This sites exists to provide an always-up-to-date, in-depth catalogue of the libre software web services I (Dave Lane) have set up and maintain.
This collection is as much for my benefit as it is for others, who might want to learn more about libre technologies they could use in their own organisations. My purpose here is to show the libre services I (or my colleagues and customers) have found compelling enough to warrant setting up instances either for testing or full production. The options are many, diverse, and often mature and highly functional.
These services are run primarily on commodity Linux Virtual Private Servers, aka 'hosts', which I also maintain. Some systems are also run on real physical hosts either in my home hosting facility or in commercial hosting facilities. These hosts are based in Aotearoa NZ, Singapore, the US, and in Germany. Almost all run an LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu Linux although a few hosts run Debian Linux.
Almost all the hosts are configured in a particular way which allows multiple services to run harmoniously on the same host. I use a set of somewhere between one and twenty-one Docker containers (which I run via Docker Compose) for each service, to keep different services, each of which has different software dependencies, from interfering with one another. Each service is made available to the Internet via a 'reverse proxy' (for which I use Nginx) and user interactions with them are secured (encrypted) with Let's Encrypt SSL certificates (which renew automatically).
To manage the servers and keep them up-to-date, I use SSH to establish secure encrypted connections to them (via key-based authentication). I run updates of the hosts manually, and update individual services when required (urgently if updates are security-related). Some of the Docker containers I run I have built myself, in other cases I use those supplied by the communities developing the service.
One huge advantage of the Docker Compose pattern is that I can rapidly move services between different hosts, or even replicate services very rapidly for development or staging purposes. Using them has revolutionised my hosting processes.