For a while now I've been wanting to untangle the mess that is my home network by unifying the hundreds of docker containers and ~10 VMs that ran all these together, and also get into blogging.
I use some of these services alot (GitLab, Bitwarden, personal website, etc.), others rarely such as Lidarr, Minecraft servers and a handfull of factorio servers (clusterio!) and others never - I worked out I have 3 different LDAP servers running, all with different databases.
Because these servers are run from my home, I have to port forward out port 80, 443 and others for all my game servers.
On occasion I have seen my home internet connection fully satisfied by a git clone or someone downloading files off my server which makes the whole household suffer.
I have also wanted to up my home-network-security game, by closing half the remote management ports and service ports.
I thought long and hard about how to implent this, but in the end moving my common services such as GitLab, Bitwarden and my personal website/blog to the cloud won. Now, I originally went shopping around for cheap VPS solutions in New Zealand, but quickly moved to looking in Australia as an extra ~10ms of latency isn't going to be the end of the world. That is when I found a good VPS provider - Vultr (use my referral link for $100 in credit, subject to Vultr's terms). Vultr provides VPS' for as low as $5 a month (they do have a $2.50 per month plan but that has IPv6 only, meaning I can reach 30% of the world according to Google). Equiped with this knowledge, I purchaced a VPS with them and got to setting it up.
Before I start a project like this, I usually set myself out some goals so I don't get too much feature creep (I always find a way to make something "better") and know exactly what I want from a project like this.
Throughout this 7-part-mini-blog-series-thing I will walk you through the design and development process behind Galaxy and the server - milkyway.