I host what I build.

Most of what I build, I also host. There is a Kubernetes cluster running in my garage, and this page is being served from it right now.

The hardware is a pair of HP ProLiant G9 servers running Proxmox. It has been going since 2023 - first as a place to break things safely, then gradually as the place where everything I rely on actually lives.

Proxmox handles the virtual machines; Kubernetes runs on top and schedules everything else. At last count there were sixty-odd self-hosted services on the cluster: Postgres databases, internal tools, monitoring, and a Forgejo instance at git.iacob.co.uk where my code lives. This site is one of those services, and the live status panel on the home page health-checks the important ones server-side.

With sixty services on two physical machines, you have to care about resource limits - a memory leak in one container eventually becomes everyone's problem. Hardware fails, nodes drop, pods get rescheduled. The apps I build have to survive that and reconnect gracefully.

It also keeps the freelance work grounded. When I set up self-hosting for clients, it is the same stack I run and repair at home.