Blog

Tag: Self Hosted

Building a Simple Newsletter Service

Just a DB with some HTMLs

When I had the idea on the series about The Opinionated Engineer, I figured maybe that’s something worth setting up a newsletter service over. That said, after some consideration, I just thought that I didn’t need anything too complex and decided to roll my own because “how hard could it be?”. As far as I can tell, I think it’s working fine so far(?) and took me around one whole day to put the whole thing together from my couch. You can find all of it’s source code here on GitHub. ...

May 21, 2025

Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners

Turning your old laptops into GARs

This post will focus more on the “why” and some of the quirks around doing so instead of the “how” since GitHub already have a very comprehensive guide around it. Just wanted to take a bit of time to acknowledge that it’s been almost 3 years since I last wrote a blog post. It’s been a busy 3 years for sure but hopefully I’ll be writing more consistently moving forward. (I do have quite a few half-written drafts that I’ve never published which I can’t tell if it’s still relavant at this point.) ...

April 25, 2025

How to host multiple domain names and projects on one server

NGINX is one magical tool

I own multiple domain names, and each one hosts a different side project. For the longest time, everything that required ‘hosting’ was hosted on Heroku. But their free tier can be quite limited, it can also get costly quickly if you are paying for each separate project. So instead, I decided to explore putting all of them together using NGINX (recommended to me by Jane Manchun Wong). Required Resources # Virtual Private Server (VPS) # You’ll need a virtual server such as DigitalOcean or EC2 by AWS. Personally I uses Vultr (here’s the non-referral link) which costs me about $2.50 / month. ...

August 29, 2018

Hosting your own Git server with Gitea

Having additional backups are never a bad idea

Most people (including myself) host their personal projects on a third-party free Git hosting websites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. While that is sufficient for most people, it is also pretty fun to have your own Git service hosted on your own domain name of choice. While I trust my fellow engineers at these companies, I am using this as a personally backup to those services if anything goes wrong (like GitLab. Though to their credit, they were able to recover most of it). ...

August 20, 2018