Self-Hosting8

Why I run ClickHouse on a dedicated box instead of Kubernetes, the trade-offs, and how to back it up without corrupting your MergeTree parts.

How I ran the modern data stack — ClickHouse, dbt, Dagster, Iceberg — self-hosted on Hetzner for under €200/month instead of €1,000+ managed.

A reproducible recipe for checking whether an ecosystem is as open as it claims: the GitHub sweep, the filter matrix, and what a licence check finds.

I rebuilt my Home Assistant host on a fresh VM with a stopwatch. It took about 50 minutes, and two steps were missing from every backup archive.

A config-only backup restores Home Assistant but not the host: VPN keys, firewall, cron and the container definition belong in the archive too.

How I structure a dbt Core project against ClickHouse — staging/intermediate/marts, layer-per-database, incremental models, and the ClickHouse-specific gotchas.

Nine days of nginx logs from a small blog: 18,209 AI-crawler hits. Which bots (ChatGPT-User, Bytespider, ClaudeBot), who honours robots.txt, and the JS-less view they actually see.

I wired an AC·THOR 9s into Home Assistant to dump PV surplus into the hot-water tank — then the device refused every Modbus write. Here's the read-local, write-cloud fix.