Introducing Bitsmith

I love computers, and I love to self-host, all the way from a Raspberry Pi to a “real server”.

Owning your data has become more important day by day: companies get hacked, leak data, sell data, and the list goes on. I just want to own my data.

I wasn’t alone feeling this, my brother had the same thoughts, I mean, even PewDiePie made an entire video about privacy.

So, we wanted to solve this for ourselves. A good piece of software, installable on Linux x86 or arm64, that takes you from hosting your own data to setting up virtual machines, to even controlling your entire home server with your own AI (yes, we even self-host LLM, but I won’t judge).

Introducing bitsmith, Our way to self-hosting made fun and enjoyable.

What it does

Bitsmith is a product with a range of features, but our goal is to provide a single piece of software that you interact with to give you everything you need for self-hosting. We do this with a couple of core features.

Storage

Built on top of ZFS, storage is the most critical piece. You want to be able to set up redundancy, navigate around files, and just have it working. And of course, it should look and feel nice. Here is how a 4-drive setup could look.

Apps, LXC and Virtual Machines

Sometimes you want to just set up something simple, maybe Jellyfin. In Bitsmith you can set that up with our “one-click” install apps. Honestly, it’s not one click: here’s how many there were when I asked my brother.

“one when clicking on Jellyfin, repeat for each folder (one for “add folder”, x for navigation to folder), one for the review step, and one for install”. or a prompt using AI” - Brother 2026

Of course, we also support Docker Compose if you already have your favorite app configured.

And then we also have LXC and Virtual Machine support. Ready-made images: just pick one, pick the size, and you’ll have your virtual machine or LXC ready within a minute.

Backups

You can’t really run a home server if you can’t easily back up your data, your apps, configurations, virtual machines, and so on. So of course we support this, one time or on a schedule. Back up to another drive, to a connected SMB, or maybe another computer also hosting Bitsmith (yes, we have cluster support).

AI

When you start using AI, you don’t look back (sometimes you do, but hey…), and if you have the hardware to run it locally, even cooler!

We have a full Bitsmith MCP. You can connect your favorite harness and let it create virtual machines, proxies, add files to your storage, and create an SMB share. Of course, you can define what they get access to through scoped tokens, all configurable.

Just the other day I used it to start Star Wars in a virtual machine accessible through my terminal. It was so dumb, but I laughed so hard.

When you want more

• OIDC login
• USB device passthrough
• Cluster Bitsmith servers
• Terminals to all virtual machines, LXC, and other computers if you are using it as a cluster.
• No telemetry, I don’t even know who you are on this site.

This is becoming a feature list… You can also just read the entire changelog.

Getting started

It runs on anything that supports Ubuntu 22.04+.

1. Buy a license. $99, lifetime.
2. Run the command curl -fsSL https://downloads.bitsmith.app/install.sh | sudo bash
3. Open the URL the installer prints. Setup walks you through your license, an admin account, the network, and your first storage.

That’s it. You will be up and running in a matter of minutes.

If you give Bitsmith a try, I’d love to hear how you like it. If you hate it, I have a 30-day refund guarantee, and I would love to hear your feedback!

Thanks for reading!

Robert

from the Bitsmith team, where my brother just tries to add more features, and we keep pushing the release back another week.