I think that user donations are easier when an instance has a good focus. There are some other instances I can think of where the donation model has been enough to cover things. In addition to feddit.dk and beehaw, an instance I use most of the time, ani.social, is more than covered by donations last I checked. It looks like @hitagi@ani.social even took away the donate link in the sidebar. Never mind, I am just blind. I didn’t notice the little Ko-fi badge at the bottom. I was looking for a text link.

This is what I do. I have a VPS that handles all the 443 traffic and then proxies it back to my home server on the correct port. I also just serve some things directly from the VPS since I have it already. It also works well to have a second box for things like uptime monitoring.

Yeah, spoiler tags are the one big feature that is missing. There are also some minor things on the moderation side that aren’t there. For example, admin accounts don’t have a full list of options in the moderation menu.

Some good answers in here already. It boils down to a couple points for me:

• Back when I started selfhosting, it was either nginx or apache, and I found nginx better and easier to set up
• All the nginx knowledge I learned years ago still works just the same as it did back then, so why potentially mess things up by switching if it all still works
• Basically every project has an example nginx config for reference, that can’t be said about other proxies
• It is easier to find support online for edge cases that might pop up with nginx due to the ubiquity of its use and years of history

I didn’t have a VPS with them, but long ago I had a couple domains through them. One of them had an issue with the auto-renewal and I never got a notification of any kind, only finding out when they had taken ownership of the domain, advertising it for sale. Then they wanted some way, way higher amount of money for me to buy it back. So, I don’t have any domains with them any more.

This was years and years ago though, so they might be better now.

I use Sonarr, but it does mess up sometimes for shows even when you mark it as an anime to use absolute numbering. It most often happens with older shows that have lots of OVAs that are sometimes listed as episodes and sometimes listed as specials, depending on the database. So, if you are having Sonarr manage your downloads, then it can grab the wrong episode if its database (I think TVDB) and the release (usually using MAL numbering) disagree.

I don’t have a solution for you, but I will be watching this thread. Currently, I use Sonarr for library organization, but it doesn’t always work well with anime due to title differences and differences between how seasons/specials are numbered in different databases. So, Shoko was on my radar to try out at some point since it uses anidb.

I used to have my docker updates done automatically. However, as the services I used to run just for myself have started to be used by other people (family, friends), I am less tolerant of having things break. So, instead of something like watchtower, I run diun these days. I have it set up to ping me in a discord channel when a docker update is available. Then, I can actually perform the update when I have time and attention to troubleshoot any issues that may come up.