Introducing Endeavour

Acquired my first production server to start self hosting proper!

Owning the hardware is one of the core tenants of self hosting. Given the cost of electricity in Ireland and some initial requirements I felt I had, local hardware did not seem to be the way to go. So, I started investigating options around a bare metal server. Spinning up loads of virtual machines or even one large virtual machine is something I’ve done in the past, but for this I wanted as much control of the local system as I could get. As I was already using OVHcloud to run some public cloud infrastructure, I was drawn by the fact that I would have everything under one roof, which is always nice for billing and organisation.

So, I’m happy to introduce, Endeavour! I feel like that should of lead into a photo, but just picture one server among many others inside some data centre in the middle of France and there you have it! In terms of the specs, I went with OVH’s Advance line of servers, specifically the Advance-3 which has the following specs.

• CPU - Intel Xeon-D 2141I - 8c/16t - 2.2 GHz/3 GHz
• Memory - 64 GB ECC 2133 MHz
• Storage - 2×4 TB HDD SATA RAID 1
• Bandwidth - 1Gbps public and private interfaces

It’s definitely a bit overkill and I think I definitely made a sacrifice by going hard drives as versus solid state, this being said with a few months of hindsight under my belt. There is now a handful of services running on this box however, almost all of them in Docker Compose files which I’m enjoying. I flirted with the idea of just installing a hypervisor like ProxMox on there, but running VMs to then run containers just seemed a bit mad. There’s always room for improvements with this stuff, but I’m definitely enjoying my time. I’m already making plans to replace this server in 2022 however, so definitely watch this space. But for now, Endeavour will be flying high above, powering my self hosting journey.