Is there room for Windows selfhosters?
from GatesMcBalmer@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 10:57
https://lemmy.world/post/48155279
from GatesMcBalmer@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 10:57
https://lemmy.world/post/48155279
I’m a Windows guy since forever and I recently got into selfhosting. So far its a blast! Are posts about that welcome here?
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Sure are. I started self hosting with a VM on Hyper-V.
Nice to hear it!
Oh, I’m sorry. Lol.
Hyper-V is just so bad. Decided to run it for a while as a test, I couldn’t get back to ESXi fast enough, haha. And I come from the Enterprise world where Hyper-V is common.
Honestly I find hyper v to be easier to work with then virtual box for home stuff and with what Broadcom has done to VMware I am staying away from it.
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/ee1a8625-6dbe-4b2c-80d7-5dffc06d3fd8.jpeg">
/s
I love that movie lol its a family fave!
I don’t think that Linux is in the title or description of this community!
You pick your own poison …
Mine is Gentoo Linux all the way, yours is Windows. Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us! We are kind of the two extreme of the spectrum…
Welcome!
So true! I met a friend of a friend at a church social last week and he spent the whole time trying to convince me to try FreeBSD instead of selfhosting on Windows. I might try it someday but as polite as he was about it he just couldn’t get the hint lol
Yeah, but you’ll probably figure it out eventually.
Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).
I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.
With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.
My homelab is a mishmash of Windows and Linux machines. The primary game server is Windows and the rest others are Linux.
That’s so cool! Have you ever tried a BSD?
I’ve experimented with OpenBSD in the past, but it was back when I was solely a Windows kid before embracing and clicking with Linux. It just never really meshed with me.
Windows is what I already but I’m also curious to learn linux and bsd at some point.
I was at this point for a while, believing gaming on Linux wasn’t up to par, until I discovered that Linux has a decent translation layer (Proton/Wine) that means even though the vast majority of Steam games are Windows only, Steam or other launchers like Heroic just run them in a container, and from my experience none of my games have had issues. This has only improved massively over the years.
Oh don’t misunderstand. I run Linux on my personal machines. Arch on desktop and Cachy on laptop. My game server is only Windows because the Linux Palworld server software would just not recognize the server files from the Windows machine and I eventually just gave up trying to transfer. We are endgame and unless everyone decides to start a new server with 1.0, it’ll remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Linux is favored because the ecosystem is more open but you can also run it on low power devices which isn’t really the case with Windows (and getting worse over time) and it’s free with Windows, to be legal, you need to license the cores/VM. Now does anyone actually do that?! I wouldn’t think so.
Sure ! But… How !? I don’t have even the first idea how you’d host… Almost anything on Windows 😅 and I would be concerned by the power consumption of any non-minimalist OS.
Windows Server exists.
It really shouldn't, but it does.
Hyper-v server can get pretty damn lightwieght as it ships without a GUI
+1 for Hyper-V, despite being glitchy and only sustaining Home Assistant for about 12 hours this and VirtualBox were my best chance at self hosting VMs on a Windows host. The problem wasn’t the virtualization, but the rest of the OS and its persistent maintenance cycles. Antivirus (MsMpEng.exe) and its NTFS scanning running more and more resources until the CPU was clogged. OP has gotta start somewhere.
Oh I was suggesting a the free standalone hyper v server MS did but I just searched for it and it looks like they killed it off recently which sucks. Was probably the best MS os going.
My ESXi box draws 20 watts at idle with 3 Windows VMs and 3 Linux VMs.
Guess which of those VMs draws the most power (hint: it’s not Windows).
Power draw depends on more than the base OS, what it does matters so much more. Which is why my one Linux VM draws the most power - it gets used for some intense tasks with ffmpeg.
Interestingly. I’ve found little power draw difference using ffmpeg on Windows or Linux. Both will max CPU while converting and take a similar amount of time.
Did you install the guest tools and set the CPU governor to the correct scheduler? Do the Windows boxes host the same applications as the Linux boxes?
Docker for desktop will also let you run a lot of services
Isn’t docker on windows just Linux in a trenchcoat?
Always. Started on windows hypervisors and windows as they were relevant to my work and I was trying to skill up at the time. Since moved to a Linux stack as the lab grew in scope and my distaste for MS grew as well.
This is a natural progression. Inescapable.
Verily. Especially after working with heavily windows/MS environments for a decade and change. Intune makes my blood boil.
While I have no respect for Windows people, it’s interesting to read through their failures. Yeah, do Windows instead of spending bits of your time to make an effort at learning something new.
I mean it, in a non-sarcastic way. You can start with Windows, and if you won’t give up on this hobby, I bet you’d come to some open source system instead at some point. After all, the entire self-hosting point is not in ditching Windows, but ditching proprietary thing corporations lure people to use, to farm their data and money too. And attention, not the least thing. It’s just that Windows is precisely the very thing a self-hoster would despise.
Having one to boot into ‘launch that game’ mode makes sense to some, but running it to run some services 24/7, makes little sense, if at all.
I self-hosted Plex and Jellyfin on Windows. It’s fine. But as others have said, Windows machines tend to be too power-hungry. Honestly I think that’s more a symptom of x86-64. Changing the OS from Windows to Linux does not magically change the power needs of the hardware. (However, Linux tends to demand less of the hardware, especially if there’s no GUI.)
I now self-host Plex on a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM/512GB SSD). M2 Pro in Intel speak is like i5 as in, it’s the “next one up” and “good enough for most people” but not the low entry into the platform (M# base or i3), though I’d say M4/M5 base is better than M2 Pro. Just like going 2-3 generations newer, the i3 gets closer to and may surpass an older i5.
There’s a reason self-hosters prefer Linux, but I’d think it would be more about the hardware than the software. Windows is problematic because you’re opening ports and Windows is a target due to its massive market share. Mac is kinda (/sorta /not really) UNIX based, and Linux is, well, it’s Linux; neither is bulletproof, but both are better than Windows because they’re not really being targeted. That said, the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini going for $500 if you’re a student, $600 otherwise is getting a lot of people sick of Microslop’s BS to switch, and the Neo in particular is forcing the PC market to get competitive as macOS market share is rising — this also makes it more of a target. You’re always at some risk online and a little common sense goes a long way.
Many of us started running Windows Server and endpoints with Cisco PIX firewall (am I showing my age here?) but in my case, the cost and substandard tools turned me away. I was running A DLNA server and using WDS (yes, very overkill for home, but fun to learn for work), but then I found TrueNAS (then called FreeNAS) running on BSD. I now run a simple share from there and Kodi on my (Linux and Android) user endpoints. I don’t bother with imaging anymore, and use
ddfor backups to my NAS. My Firewall runs OPNSense (BSD) and I run OpenWRT on two TrendNet WAPs.I’ll never go back to MS. It’s just not a welcoming platform from my perspective. Don’t even get me started on .NET or the various and sundry “redistributables” constantly required by every tool you try to use.
dotnet is pretty great, runs great on Linux, and you can ship your executable without a need for an external framework if you want.
Dotnet is also open source, a strongly typed language, a large standard library so it doesn’t have the problems of npm, has great performance and is all around the best language out there imo.
Use rust if you need to be closer to the metal, but that’s rare.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #12 for this comm, first seen 14th Jun 2026, 12:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Temporary becomes permanent. When I was experiencing severe long-term symptoms of Covid, I bought a refurbished computer to use as a NAS with Jellyfin, Sonarr, and indexers. I kept the installed Windows 10 because I simply did not have the energy to do more. Then, when I felt better, I told myself, “Let me add more services.”
Now, it’s a Frankenstein computer where Windows 10 acts as the hypervisor, running Caddy as my reverse proxy. Crowdsec protects my services, and my Flint 2’s firewall acts as the Crowdsec bouncer. A VirtualBox VM runs in Windows 10 and hosts most of my Docker containers. Stablebits DrivePool manages my drive pool.
I’ve been running this setup for over a year, and I haven’t had any issues. I know I should switch to Linux, but since it’s been working great and I’m busy, I’ve been procrastinating.
I have seen the temporary->permanent happen so many times even in enterprise IT.
It’s only temporary, unless it works.
Sure hope you’re doing better now, and no ‘long Covid’ after effects.
Yes, masochists are welcome.
Yup, there’s no kinkshaming here
So I’ve got this Solaris Sparc cluster…
Straight to jail
That’s kinda the core of self-hosting, isn’t it? We are taking back digital sovereignty but giving our time and mental health to the Machine God.
I’m not a windows hater per se, but I am for using the best tool for the job.
And in my opinion windows is not the best tool for self hosting. There are things windows does work well for that meshes well with self hosting and that’s docker. Honestly I’d focus on that for a lot of reasons but primarily because it’s a very easy to deploy self contained way to provide services. And the differences between docker on windows and Linux is almost negligible.
You will not find many people who willingly work with Windows servers, there is a reason for this. That being said, one point of self hosting is that you can do everything the way you want. So you do you.
Posts about self hosting are welcome, posts to strangers seeking external validation…? Maybe save for therapy.
Absolutely. The gate’s open…come on in. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a Windows based server. I still run Windows 10 in the lab, plus Linux and Mac. I don’t really discriminate. All OS’s have their place imho.
That is one of the prime directives of selfhosting. I have a ton of fun learning about new stuff to do and how to do it. Tell us all about it man. What do you selfhost? Are you running any Docker containers? I’m all ears, which in reality isn’t too far from the truth with my Jumbo ears. Share! Share!
Sure thing!
(also, please do post about it when you eventually decide to switch to linux)
I self hosted windows for many years, mostly because that is what I used at work. I liked it because it hid some of the low level details and worked most of the time.
The thing that finally made me switch was the exorbitant cost of licenses and the need to run services on older hardware.
DM me if you want some keys. I have a few copies of win10 and winIOT laying around that I’m not going to use.
They better be! I’ve got a mix of proxmox running Windows and Linux machines, as well as a bare metal Windows machine for streaming gaming, as wells as Linux laptops to access all this.
… My only shame is using Windows server to host my DHCP server.
Hey! I started running a home server on Windows 10. It was a great easy way to get started. The only problem for me that I found with time was that Windows updates would take everything that I was running offline, which was a nuisance to log back in and open everything up.
You may find you gradually move towards Linux :P
srvany
Now, let me be polemical here …
(And this is to be read with a pinch of /s)
Selfhosting on windows and understanding what you do is so much better than selfhost on CasaOS/ZimaOS/FancyWebGui/Synology and just spin up containers randomly without even understand what a container is and how it does work at all …
Now roast me :)
Sure, if that’s what you want to do. Though, you’ll probably find less references and expertise here. There is a reason that even Microsoft runs Linux on most of its own servers.
I wouldn’t recommend it personally
That’s just silly.
Self hosting is all about Digital Autonomy; that’s just not possible with a windows OS.
Apart from that it would just make your life harder, as the vast majority of documentation and tutorials and helper scripts are based on some linux like OS.
Tell us what you are hosting! Tell us now! Lol