A Hobbyist's Quest for a Personal Server - Salman FF - LNUG April 2018

Tuesday, 24 April 2018

How easy is it for a non-techie lay-person to set up a personal server and have their own apps running on it?

There's been much talk recently about how large companies host our data, control it, and sell ads against it. But what if we all had our own servers with our own applications running on them holding our data which we control?

Is that doable today, using existing cloud services and node.js? What does it take? How easy is it?

For the past few years, I've been running my personal node.js-based server on AWS, Google Cloud, Openshift and Heroku, using mlabs and Mongo, as well as Dropbox!

So I'll talk about what it takes for a non-techie (or at least a newbie) to set up a node.js server using each of those environments - the pluses and minuses of each ... and why doing this would be a good thing in general.

About me: I am clean tech entrepreneur (@zemenergy.com) and VC executive (@top-funds.com). I code for fun. See http://freezr.info twitter:salmanff github:salmanff