My Self-Hosted Stack with VirtualBox

Note: This is a recovered post from my old blog. See how we recovered these posts using the Wayback Machine and AI tooling.

My self-hosted setup runs on VirtualBox hosted on Windows Server 2016, fight me, where I run a mix of Ubuntu and Windows Server virtual machines to power my home services.

Why VirtualBox?

VirtualBox has been great for my self-hosted needs, people might say it’s “not production grade”, but neither is my home server. The VMs are incredibly portable, I can copy them to an external drive or move them to another machine with minimal hassle. This makes backup and recovery straightforward, and maintenance windows become much easier to manage.

Recently I needed to upgrade my server, I simply copied all the VMs to an external drive, moved them to my desktop PC, and they ran right there until I finished the server upgrade. Minimal downtime, no reconfiguring services - just move the files and go. That flexibility is hard to beat.

The Stack

Here’s what I’m running across my VMs:

• Wordpress - This Blog you are reading now.
• Plex - Media server for streaming movies and TV
• Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking at the DNS level
• Apache - Reverse proxy for web services running on other VMs, like this blog.
• Nextcloud - File sync, sharing, and personal cloud storage
• SSH server - Remote access when I’m away from home