I was bored one day, looking through Porkbun's cheapest TLDs when I found it...

.cloud was just €1.50 for the first year! This deal was expiring in a few days, so I went and grabbed a domain.

MURGA.CLOUD

One of the things I want to do after I graduate university it scale up my homelab and increase the amount of services I host and make available to people.

Right now I run instances of FoundryVTT, Paperless-NGX, Jellyfin, Trek (for Trip Planning), IT-Tools, and BentoPDF for public consumption.

I've always liked the idea of hosting production services. I find the challenge of building a production environment fun, and like everything I do to be worthwhile, for there to be stakes.

After graduation, I hope to increase the amount of services I host for my friends, but also expand the offering. I hope to become a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to them, too. Offering them the ability to spin up VMs or specific services, just to test things out, or to host their own websites.

What's There Now?

Well right now, murga.cloud is in its infancy, with a running OIDC Authentiation provider that gives my friends the MurgID they use to log into some of the services I currently host.

As the services I offer scale up, they're able to access more with just their MurgaID. And as I program more bespoke services (Event RSVPing, Starboard 3.0, Spotify Jam alternative, etc.), they'll be able to get those too.

Why Do This?

While hosting productive things does increase your workload, it also improves your learning. You start running into scaling, security, usage and bandwidth issues that you wouldn't if your services spent most of their time idling.

You get to experience that 'on call' panic if you break someone, and that feeling of people relying on you makes you plan your architecture, migration and general maintenance more thoroughly.

I started my self-hosting journey because I wanted to host a Minecraft server 24/7, with proper backups and the ability to handle many players. This one choice has now grown into the Murgacloud and given me such a unique experience that I would have never gotten elsewhere.