Tag: servers

My thoughts on building LibreCloud

On February 20, 2025

I thought I would take the chance today to share my vision for LibreCloud, in order to shed some light on what’s going on internally. I am attempting to build more of a platform than anything, by connecting open source to open source. It’s no doubt that interoperability within FOSS already exists and is used frequently, but you have to ask the question: is FOSS usable for individuals? We focus so much on accommodating businesses while de-prioritizing the user, much like Arc.

I have build LibreCloud from the principles that it should be (1) free, (2) open source, and (3) accessible. While we are no official organization yet, we will still continue to operate under these standards. To abridge our principle of free, as I feel it’s necessary, I still plan to sell account upgrades, though have no fees (you pay us and we pay 100% of that amount to our host, NameCheap, for the upgrade).

What I am intending to build is an organization and a platform intended for the sole purpose of serving individuals. This means that “user centric” means user centric and we actually make an effort to care about users. So far, we’ve built a free and pure-FOSS-powered platform with email, passwords, authentication, and git. That’s insane! But, I don’t want to stop there.

I want to lead LibreCloud into becoming a part of people’s life in a positive way. Instead of pushing addiction, privacy concerns, and money in your face, I simply want to create something we all want, without the downsides. With LibreCloud and our community being so focused on Android, I am intending to work with other developers in the space to bring our services into the FOSS space.

LibreCloud is truly open, too. I intend to collaborate with any developer looking to create integrations, and add utility to your account. This not only spreads the good word of free-and-open-source software, but also gives less power to the data collectors in your life (Google, Microsoft, etc).

While LibreCloud will be small for a while, I am still dedicated to building something that this community can share and enjoy. In fact, our operating costs are only $22.88USD/month. Not all projects must be massive to have a positive impact, which is all I am looking to come from this project. In fact, I even hesitate to call it a project, as LibreCloud can become so much more.

Thank you all so much for the incredible amount of support!

Announcing BlogPop, a new project by ABOCN

By aidan

On January 17, 2025

In Technology, Web Development

I, the author of this post, hereby release the aforementioned post and its attached image into the public domain. These works may be freely used, shared, modified, or distributed for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

Greetings all,

A Bunch of Computer Nerds (ABOCN) is excited to announce a new project, BlogPop. Powered by Next.js and with a design you are going to love, we are ready to enter the 2025 version of ABOCN, one with bigger projects you’ll most certainly love. We aim to become more ambitious with the projects we create, ensuring they are high quality, yet stable and well maintained.

If you haven’t already, consider joining our Telegram.
https://t.me/nerdsorg

BlogPop features a snappy user interface, modern AF design, and a bright future for plugins, theming, and much, much more. We hope you will join us by becoming an early adopter of BlogPop, which you can do so for free. We suggest utilizing Oracle Cloud or a personal VPS/Vercel. Configurations for an easy setup, powered by Docker, will be provided upon our first official release and release of the GitHub repo.

We have decided to choose a BSD-3.0 license for this project.

This project stemmed from my original frustration with WordPress, software I have used for half of my life, has become very corporate. Automattic and WPEngine rub me the wrong way. However, why not build something everyone can use and maintain, much like WordPress, but smaller and with a tight-knit community building something amazing. I hope this project may reach these goals, however the future will tell.

I thank this community for the huge amount of support from my project. This inspires me daily. I would also like to thank the other members of ABOCN for their support in making this project a reality. It’s truly great to have a team of developers.

Credits:

Much love to the PontusHub community, and I wish you a good start to this year. Maybe take up blogging this year! We sure would love that :p

This project will be launching within a week on GitHub. Stay tuned on our Telegram!

Best,

ABOCN
Written by ihatenodejs

I now run an email server

By aidan

On October 21, 2024

In Technology

You read the title: I am now running an email server, which I would consider to be one of my most ambitious projects yet. The area of email hosting is very dark, and prone to attackers, and thus I will be leaving out some details which I find unfortunate. Spammers (yes, this includes companies) are ruining the email protocol. I am extremely lucky to have a server with the ability to use port 25 and other mailing tools and ports, and have reverse DNS setup.

After around 10 hours of work, I completed it. There is a backend which runs all of the typical services such as IMAP and SMTP, and a frontend, which I can tell you, is Roundcube. Roundcube’s interface is extremely snappy and sending emails is almost instant. I have successfully gotten an almost perfect delivery rate, being able to make it into the main inbox of a Gmail user (that’s a quite good accomplishment, better than most companies).

However, this mail server isn’t for stupid mass marketing, at least I hope not. I am wary to add more users, or ideally make the server public, free, and open, as if one user’s account gets compromised, my IP range could be put on spam lists and my email being shut down in a few days. I am using it as a personal email for now, just emailing friends and interacting in various mailing lists.

This experience of setting up a mail server has taught me that triumph is important, though your experience can really reduce the amount of effort you have to dedicate to a task. While this required the support of others (mainly the amazing support rep who set me up with a reverse DNS record in a few minutes), which can sometimes be difficult for me, I was able to work with those people to deploy my solution.

I am debating on opening up registrations to only a couple people, and gradually expanding. Though, I will need a better email than one which is branded to my person.

I’m sold on Inmotion Hosting’s VPS servers

By aidan

On October 19, 2024

In Technology

This post is not sponsored, nor will any of my posts be.

I tend to lean towards cloud over on-premises solutions when hosting just about everything, and thus I noticed Inmotion’s great deals on VPS servers. I made it out with an unmanaged server rocking an Intel CPU with 8 vCPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 260GB of SSD storage. This came out to a final total of $29.99 per month (billed monthly, however you can save more being billed annually). I would consider this as a high-end server, compared to what I was working with previously.

In terms of speed, I was not entirely impressed, though it’s performance comes in it’s ability to handle a lot of tasks. I have over 20 Docker containers running on it, with no noticeable lag (especially nice for Nextcloud when disk speeds count).

I have noticed several tradeoffs, especially with their control panel. I was quoted $12/month for my first month on WHM, then $20/month after first the month elapsed. Their free control panel comes with the essentials, and focuses on total control. Thus, firewalls are managed through iptables over a web dashboard. Additionally, there is a noticable 10+ second page load delays on their “backend” (as in their shop section provides amazing page load speeds, while their backend is slow as a turtle).

While there are many minor downsides, the deal itself is not something I would typically pass up, and thus I believe I will be hosting with them for a while.

EDIT (8 Nov 2024):

The referenced price of this configuration, $29.99, was incorrect. To clarify, it is $29.99 for your first month, and renews at $66.99/month.