Caddy supports the HTTP-01 and TLS-ALPN-01 challenges by default, you just need to expose 80/443 and it just works. But if you want to use the DNS-01 challenge you’d need to build it with a plugin of your DNS provider.
Traefik supports all 3 challenges equally ootb, with a wide range of DNS providers. But it is a bit harder to configure and doesn’t support being a web server.
I wanna reshare my experiences here. Essentially it doesn’t scale well with large rooms, and isn’t friendly with janky/underpowered equipment like XMPP. But with a lot of performance tuning it can go a long way.
For a room, the amount of servers you federate with is a more reliable metric than member count (so 5000 accounts on 2 servers would likely take less load than 500 accounts on 500 servers, as an example). There are some large public rooms that are very broken, and I advise banning them before users get to join
Search “selfhosting” on matrixrooms.info and sort by most members, you should find a few
We are (like everyone) on matrix.org now but realize we need to move eventually.
Consider moving to another open registration server too. Find one that supports Element Call
do I need to pay for a domain still?
If you’re gonna selfhost, you should purchase a domain for proper federation with the wider network. IP-only servers are possible, but they are generally banned in most rooms due to antispam. Same with dynamic DNS domains
Unless it really is easy enough to do it on a synology nas for text/voice/screen share…
You’ll need to integrate a Matrix homeserver (I recommend Continuwuity.org, much lighter than Synapse) and Livekit (the software that handle Element Calls). It’s not particularly easy so maybe consider managed hosting beforehand, too
most of the guides can be outdated because the software changes a lot. You’d find some better support writing on their Discord guild