Another teacher here, I picked up an interest in computing in general from my dad when I was young (got my start on an old C64). As I grew up we both discovered Linux and it’s been a slow burn ever since. My first self-hosted service was Emby and a simple file server, followed by a personal Moodle instance. I eventually moved to Proxmox for hosting my services and have steadily expanded my list as I become ever more dismayed by cloud hosted services and subscriptions.

I don’t work in IT/Tech at all, but I’ve been an enthusiast since I was young, at first piggybacking off of my dad, then developing my own interests as I got into high school and college. I started self-hosting because I found it interesting and as time progressed I saw the benefits of operating things locally. I only host things within my own network though, because I’m not yet comfortable with how to safely set up external access.

Perhaps not as full featured as the others, but I host wiki.js for my knowledge base on my local server.

I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM’s purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.