About this Website

This site will be revamped soon. This is a work in progress.

This is Host Things Yourself, a site attempting to show people how to setup websites, email servers, chat servers and everything in between.

This site is a fork of LandChad by Luke Smith and others. The two main goals of this site that differs from the original is that we try to make guides that work with 100% free software, and that we are serious—usually there are no memes. This site is still work in progress.

Starting a website is something that can be done in a lazy afternoon and costs pocket change.

Most of the Internet's problems could be solved if more people had their own personal platforms, so the objective of this site is to guide any ordinary person through the process of getting a website, and possibly an email server and a chat server.

Basic Personal Website Setup

This is the basic "course". Follow these quick tutorials and you'll have a fully functioning basic web page on the domain name of your choice.

This "basic course" can take as little as an hour or even less.

  1. Get a domain name
  2. Get a server
  3. Set up DNS settings to connect your server and domain name
  4. Set up your web server
  5. Get a secure HTTPS connection with Certbot

Build Your Own Platform!

Host your own services, social media and more. Some of them are federated, which means that your instance can communicate with other people's. Please don't abuse them for mistreating others with SaaSS.

XMPP
Minimalist-ish and federated chat server
Pleroma
A federated Twitter-like microblogging site
PeerTube
A federated YouTube-like video site
Nextcloud
Setting up a Nextcloud Instance (file hosting and more)
Jitsi
Free and easy video conferencing
git
Version control software on your own server
Cgit
A hyperfast web frontend for git repositories
Gitea
A fully-featured git and issue tracking site
IRC
Installing and managing a classic internet relay chat server
RSS Bridge
Creating RSS feeds for social media sites
Matrix
An easy-to-use, free and federated chat and channel server
Calibre
A library server
I2P
Host your site on a private and peer-to-peer internet layer
Tor
Host your site on private onion-routing