I was that guy. And then ended up with that career partly because of it.

Starting to mess around with selfhosting, no IT background but grew up on computers.

I do have formal education in the field, but that doesn’t mean that I’m easily capable of e.g. writing a module for Nginx or even most website frameworks or knowledgable enough about administration to feel comfortable exposing a dynamic website (as opposed to static HTML+CSS) to the internet.

A lot of it is learning by doing, though, and for a lot of things books are a great resource (some stuff is outdated as soon as it’s published, but general system administration or programming knowledge doesn’t get outdated that fast).

1. Buy books
2. Read

A “formal education” mostly involves reading a book. These books can be identified, purchaed, and read without enrolling in any course.

I have a whole shelf full of text books for IT degrees and certifications. Despite never enrolling in any classes, amazingly, the books still allowed me to read them.

Me too. I do not work in IT, I do not even work at a computer.

Started installing first ripped Windows, later Linux on handmedown laptops starting around 2010.

And tweaking the shit out of it, later also to escape the Googleverse.

Selfhosting since 2014.

I can’t do everything either but I’m confident enough to let my server face the world. It doesn’t take all that much knowledge, mostly common sense.

I guess there’s some secondary knowledge, like knowing where to find useful instructions (archwiki) or knowing that Linux software often (but not always) doesn’t bother with sane defaults.

If this narrative seems to be coming from the prehistoric past then there’s your answer: give it more time. Do what you can do now, and surely your knowledge/capability will grow. Esp. tweaking Linux!

I was working in sales when I started self hosting like a decade ago. But the things I taught myself then led me to a career in data analysis. Same company.

I started both around the same time. I switched careers from being a chef at a pretty high level. Started getting into systems and got engrossed in it. So the selfhosting was just an aspect of my education.

Ive been self hosting for years, have a 24/7/365 web server public facing, with 20+ services hosted, including a Lemmy instance. No formal education, qualification or any actual experience in any way. Never had a single course or anything. I work as a commercial manager on complex and large infrastructure construction and engineering projects.

I used to work as an electrician in the automation industry (robots that welded the frame of automobiles) but I was only an apprentice. I worked alongside robot and PLC programmers and absorbed information through them. I lost the motivation to finish my apprenticeship due to a changed perspective on the harmful affects of too much progress. That was as close as I got to any coding.

I decided to enjoy a mid-life retirement after protesting my way into getting fired which gave me time to explore hobbies. Along the way I ended up buying a used Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 and found some joy in both self hosting and shell scripting. Fortunately shell scripting supplements self hosting. I have been slowly crafting a low resource, low maintenance, minimal server.

Both Pi’s run Alpine Linux, the Pi 4 is dedicated to HomeAssistant which controls a handful of lights and switches. The Pi 5 runs Caddy and Kiwix. Right now it just hosts a bunch of wikis and a static file server with Caddy. Eventually I plan to run a blog created only by a single Bash script.

This is all completely outside of any workplace skill and I think I’d like to keep it that way. Programming for money would likely kill the wonder I still have for computers.

I have no formal training but have been in IT for over thirty years.

Well, I’ve had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don’t conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I’ve had no formal training, even tho I ‘ran’ the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

I have no formal training and work in real estate so I’ve taught myself GNU/Linux CLI commands, docker and basic networking stuff with the help of the Internet, YouTube and some LLM assistance. I now self-host around a dozen services via docker on an old Dell XPS laptop for myself. This did lead me to consider a career change and I applied for and got into a free study course for the CompTIA Network+ and Security+ certificates so we’ll see if that ends up just becoming extra help for my hobby or a means to get into IT more broadly.

I do. I have no IT background whatsoever. Just interest and ADHD.

The only formal training I had was 20 years ago in high school when I took a pair of A+ and Networking certification electives. At the time I wanted to get into Systems Administration as a career, but no one was hiring when I graduated. Went into trucking instead.

20 years on though, I don’t really consider selfhosting a hobby, but rather the most cost effective way to achieve whatever I’m trying to accomplish for my family or myself. SAAS and subscriptions have kinda gotten out of hand, so I’ve “voted with my wallet” and just done them myself.

Mostly. I pay for email. That was a pain in the ass.

Do I still enjoy it, sure. But that’s has become secondary as my objectives have shifted over the years.

No formal training only help from self hosting community 🤟

I have no formal training except 1 single year of a trade school where i learnt a bit of pascal and c++. But i have been in front of computers since my earliest childhood starting with ataris in the early 80, C64, Amiga 500, and then starting from 286 across every major consumer x86/x64 CPU architecture. All I know except logic and programming basics are self taught, i never worked in the field outside of giving tech support for ISP clients a.k.a help grandma configure her mailaccount or help someone reinstall their modem driver.

That’s me. I don’t regret not pursuing a career though because my achievements don’t make me feel accomplished. When I get a service running I mostly feel relieved. But, I want the things self hosting provides, so I do the work self hosting demands.

No major formal education. Did a DOS class at a local Community College back in the day, only did it for the certificate and made my high school pay for it. I already knew how to do everything they were walking me through anyway, I only showed up a couple days per week to drop stuff off.

The instructor made a big deal one of the last days. He stood near this whiteboard and said, “I’m ashamed, I’m appalled, out of everyone in this class, a high school student has the highest grade.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I learned DOS from the DOS Manual when I was 15. I learned how to do some very basic graphic programming and such when I was in elementary school on an Apple II.

I have worked as a network tech and pc repair tech for a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) helped shoot 2.4Ghz WiFi connections up to 8.5 miles and shot a connection 7.6 miles myself. Most of the network troubleshooting was running multiple ping’s to different equipment to watch for issues. Learned on the job how to weatherproof connections using electrical tape and butyl rubber tape. It’s also where I learned how to crimp cables from the installer we had.

Most of the job was cleaning up and checking CPE’s that came in from previous installs, configuring the CPE’s for upcoming installations, and dealing with the phones. The owner was working for another company in IT about 3 hours away. I eventually quit when I was stuck trying to train a new installer and needed help with an issue, the owner quit answering the phone.

I later managed an in house ISP for an apartment building that was converted from a hotel built in the 50’s. I brought in 4 different connections, one from a small local WISP using the building as a tower 6Mbps, two AT&T 3Mbps DSL lines, and a cable modem 6Mbps. And provided internet for about 30 apartments using HPNA. Tried getting the owner to change some things but he was off the thought that if it works don’t fix it. Most people only got between 750Kbps to 1Mbps due to line quality and the technology.

No IT formal education, training, career or any job here. I’m an accountant by day and this is all a hobby for me, allowing me to save on subscriptions and having complete control of my family’s data

Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.

I was enrolled in community college for computer science around '08-'09. I completed Visual Basic and C++ intro courses in before switching to mechanical engineering, which is now my field of employment. I built a Windows Media Center HTPC with a tuner card during my community college years. That HTPC evolved over time, and eventually Microsoft killed WMC. I tried Plex TV recording, but that sucked balls compared to WMC. The latest incarnation of that computer runs TrueNAS, and I’m not really doing much with it beyond self-hosting media, but I have a Mint VM installed and set up for a Valheim dedicated server in anticipation of the 1.0 release next month. I might eventually move Home Assistant off a Pi into my TrueNAS, but it hasn’t been high-priority.

I had no formal training in hosting when I started. What got me started was, dating myself, blockbuster going out of business and getting over 1000 dvds over the course of their downfall and wanting a better way to watch a movie than going thru a big binder. Found Plex eventually, then built a server from an old workstation and a couple hdds. Then docker and automation, that did get me in the door for my current kubernetes job, now I’m starting to get kubernetes setup at home with 3 mini PCs.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #78 for this comm, first seen 15th Aug 2026, 15:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I’m a social worker. I have yet to find another in my field who does this, but I’m always searching. When I find them, I’ll form a joint practice with them. With our powers combined we will take over the world.

Professionally, I'm a teacher in a subject area totally unrelated to IT. My only formal training was a high-school program that taught me networking (in the days before wifi was common), and an intro to C++ course during college. Everything I've learned since has been piecemeal and self-taught. I'm forever grateful to those with the proper training who write up guides, answer questions, and generally help out those who don't have that training.

I have no training. Moved to Linux when W10 came out, and just organically got to self hosting

Yes, all self taught. I do some script writing in my job but it’s mostly mechanical engineering. I’ve had lots of people assume I work in IT.

I learnt basic HTML as a youngling in the 90’s so back before it got very complex, no formal training. I pretended to learn python for my 100 level comp sci in the mid 00’s but completely forgot it after the class was over. I just got into the hobby recently because I did not want to continue paying for stuff but not owning stuff, and it was getting silly expensive for my unlimited free trial hack and personal blog. Plus I wanted to start getting away from big tech, so learning about self hosting from the web and double checking my stuff with Claude really helps.

Bachelor of science in molecular biology here. Never had any computer/programming courses, not even in college. I come from a 3rd world country, so our “computer lab” naturally had two desktops that we were only allowed on for half an hour a week for basic windows tasks. I’ve always been a curious person, though. Moved to the US in 2010 and started messing around with a laptop I had that was struggling to run windows. Ran into this thing called “Linux” and the rest is history.

I’ve had countless sleepless nights fixing things on my broken Linux installs and/or to make some things work. That is the thing that built what I know now.

Being the same curious dude I am, I wanted to dip my toes into self-hosting, and I just discovered that it’s just a whole new world that is even more fun. Been doing things in this realm for around 1.5 years now and still dabbling.

Edit: forgot to mention that I now work as a software developer at a big company. Yes, my microbiology degree is sitting in the drawer sleeping. lol

You write “participate” which sounds like a free choise, but I don’t do it out of my own free will. I do it because the web is so enshittified, that it forces me to selfhost more and more of my own websites that only I use.

I fucking hate doing any devops. I think it’s the most boring, soul sucking task there is. Fucking yamls and .env and config files in different places for every app with it’s own syntax.

I tried passing it to an LLM but it’s always subtly wrong, so in the end I still have to read everything, correct everything, generate keypairs, configure something on each client etc.

Every day a million bots are hammering my services, so I have to run crowdsec and fail2ban and make sure there are no ways in, everything is behind a login, up to date, constant manual migrations to newer versions cause one of my hunders of apps always has a breaking change.

I’ve written more devops and security related stuff on my CV than my carreer programming experience. I got a job because now I am not just a fullstack developer, but a fuller stack devsecops-veloper. Showing my homelab and docker setup during a fucking java + react interview landed an immediate yes at the wage that I wished.

I fucking hate devops. Now I have to do it in my free time and at my job. Why does the world force me into devops? Please take it away. Let somebody else handle it. I want to enjoy my life again.

/notsarcasm

No formal education in IT, I’m a GI surgeon.

I built my own gaming pc’s in mid-late 00s and i also knew some basic html just by the virtue of being on the internet as a kid and trolling at bulletin boards/trying to build some websites.

In 2018 i was miserable as a GP after finishing my medical decree. I was thinking about changing careers and I did most of the online version of Harwards CS50 course for fun. In the end i did become a surgeon and not an engineer.

In 2025 Trump II happened and seeing that the tech billionaires were in on it, I lost faith in the USA as a country. I wanted to get off all of my subscriptions and american big tech services, which I’m happy to say ive almost completely achieved. As i was searching for the best replacements for all the services I realized the cleanest and most future-proof path is to host my own.

I run nextcloud, immich, jellyfin, matrix, home assistant, paperless, ollama etc etc. There’s still a whatsapp account unfortunately. It is mirrored to my matrix instance so the (grapheneOS) phone i use daily doesnt have a whatsapp client but a matrix client instead. Nothing is happening on the phone whatsapp runs on.

I’m gonna speak generally and it doesn’t quite generalize. Sue me.

Formal education in computer science is a waste, unless you want to be in academia. A formal education in computer science will either prepare you for higher education in Computer Sciences, or it will drill into you some best practices on how to be a good programmer. You can get the latter through brute force for free.

That said, I have a formal CS education. It has helped my career 0. I’m 10 years into my career and am the 1 man cybersecurity team (plus my boss and my coworker who does most of our networking stuff unless he’s too busy, then that’s me as well) for a fleet of ~4000 devices across ~1500 folks.

I have never once needed to explain to someone what von Neumann architecture is, and how it differs from Harvard. I have never once needed to explain two’s compliment or how to represent negative numbers in binary. Knowing what an xor swap is and why it’s used has only helped me solve a leetcode problem exactly ONE TIME. I have explained to many people what P vs NP is (no your suno track will not be the next cultural phenomenon) but nobody cares.

The stuff that did serve me was like, making the card game of war in Java. Even the GUI. That’s a project I would have never done because who TF would. But it forces you to implement recursion (war within a war), it entails some good validation checking practices, etc. the truth is though, I did not need a college education for that project.

At the end of the day, technical projects teach technical skills. Not PowerPoints based on textbooks.

If you wanna learn how to harden your servers, I recommend freemium hands on learning platforms like tryhackme or hackthebox.

Hack the box has a module on server hardening. It’s my go to for hardening servers. Happy to share the bullet points. It’s not too much. Basically just disable root auth, disable ssh except key-based, enable MFA (I use authelia) and you’re harder than 90% of boxes in the wild. Then just setup Fail2ban and you’re more or less golden for a home server.

Yeah, I studied linguistics and literature.. Somewhere at the end of university I was presented to Linux and began my journey with computers. Bought a pi in 2012..used it as a media server … one thing led to another until I was able to build a debian server with 20 containers.

I personally do have a degree in computer science, but I feel like I would be doing this anyway, even if I didn’t. My degree didn’t teach me how to self host

Nothing about my IT or software career has changed anything about my set up, except maybe some of the OS hardening info, which could be easily googled.

No need to gate keep, we kill google one laptop at a time :)

Does anyone else here participate in the selfhosting hobby without a formal IT related education or a career in a similar field?

Yes.

Sometimes I regret not pursuing an education in IT/programming

I’ve thought the same for most of my life, but right now, not so much. All of my friends in the field are being laid off.

Yes, i would never work on computers for a job. I am too strongly a PEBKAC.

I’m a welder-turned-health and safety manager. What I’m learning from self-hosting I’m using to make our h&s reporting more efficient than it was before.

Closest thing I have to a formal education in IT is taking keyboarding, QB, then VB in high school in the early 00s. The only thing I came away with from that was the basic concepts; variables, integers, strings, loops, functions, recursion, etc. I remember nearly nothing about VB. Self taught some Python after that, went to Linux and started learning Bash, CLI tooling, editing confs, working on small portions of languages I didn’t know like Haskell (Xmonad) and eLisp (emacs), running containers… Long enough ago I remember manually setting up Apache and MySQL a few times, editing whatever init system I was using to ensure they started, etc.

Time and cost are big determining factors. Sometimes I’d like to know more but never enough to become indebted to educational bills for something I’m not making a career out of. Same reason I can install, remove, rekey and pick various locks, and have installed some access control stuff in the past under an employer, but I’m not shelling out to become licensed Locksmith or Security Systems Technician myself. Tools are comparatively inexpensive, and I have many from past employment, and YouTube is still free and archiveable… add in a bit of “dorking” to find manuals and whatnot and self-teaching just makes more sense for me. Same reasons I’m entering my shade tree mechanic arc these days - it’s not worth paying to become an auto tech but it is worth saving thousands on the repairs I can do. Plus it’s just fun to learn and work with my hands.

I have formal education, from 1997, which serves nothing for the kind of technologies we’re using now. Even though I work in IT (call center) I’ve had to read a lot on networking to make sense of what I wanted to achieve. I also don’t know anyone else in my office that does this so I’ve been relying on online communities and my failures. I’ve learned so much by failing.

I have my academic bachelors in CS and I’m doing a civil engineering masters on the CS track. So I’m the opposite of your target audience, but I did want to mention something.

Yes there are some fairly technical things like cryptography, natural language processing, and compression algorithms where you will need a good understanding of mathematical subjects like linear algebra, statistics, and group theory.

But apart from subjects like that, you can definitely learn most of what we did at the same pace, or even faster (and even then, something being difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn). You can easily find good resources online to learn languages from Haskell to C. Nobody is stopping you from buying books that are used as course material. Same goes for networking.

Saying all that, I never even learned to work with containers or VMs as part of a uni course. Most of the stuff we learn is in the realm of theoretical computer science. So I probably learned a lot about self hosting the same way you did: the internet and some friends.

I picked up programming using “C for Dummies” book at age 13 and absolutely fell in love with developing/tinkering. My school didn’t offer any IT lessons (yes I am old) so I couldn’t wait until I got to a college that offered CS classes. Once I started these classes, I started absolutely hating development, to the point I dropped the course six months in and ferverently avoided anything IT related for the next decade. Eventually I found my way back to it via homelabbing for my own projects through organic need.

The point of my long winded anecdote: a formal education may actually hinder your IT learning more than it helps. The best teacher I found was in fact necessity or passion. Formal education will also teach you next to nothing about skills needed for selfhosting.

No. But I wasn’t doing anything particularly complex, just a LAMP stack server for some game forums. Think I had a Dell desktop. Was a dishwasher at the time.

Took a few days fumbling through tutorials but I eventually got it up and running. Repeated that a few times over the years, once to host a blog, stuff like that.

Would like to get into it again but all I have now is a tablet.

I don’t have any training or schooling in it, at all, I just enjoy computers since I was young 🤷‍♂️

I got into Linux while earning a degree in social sciences. That led to self-hosting, which later led me to a job in IT.

IT started as a hobby for me. My initial career was digital art/design. When I was 12/13 my dad let me have a pc, that I had to build from a box of scraps he got from work. I kept adding/upgrading that pc until windows pissed me off. Years later I kept it up on ppc and Intel Macs, when I started college. (No degree at all, went to a fancy art school and they ended up killing my program, so I just got a job instead)

I pretty much got my current job by already running a few various servers at home on arm boards and a NAS, helping with basic o365 admin tasks, and being able to crack open/max out the MacPro6,1s at work. I was only supposed to resize art files lol By the time we named a CTO, he just straight up asked me to run IT for him.

It’s always interesting when someone asks this question because while I do have a formal education in computer science. I’ve had this hobby since before I had that formal education. Linux and self hosting are what made me pursue the formal education part and not the other way around.

I took an HTML elective in high school, and I think a Flash elective as well (might’ve been the same class, it’s a long time ago). And I took one python class in university, but that was all basic python (v1 or v2, can’t remember, I just know it for sure wasn’t v3).

Other than that, I’m self taught on everything I host/do. My professional field is emergency response (I’ve bounced around every specialty except security/policing) so very little IT exposure in my day to day work life.

i have an associates in programming and a bachelor’s in cybersecurity, but i have forgotten most of it. i’m just a dumbass who likes computers now. all i know about this hobby is from the internet

Sysadmin here. I’ve been responsible for huuge systems, and been on call.

I’m just lurking. I have a VPS but I happily don’t have any servers at home to maintain

Yeah, my education is in electrical engineering and industrial automation. I’ve grown up using computers and like to learn, but I’ve never had any formal education on the subject except for high school programming classes, an intro CS course using Scheme, and a Python 3 bootcamp on Udemy. Everything else that I know is just from hands-on experience and using a search engine.

For hosting services and managing my domain, only a basic understanding is necessary, so I don’t feel held back by it. I do wish that I could contribute to my favourite projects, though.

Yep! I am a mechanical engineer and manual machinist.

My experience with my own self hosting has led to my current added responsibility as IT for our 6 person startup. But 90% of my time is mechanical engineering.

I have three degrees, none of them have focused at all on programming. I had one c++ programming class in uni.

In my experience, most of the IT stuff is easy-ish, if you start trying. Most people have some psychological barrier with anything looking like code. I’ll give you two examples.

My wife would refuse to fix small issues in our home lab, but once I explained, everything we have is backed up twice. And wiped homelab to assure her that we can’t fuck up by accidental edit, we’d have a way to restore it she started trying, and she is decent at it. She even started our paperless container on her own. I had to help a bit in configuring it, but a bit. Soon she maybe able to manage everything. On the other hand.

At work I have this junior, I’m training. First I had a json file, he got scared editing and would bug me everytime. Then I made a simple text file, variable_name space value. He was scared of that too. I finally made a csv that he would open in excel, then he felt comfortable. He refuses to even try 2 years in, because our job in not really technical and I’m not his boss.

TLDR: start trying with simple things, backup everything, you may fail a bit, but it’s not that hard to get started with basics.

Yes. I have no education at all in IT. I have a masters in classical double bass and a career as a musician, working in an opera house now. Computers have always been a hobby and was my second choice for “life path”. Could have easily been the other way around, professional nerd and amateur musician. I am very happy as is, though.