I’ve recently migrated away from iOS to GrapheneOS and I need a way to have a family shared calendar and reminders. I’m thinking NextCloud because I don’t really know of anything else.
I’ve been doing some research and I’m a bit overwhelmed since I have never self hosted before and I’m not too familiar with these technologies. I have an old HP ProDesk with an old i3, 4GB of RAM, and 120 GB SSD that I was hoping to use intermittently until I get a newer machine. I want to be able to expose the instance to the wider internet so we (my partner and I) can access it on the go, but I’m worried about messing it up. I was reading that I need a reverse proxy as bare minimum, but do I also need fail2ban, Anubis (or Go Away), and special UFW rules? I got as far as installing NextCloud with podman on Ubuntu Server 26.04.01 LTS and I can access it locally, but I’m not sure how to get move forward.
Ideally I would like to have a bash script that sets everything up with user data being handled by an external drive so I can easily reproduce it to a new machine later down the line and facilitate backups. I’m not married to Ubuntu and I am open to using something else.
I also want to run other self hosted open source services like Navidrome, Yamtrack, Standard Notes, etc. Any guidance would be appreciated.
When I was a newbie, my first project was also Nextcloud. Honestly, Nextcloud is overkill if all you need is to host a calendar. You can probably find something that meets your needs (like Radicale ) at Awesome Self Hosted.
If you are getting started in self hosting, you should spend a little time learning Docker . It’s a tool for hosting software in individual containers on your local computer. You will find that many self-hosted apps have installations for Docker container versions in their documentation.
For me, once I understood docker, and also Portainer , a web UI for Docker, I got over the learning curve and was able to install most Foss apps I found online. Good luck!
Screenshot of Portainer, showing a list of Docker containers running various Foss apps