exists.
It really shouldn't, but it does.
…. I’m stealing that 😀
Hyper-v server can get pretty damn lightwieght as it ships without a GUI
+1 for Hyper-V, despite being glitchy and only sustaining Home Assistant for about 12 hours this and VirtualBox were my best chance at self hosting VMs on a Windows host. The problem wasn’t the virtualization, but the rest of the OS and its persistent maintenance cycles. Antivirus (MsMpEng.exe) and its NTFS scanning running more and more resources until the CPU was clogged. OP has gotta start somewhere.
Oh I was suggesting a the free standalone hyper v server MS did but I just searched for it and it looks like they killed it off recently which sucks. Was probably the best MS os going.
My ESXi box draws 20 watts at idle with 3 Windows VMs and 3 Linux VMs.
Guess which of those VMs draws the most power (hint: it’s not Windows).
Power draw depends on more than the base OS, what it does matters so much more. Which is why my one Linux VM draws the most power - it gets used for some intense tasks with ffmpeg.
Interestingly, I’ve found little power draw difference using ffmpeg on Windows or Linux. Both will max CPU while converting and take a similar amount of time.
Did you install the guest tools and set the CPU governor to the correct scheduler? Do the Windows boxes host the same applications as the Linux boxes?
Idle windows is so damn heavy on io :(
Docker for desktop will also let you run a lot of services
Isn’t docker on windows just Linux in a trenchcoat?
Always. Started on windows hypervisors and windows as they were relevant to my work and I was trying to skill up at the time. Since moved to a Linux stack as the lab grew in scope and my distaste for MS grew as well.
This is a natural progression. Inescapable.
Verily. Especially after working with heavily windows/MS environments for a decade and change. Intune makes my blood boil.
While I have no respect for Windows people, it’s interesting to read through their failures. Yeah, do Windows instead of spending bits of your time to make an effort at learning something new.
I mean it, in a non-sarcastic way. You can start with Windows, and if you won’t give up on this hobby, I bet you’d come to some open source system instead at some point. After all, the entire self-hosting point is not in ditching Windows, but ditching proprietary thing corporations lure people to use, to farm their data and money too. And attention, not the least thing. It’s just that Windows is precisely the very thing a self-hoster would despise.
Having one to boot into ‘launch that game’ mode makes sense to some, but running it to run some services 24/7, makes little sense, if at all.
I self-hosted Plex and Jellyfin on Windows. It’s fine. But as others have said, Windows machines tend to be too power-hungry. Honestly I think that’s more a symptom of x86-64. Changing the OS from Windows to Linux does not magically change the power needs of the hardware. (However, Linux tends to demand less of the hardware, especially if there’s no GUI.)
I now self-host Plex on a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM/512GB SSD). M2 Pro in Intel speak is like i5 as in, it’s the “next one up” and “good enough for most people” but not the low entry into the platform (M# base or i3), though I’d say M4/M5 base is better than M2 Pro. Just like going 2-3 generations newer, the i3 gets closer to and may surpass an older i5.
There’s a reason self-hosters prefer Linux, but I’d think it would be more about the hardware than the software. Windows is problematic because you’re opening ports and Windows is a target due to its massive market share. Mac is kinda (/sorta /not really) UNIX based, and Linux is, well, it’s Linux; neither is bulletproof, but both are better than Windows because they’re not really being targeted. That said, the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini going for $500 if you’re a student, $600 otherwise is getting a lot of people sick of Microslop’s BS to switch, and the Neo in particular is forcing the PC market to get competitive as macOS market share is rising — this also makes it more of a target. You’re always at some risk online and a little common sense goes a long way.
Many of us started running Windows Server and endpoints, but in my case, the cost and substandard tools turned me away. I was running A DLNA server and using WDS (yes, very overkill for home, but fun to learn for work), but then I found TrueNAS (then called FreeNAS) running on BSD. I now run a simple share from there and Kodi on my (Linux and Android) user endpoints. I don’t bother with imaging anymore, and use
ddfor backups to my NAS. My Firewall runs OPNSense (BSD) and I run OpenWRT on two TrendNet WAPs.I’ll never go back to MS. It’s just not a welcoming platform from my perspective. Don’t even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry “redistributables” constantly required by every tool you try to use.
dotnet is pretty great, runs great on Linux, and you can ship your executable without a need for an external framework if you want.
Dotnet is also open source, a strongly typed language, a large standard library so it doesn’t have the problems of npm, has great performance and is all around the best language out there imo.
Use rust if you need to be closer to the metal, but that’s rare.
Maybe now. .NET wasn’t always open, used to be Windows-only, was buggy, version-dependent (but not as bad as the jre could be; true), and had (still has) poor resource-management. I think you’re talking about .NETCore.
That said, I wasn’t commenting on the code viability (I’m not a professional developer) so much as the support overhead required (back when I worked support) for the different versions of .NET, especially when MS stopped including v3.5 in Windows except by using “features and programs” or downloading and installing it manually.
Yeah, that’s pretty dated. There’s one flavor of dotnet (more or less) that runs on everything, and it’s about as efficient as anything with a garbage collector can be.
There are hairs that could be split in there, such as the release cadence, hosting bundle vs desktop runtime, but that’s all much simpler than it used to be. You generally know if you want to run a desktop app vs a webserver.
It’s absurd but Linux is far worse. Instead of addressing library bloat and versioning we have Docker which just throws EVERYTHING into a bag and makes you download an entire OS environment space to run one app.
That’s not Linux, though; that’s docker.
.net isn’t Windows.
And that is perfect. Instead of setting up one VM for each service and manually updating all dependencies, I’d much rather use that very handy bag with everything in it.
But the op is complaining about the much lighter .net where the shared libraries for all apps are a fraction of the space of bringing in an entire OS environment for each and every app.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #12 for this comm, first seen 14th Jun 2026, 12:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Temporary becomes permanent. When I was experiencing severe long-term symptoms of Covid, I bought a refurbished computer to use as a NAS with Jellyfin, Sonarr, and indexers. I kept the installed Windows 10 because I simply did not have the energy to do more. Then, when I felt better, I told myself, “Let me add more services.”
Now, it’s a Frankenstein computer where Windows 10 acts as the hypervisor, running Caddy as my reverse proxy. Crowdsec protects my services, and my Flint 2’s firewall acts as the Crowdsec bouncer. A VirtualBox VM runs in Windows 10 and hosts most of my Docker containers. Stablebits DrivePool manages my drive pool.
I’ve been running this setup for over a year, and I haven’t had any issues. I know I should switch to Linux, but since it’s been working great and I’m busy, I’ve been procrastinating.
I have seen the temporary->permanent happen so many times even in enterprise IT.
It’s only temporary, unless it works.
Exactly why prototypes should always bake in limitations and problems. Otherwise management will just say “good enough”
Sure hope you’re doing better now, and no ‘long Covid’ after effects.
I had long covid for 3 years after that. But I’m feeling better nowadays, thanks.
I’ve never had Covid, but my lady friend has. She contracted it at the hospital working as a medical professional of 40 years. There were circumstances surrounding how she contracted Covid that I will not go in to, but basically a lack of stocked PPE on the part of the medical facility. She now has long Covid and will for the rest of her life. Getting up in the morning to make herself some breakfast is exhausting for her, and they really are no closer to understanding why these symptoms persist in certain people. She had to retire, which really broke her.
Yes, masochists are welcome.
Yup, there’s no kinkshaming here
So I’ve got this Solaris Sparc cluster…
Straight to jail
Ooh, that would go well next to my DEC Multias!
I wish I kept my pizza box tbh.
That’s kinda the core of self-hosting, isn’t it? We are taking back digital sovereignty but giving our time and mental health to the Machine God.
Meh, so far it has been a smooth ride for me. Though I’m using Unraid. Not ready for CLI-only.
I’m not a windows hater per se, but I am for using the best tool for the job.
And in my opinion windows is not the best tool for self hosting. There are things windows does work well for that meshes well with self hosting and that’s docker. Honestly I’d focus on that for a lot of reasons but primarily because it’s a very easy to deploy self contained way to provide services. And the differences between docker on windows and Linux is almost negligible.
You will not find many people who willingly work with Windows servers, there is a reason for this. That being said, one point of self hosting is that you can do everything the way you want. So you do you.
Posts about self hosting are welcome, posts to strangers seeking external validation…? Maybe save for therapy.
Absolutely. The gate’s open…come on in. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a Windows based server. I still run Windows 10 in the lab, plus Linux and Mac. I don’t really discriminate. All OS’s have their place imho.
That is one of the prime directives of selfhosting. I have a ton of fun learning about new stuff to do and how to do it. Tell us all about it man. What do you selfhost? Are you running any Docker containers? I’m all ears, which in reality isn’t too far from the truth with my Jumbo ears. Share! Share!
Sure thing!
(also, please do post about it when you eventually decide to switch to linux)
I self hosted windows for many years, mostly because that is what I used at work. I liked it because it hid some of the low level details and worked most of the time.
The thing that finally made me switch was the exorbitant cost of licenses and the need to run services on older hardware.
DM me if you want some keys. I have a few copies of win10 and winIOT laying around that I’m not going to use.
They better be! I’ve got a mix of proxmox running Windows and Linux machines, as well as a bare metal Windows machine for streaming gaming, as wells as Linux laptops to access all this.
… My only shame is using Windows server to host my DHCP server.
Hey! I started running a home server on Windows 10. It was a great easy way to get started. The only problem for me that I found with time was that Windows updates would take everything that I was running offline, which was a nuisance to log back in and open everything up.
You may find you gradually move towards Linux :P
srvany
Now, let me be polemical here …
(And this is to be read with a pinch of /s)
Selfhosting on windows and understanding what you do is so much better than selfhost on CasaOS/ZimaOS/FancyWebGui/Synology and just spin up containers randomly without even understand what a container is and how it does work at all …
Now roast me :)
Didnt find any /s there. That’s one of the reasons why I dislike docker, it supports not understanding stuff. But then that’s just me, who wants to understand stuff. Enabling less tech savvy ppl is also great I guess.
Lowering the entry barrier is a good thing… Self hosting need critical mass to support and use all the nice things we like to selfhost
More so, from the point of view of big tech independence, for those who care, again lowering the barrier is very important
So welcome to docker and stuff, I use docker for half my stuff or more, it’s just so much more convenient.
But never stop trying to understand and don’t be a passive docker-puller whenever possible :)
I feel with you, but at the same time I remember trying to setup Apache Guacamole and failing miserably. Doing it now with docker would remove everything that made me fail 10 years ago.
Sure, if that’s what you want to do. Though, you’ll probably find less references and expertise here. There is a reason that even Microsoft runs Linux on most of its own servers.
I wouldn’t recommend it personally
That’s just silly.
Self hosting is all about Digital Autonomy; that’s just not possible with a windows OS.
Apart from that it would just make your life harder, as the vast majority of documentation and tutorials and helper scripts are based on some linux like OS.
Tell us what you are hosting! Tell us now! Lol
IKR! You can’t just tease us OP.
<img alt="Windows?" src="https://media.tenor.com/3AUnMaJkylkAAAAC/donald-sutherland-pod.gif">
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Well, if masochism is your kink…
Being a former pure windows guy it’s more like battered wife syndrome.
Its an abusive relationship but its all you know and hard to leave.
I’m on bazzite now with a Debian homelab on a SFF.
Still really new to Linux but I’m trying.
Good for you. If the way Windows behaves now doesn’t drive people to Linux, they’ll never jump. They’ll just keep taking the abuse because they like it.
I don’t understand starting out on Linux in an immutable distro, but maybe that’s the oldhead in me, I’ve been on Linux since the 90s. I find adding software in those distros to be a massive pain in the ass, as well as dealing with its constraints on configurability. But if it’s working for you, fill your boots. Welcome to the dark side.
My daily driver is bazzite. It’s my web surfing gaming box.
I got a Linux mint laptop to fuddle with as well. Thats where I break things.
I would recommend at most ruining windows as the hypervisor then running Linux virtual machines. Maybe run a windows VM if you have a specific need.
This is mainly because Linux is much better “supported” for the majority of self hosted projects.
But you can of course do whatever you want.
I also recommend ruining windows
Most self-hosted solutions come as containers, containers are Linux only and on Windows they run under the WSL VM, so eventually (if you are not doing full installs) you are still using Linux
I don’t see why not.
Sure, but know you’re doing things the hard way. I started with Win 10, WSL, and Docker Desktop but moving to Linux made things 10x easier, Windows is… difficult.
I agree with this comment. Switching to Linux, with minimal experience, has been so much easier than trying to arse around with Docker Desktop on Windows.
One step at a time, you will eventually move to GNU/Linux in the future if this new hobby persist. But there is nothing wrong with beginning using software and tools you are already familiar with. However you will probably have to use WSL (Linux inside Windows basically) to make things work and all guides you will find will mostly be based on Docker and/or Linux. So you will definitely use Linux on your Microslop owned machine.
If you don’t have the time to learn a new OS it’s fine, but it will not necessarly make things easier, especially on the long run. That’s my take on it.
My very first self-hosting homelab was a Linux Mint old refurbished desktop PC that I was remotely accessing through AnyDesk (I was a Windows kid user at that time). Now I’m on NixOS through SSH and still learning, I do not completely comfortable but I am able to use it and learn while doing so.
I would highly encourage you to try to run a lightweight beginer friendly Linux distro such as debian, Linux Mint XFCE or Kubuntu if you feel like you need a desktop environement and graphic user interfaces but if you really want to use that Microslop license you bought it’s fine, you will probably switch in the following months or years. Okay maybe not, some people are fine using it.
You can also take a look at stuff like runtipi, yunohost, CasaOS, ZimaOS, Umbrel, Cloudron and stuff like that. They aim to be beginner friendly self-hosting “OS” or “WebUI”.
I started out self hosting with windows server 2012 because my school was a Microsoft and Cisco partner but mostly ran Linux VMs on it using hardware raid. Ran bitwarden, Plex and a wiki plus a VM with a bunch of docker containers. Ran that for about 3 years and now have been on Unraid for 6 or so years and loving it.
Well yeah but… Why would you? It’s unnecessarily making things hard on yourself for so many reasons.
My Linux computer is like a giant basket of free Legos and I can build whatever the hell I want easily
For learning. Most enterprises use windows servers. The IT job market is mostly windows server for entry / mid level jobs.
Even if you don’t use it day to day. Its great to understand how it works.
I guess everyone is welcome, from windows to people doing it on OSes they made themselves!
I self host on windows. It just happened to be what I had on the box. Then I got started with docker. So that was great. When I have the time, I hope to switch to unraid, but need the time to be open enough to deal with the problem that will arise in getting the system set up just right.
Welcome sure, but few and far between. Check out JimsGarage on YouTube. He does a lot of windows selfhosting content
.
100% there is room for Windows self hosters. Welcome. May your self hosting be productive, secure and fun.
Windows hacking is just as fun as anything else, sometimes it’s even more rewarding just because you made it work on windows! My favorite is replacing the windows shell… Haven’t done that since 7 though :(
My host OS is Windows Server 2022 because I Prefer it, HyperV works, Windows Backup works, and the drivers work. I then run a Linux VM for Docker and a few other VM’s for silly things. If I break a VM I can have it restored in a few clicks. I tried to use Proxmox as the host OS but it would kill itself every 6 months. It was a good learning experience but it would take a Lot of convincing to try it again.
I’m gonna sound like everyone I complain about here, so feel free to ignore me. How did Proxmox break? I’ve been hosting a bunch of Proxmox containers on a 15 year old crappy laptop and it’s been smooth sailing for at least a year and a half.
Not trying to shun you for using windows or discount your personal experience with Proxmox or anything, just genuinely curious. If you prefer windows, use it.
I can’t remember the actual errors. I was running it on an old DELL PC they I had added an extra drive to, I think it was an SSD I had lying about. Everything would be running fine with no errors, Linux and Windows VM’s. Then one day all services were offline. Being a PC I had to plug in a screen+KB/Mouse. The host OS would boot and then flood the screen with errors regarding unable to mount the storage. troubleshooting with Boot USB showed all of the virtual Partitions (the ones that the VM data sits in) had been corrupted. Maybe a Linux guru could have restored them but I was lost.
I started over with a clean install of Proxmox, Maybe I had done something wrong the first time. I cant remember if I managed to restore the VM’s from backup. A few months later Bam, exact same thing happened again. I thought maybe my PC or drives had issues but decided to try Windows 2019 HyperV host instead. That ran for 2 years without issues on the same hardware.
Good to know.
Are you hosting on win server? I’m genuinely curious, not trying to shill Linux though I prefer it on the server side, believe me I’ve been on the receiving end of that for desktop Linux. How do you manage it? Do you have your home LAN set up as an active directory domain? Do you use mostly Powershell or the GUI? What do you have running on it? It just seems like everything on the server side assumes you’re using Linux and the only stuff that runs on Win server is stuff made by Microsoft like MS SQL server or IIS.
You can find a description of my first project here lemmy.world/post/48204688
Private email. Very nice 👍
Thanks!