I don’t have any other websites to recommend, but wanted to address your title with a slightly opposing view. To the main point of the RSS feed being mostly just an announcement feed redirecting you to the website: I fully agree and this is my pet peeve with certain RSS feeds.

I’ve followed selfh.st since their early posts and it seems just as useful to me today, which is being used as a “this may be useful information related to self-hosting, or maybe not” tool. Sometimes they post a really good article and sometimes I delete it within a few seconds of skimming; it all depends on the week.

I subscribe via the email newsletter instead of RSS and I don’t load images in my email client, but yes I agree that the images are obnoxiously large when loaded. Otherwise, it’s a great 2-minute email/feed to read each week to see if there’s anything I’d interested in and haven’t heard of before. I don’t use social media, aside from browsing Lemmy and Hacker News, so it fills a gap for me where others may use sites like Twitter or Reddit.

You can still read all of the content without donating, so it’s more about whether you find the few random benefits worth a donation or not. Or if RSS paywalls are a deal breaker. For me, the information delivered to my inbox is useful enough to keep around.

Worth it in what way? Are you already self hosting and looking to just offload some of your critical services to a VPS for its availability, or are you fairly new to all of this?

For your first question on the VPS, I’d suggest thinking about backups (Is it provided by your VPS? Do you need something like Backblaze B2?) and firewalls.

For your Cosmos question:

I’m curious to know if this means Cosmos will only manage DNS for services hosted on the same box.

No, not necessarily. The DNS zone you control lives on Cosmos, but the records themselves just point to IP addresses. You can point an A record to any reachable IP, whether it’s the same VPS or a completely different server. As long as the tunnel is alive, the backend can be anywhere.

It’s possible, but I can’t find any existing solutions that solve this need.

The best possible data for this will come from the big search engine’s APIs (e.g., Google, Bing) due their global reach and massive data storage capabilities.

If you truly want to self-host something, I’d suggest looking into setting up a simple pipeline from one of those (or multiple) APIs to a self-hosted data store (e.g., Elastic, Postgres) and write up some simple scripts that will let you search at-will like you would with Google Trends.

Just wanted to say thanks for coming back to your own post and writing up the solution :) Love seeing these when I search for a problem I’m having.

Minecraft server + mods + introducing scripting his own mods/customizations? Suggested simply because gaming is a great way to introduce computing concepts that kids can visually see the output from.

Otherwise, I’d suggest showing him how to create his own web pages, creating visual programming games, etc. Find his favorite hobbies (music, art, animals) and start creating something around that hobby so that the computing piece is just as interesting.

What are you trying to accomplish? Do you really need a DDNS provider?

Personally, I’ve found that using a simple script on my server to update my DNS provider (e.g., Cloudflare, Njalla) is more than enough.

hit the button. buy it all.