What if setting up a personal email server (or any other type of server) was just as easy as setting up a new PC? How would it work? How can we make it easy enough? I have been working on figuring out how to answer this question for years. I quit my job about a year ago to try to work on it full time. I think there are TWO main pain points that make self-hosting hard, and the already-existing projects FreedomBox, YunoHost, Syncloud, and Sandstorm don't even attempt to solve either one of them. 1: Ingress Routing To run a web server at home, you will have to log into your router and adjust settings to allow people in the outside world to connect. It can be tricky. If you live in a dorm or get your internet access through your phone, you won't be able to do this at all 2: Redundancy/Fail-over We want to be able to DEPEND ON the web services we operate, especially during emergency or transitional periods. If a utility outage or moving to a new residence disrupts the service, it's never going to be able to truly replace cloud SaaS like Gmail I plan on solving the ingress routing problem by launching a new cloud service that sells secure, transparent TCP tunnels for ~$0.01 per GB of bandwidth. Users will be able to get their server online without touching the router or looking up how to do technical things in a shell I plan on solving the Redundancy/Fail-over problem by building a self-hosting platform that revolves around the concept of a distributed "personal datacenter", not a single linux computer, and exposing standard interfaces for replication, consensus, leader election, etc, to devs Finally, I think importance of user interface, usability testing, etc, in all of this can't be understated. I intend for this platform to be incredibly easy to use, with unambiguous, comfy GUI and clearly communicative error handling. The word "because" should be in almost every error message I don't have a public demo yet or alpha version you can download, but if you would like to peek at what I'm doing, HMU. My repos are at https://git.sequentialread.com/forest So far: 2021 EDIT: I talk more about this project and its fate here: https://sequentialread.com/the-pragmatic-path-4-year-update-introducing-greenhouse/ That article included a link to an unpublished draft of an introduction to the project post: https://sequentialread.com/p/b211da58-3023-47d6-b8f3-acd2b427f7ef/ And also a link to a "super scuffed 25-minute demo video" of it: https://picopublish.sequentialread.com/files/automated-server-garden-demo1.mp4