About Self-Host Guide
Self-Host Guide provides hands-on tutorials for developers building and maintaining their own infrastructure. Topics include AI agent deployment, Linux server operations, Docker orchestration, VPN setup, monitoring, security hardening, and web service deployment. Every tutorial is based on real deployments — I write about setups I actually run on my own machines.
About the Author — Frankie
I'm a developer with over a decade of experience in backend engineering, Linux system administration, and DevOps. I've been self-hosting production services since 2021 on a mix of hardware — a Dell OptiPlex homelab, ARM64 single-board computers, WSL2 on Windows, and cloud VPS instances.
What I run and maintain:
- Hermes Agent — AI agent framework serving as my daily coding assistant, with QQ Bot integration and systemd-managed production deployment
- Docker infrastructure — Multi-service stacks (Databases, monitoring, web apps, reverse proxies) orchestrated with Docker Compose across multiple machines
- Self-Host Guide — This site, deployed on GitHub Pages with custom domain preparation, SEO optimization, and E-E-A-T-aligned content strategy
- Monitoring stack — Prometheus + Grafana + Node Exporter monitoring 4 machines with custom alerting for disk, memory, and service health
- FastAPI + Nginx — Python API services deployed behind Nginx reverse proxy with SSL termination, serving thousands of requests daily
My principle: Every article I publish has been tested end-to-end on my own hardware. I don't write tutorials for software I haven't deployed myself.
Why This Site Exists
Most self-hosting guides fall into two camps: either they're too shallow (copy-paste one-liners with no context) or too tied to a specific cloud provider's ecosystem. This site aims to fill the gap — practical, vendor-neutral tutorials that work on a home server, a VPS, or WSL. No marketing fluff, no affiliate-driven recommendations. Just setups that work because I use them every day.
Contact
GitHub: fulankizao
Email: fulankizao@gmail.com
Recommended Reading
- Hermes Agent Complete Setup Guide — Build your private AI assistant from scratch
- WSL2 Ultimate Productivity Environment Setup — Turn Windows into your primary dev machine
- Docker Compose for Self-Hosting — Essential patterns for multi-container stacks
- Securing Your Self-Hosted Server — Practical hardening for new servers