Overview

A guide to this segment of the series:

• Domain/Hosting
• File Storage (Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive, etc.)
• Shareable Content/Blogs
• Passwords
• Bookmarks
• Email

I’ll present each section with a description of a part of your digital life (you may not have thought of), and then a solution that I have explored myself.

Overview / Background

If you read part 2, “Modern Data Ownership: Local”, you might be thinking, “Oh, they are going to talk about putting my multimedia library online! I can listen to my Jellyfin music and watch my shows on the go!”

I am NOT a cybersecurity expert. Except for a very small chance, you dear reader are probably not a cybersecurity expert either. 🙂

I will never suggest exposing anything on your home network to the open internet. If you believe you need to, there are many articles out there that will give you that information, I will sleep better at night not giving you that.

Critical Notes

This part of the mini-series is more advanced. Most of this, for true/complete privacy and data control, will require you to run your own server that is on the internet. (but not connected to your home network) You must take extra care. With time, patience, learning, and a small amount of money (i spend $6USD a month as of this article) it is possible.

Alternately, many of the topics discussed here have paid-for hosting options. The software is open source/free, but they make money by managing the internet server part for you. You give them a credit card, set up your account, and you have the service going. (this is my true happy place with open source, a company making the software for free, and then charging for their activities like hosting, the community can contribute, everyone benefits, but you can still run it yourself if you put the effort in)

My Hosting Setup

Because I use the server for myself (not a hosted service for multiple people), I have a very simple set up:

• Single, shared CPU
• 2GB of RAM(memory)
• 20GB virtual hard drive
• Ubuntu Linux for the OS
• Manual backups

With the virtual host that I chose, Kamatera (affiliate link / regular link), at the time of this article this is $6USD per month. Clearly this doesn’t have hundreds of gigs for file storage (but some data storage), or the ability to handle thousands of web pages per second. Fortuantely, i don’t have those needs, so my little server on the internet can be simple.

Something i have learned during 30 years of IT: Don’t overengineer at the beginning, make a reasonable start and see what you need. Expand/scale up when appropriate.

This has worked well for me, as I don’t work on medical devices and I am not in charge of Amazon. Those types of areas need a more comprehensive and strategic approach than “just start small”. 🙂 This was a good place to start, and has served me well for several years now. I might increase memory or add a second shared CPU if i notice that it is struggling, but I can grow it as I need to.

Domain / Hosting

If you are hosting things for yourself/your family, it is more fun to have your own domain. You already know my domain, you are visiting it right now. 🙂 I’ve had mine since 1998. A domain is generally two-three parts. The main part you choose, kennebel for mine, and the part that indicates what type of domain it is, possibly the country it is part of, just .com for mine.

The reason it helps to have a domain, is that you can more easily break up the different services we’ll be talking about in to easy to remember names. For example, my website is on kennebel.com, and what will be discussed later the service i set up to manage my links is, not so creatively, found at links.kennebel.com, which you’ll see discussed lower down, then something like files.yourdomain.com for a Google Drive/OneDrive/Dropbox alternative, etc.

For this, you need a “registrar”, or a company that has special rights to sell and manage domain names. THey will help you search for available names, and provide pricing of what it will cost to own the domain name.

You should do research on the registrar you chose, to make sure they align with your values. The company I chose is called Hover (affiliate link / regular link), and while they have several services, i use them for the domain registration and DNS. (DNS converts domain names to server addresses, when you put a server on the internet, it is given a numerical address, but a domain is easier to remember, and you can move it around if you build new servers)

File Storage

A very common data activity for people is file and photo storage. On more than one occasion, major file storage vendors have put out notices that they accidentally had a problem with their service that made every single file available to anyone with no security restrictions, sometimes up to several hours. This is outside of the normal total access that the vendors enjoy over every single file you store on their system.

For these types of activities, there is an open source system called Nextcloud.

THis works very similar to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and others. It can store your files, you can share from the server to others, manage your photos, and more. There are programs you can download for your computer (Linux, Mac, and Windows), as well as mobile (Android and iOS). These programs make it easy to keep files synchronized across systems, and backed up somewhere outside of your local device.

Of course, be cautious about what you store, it is a device on the internet, and with enough time, every device on the internet can be broken in to.

Shareable Content/Blogs

There has been a lot of activity on shared blogging/article style platforms. Unfortunately, some of that activity is platform owners giving voices to people that violently disagree with other types of people existing. One of the reasons I chose WordPress over a multi-user blogging platform was mostly about making sure i would agree with the person in charge. (usually anyways…) It is more difficult to monetize and gain an audience with an isolated blog rather than being on a “discover” feed, but that is a trade off i was okay with.

WordPress has many, many plugins for all sorts of uses, and the code is scrutinized by a lot of people, helping it keep honest.

Passwords

THis is a bit more tricky than the other topics. Secure password storage is important, so that you can use longer, hard to remember passwords for banking, and other activities.

In the past, there was KeePass/KeePassXC/others for offline (or local network) password storage. This worked well for personal use, or a small team use inside of a corporate network. There are open source options that you can host yourself for online/shared password storage, like Bitwarden. Referring back to the top of this article, you are not (likely) a cybersecurity expert, and password storage being breached would be a serious issue for most people.

It is of course possible for the corporations that host password managers like LastPass/1Password/Keeper/others to be hacked, but they have dedicated cybersecurity staff, fiscal responsibilities, and other resurces that normal people don’t have. If you are only working on your home entwork there are options, but if you are going to store your most sensitive passwords, you should have some professional support behind you. (that is my opinion)

Bookmarks

(on to a happier topic)

Not too long ago, i went through a series of different browsers, looking for something that was compatible with websites I used, respected my privacy, and felt easy to use. This really disrupted my bookmarks/favorites. It also made me think about who had access to my bookmarks when I clicked that easy “sync now” button in the browser.

My research brought me to Linkwarden and their self-hosted option. THe tool has Android and iOS apps for saving links, as well as browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox based browsers. Now, no matter what I use, my bookmarks are stored in a single place I manage. This tool also has additional features like grabbing a copy of the page you bookmark and storing it in the app. THis way, if the site disappears or is offline, you still have a copy of the content.

It also has a neat feature that you can share links, like the following: Kennebel “Public – Data Ownership” Links

Email

This is another one of those more complicated topics. It is possible for you to run your own email server, there are many open source options that you can download and install.

The complex part of hosting your email is not the server setup itself or the security concerns of making sure your server is not taken over by a mass-email spammer, oddly enough. It has to do with getting email from your server delivered to everyone else. Other email vendors take a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to unknown email servers.

If you do nothing else besides setting up the email program on your hosted server somewhere in the world, most likely all of your messages will be pre-emptively marked as “probably junk”, if not rejected outright. It is a long process that you need to go through to prove your server is safe and not a source of junk mail. (and possibly an on-going thing to keep proving your server is safe)

Alternately, you can work with a known good provider where you can have your custom domain email to be delivered. You need to do a bit of research to make sure they are not scanning your email for advertising or AI training purposes. Some places to start your research might be Proton or Fastmail for a provider. The choices many people use (and something i’m working to get off of) are typically Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. The challenges there as what I listed already, regarding the scanning of messages not for security reasons, but money making ones.

Navigation Links

First overview article can be found: here

Previous article about local items: here

Final summary article will be found: <here eventually>