down a VPS rabbit hole

I’ve been down a deep, deep self-hosting rabbit hole this past month that began innocuously with an attempt to get away from Plexamp and ended with me setting up a full-blown external VPS, in the process learning a lot. I’m not going to document every step of the process here (no one needs to read about how I learned to create SSH keys and disable root login, and if you do, email me). But I had a ton of fun, so I wanted to log the adventure for posterity. This all started because of Plex’s lifetime price hike. As I mentioned in that previous post, it doesn’t even affect me as I’m a lifetime Plex pass holder, but the knowledge that this was the direction Plex was going didn’t make me feel good about using it. I kept thinking about it. It was like an itch that wouldn’t go away. Updating my music setup: Navidrome and AudioMuse-AII was already pretty happy with my Jellyfin setup for watching things. The main thing that was keeping me on Plex was music. Jellyfin’s music capabilities can…