What I Self-Host

> Sonarr, Lidarr, Radarr, etc. Every time I read about setting it up, it just sounds like a resource-intensive mess that’s fundamentally prone to frequent breakage. That’s the opposite of what I’m looking for when choosing self-hosted services.

I just checked on my *arr stack. Sonarr and Radarr idle at 157MB and 159MB of memory and approximately no CPU. Jellyfin currently idles at 330MB. I'm not sure where you got this impression from. I grant these tools are complicated and have somewhat clumsy UX, but they aren't especially heavy to run and are not fragile.

OP, point your :robot: at https://github.com/subdavis/selfhosted/blob/main/docker-comp... and ask for an explanation. It's a single compose file that illustrates how the *arrs, transmission, and jellyfin all work together. I'm sure you can set it up :)

> I prefer running services natively when possible, but will containerize complex services or those with many dependencies. Love: a service that’s a single Go binary. A service that only comes as a Docker compose file and wants to run MySQL, Redis, and three other containers? I’m already looking for an alternative.

Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.

Self hosting is great. The access part is hard.

Pangolin was the missing piece I needed, to not expose my servers to the internet and easily have my services publicly accessible with built in auth.

Tailscale kind of worked, but it was a hassle needing the client on mobile device and it being a VPN.

With vibe coding, I have more of my own apps running than pre-built.

With the recent change in Bitwarden's license, not sure for how long they will continue to be self hosting friendly.

I am also using Vikunja instead of trello.

Tbh in general I am fine if the self hosted app uses postgres or a container Db instead of sqlite only.

Running all these services without a declarative/standard way of deployment, ie docker compose or k3s/k8s is a bit mind boggling to me.

I self host on a bunch of different hardware, OSes, providers. I want the least fiddling as possible.

Good article. I have many of the same services in my setup.

Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary, but what you can do is mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync and use roundcube or some other frontend to view emails and compose.

I use this to easily access mail from different services, and I can also send from any of them.

I also have a seperate service that watches the mail directory and sends a ntfy.sh notification for new emails.

It’s a bit complicated cause theres so many services but here are the quadlets: https://github.com/ebrahim37/infra-template/tree/main/homela...

I implemented this about a month ago because the iphone Mail app was increasingly buggy.

To each their own but running that much stuff without proxmox would drive me insane. Especially the native stuff straight on the machine.

I've been building and self-hosting my own analytics platform[0] for 13+ years and never had any major issues with it.

The advantage is that if I do want a specific feature, I can just add it, and I am never worried about subscription limits or surprise charged, because I host it on a fixed-cost VPS.

Things don't really need maintenance and don't really break by themselves, the only time when they can sometimes break is when changing things.

You do need to have a proper setup though, for stuff like disk space alerts, knowing the common gotchas of disabling settings that can cause issues, etc.

[0]: https://uxwizz.com

Heya, nice read. I’m wondering how you managed to get LetsEncrypt certs minted when your caddy isn’t exposed to the public internet. Doesn’t LetsEncrypt need to make a request back as part of the handshake to mint/refresh the certificate?

Would love to know as I wanted to do the same in the past and ended up self signing certs.

For the self hosters: docker containers or not?

They are so easy / portable but perhaps systemd is a better option as the author suggests.

Seems like dealing with this is a part time job. I commend it though.

I recently bought a Lenovo Mini PC (01Q8X10) for under £300 that has a Snapdragon X1 CPU (and 32GB LPDDR5 RAM!) and it's turning out to be perfect for self-hosting running the newly released WSL Containers on Windows 11 with WSL 3 (it doesn't fully support Linux yet). Podman had some issues with WSL 3 that they're still releasing fixes for, but it's all working with that too.

After Google Assistant died I immediately installed Home Assistant on my old PC. Not as good, but at least it doesn't take 5 seconds to turn on a light like Gemini

People twist themselves into a knot talking about AI as the future. Its more of a bubble waiting to pop. Self hosting is the real disruptive future.

The hardware to accomplish most things that we rely on from cloud vendors is absolutely trivial. My own home server is a used super cheap and tiny machine. The hard disks don't even fit in the box and yet it has plenty of CPU and memory to spare.

The software is getting easier to configure year after year eventually creeping to the point where elderly people too lost to use a remote will be running this stuff. The real challenge will be solving for easy access to private networks from public spaces across the internet. Right now everybody seems to be centering on vendor solutions like TailScale for this.

I stared self hosting in 2020 when Raspberry Pis were super cheap (not anymore :( ) and lots of things started becoming available in Docker. Haven't ever considered going back to the cloud. I love taking back full control.

I have been self hosting for over a decade and recently have seen more people in my circle doing that and I have been helping them.

At first it was hard but then i made it into a product. I am working on Tarvis.io which makes self hosting accessible to non technical users as well. It comes with installation assistant, ssl domains and backups inbuilt into it.

You can install open source apps from a catalog or drop any github repo and it installs and run it for you.

With Tarvis, I have been self hosting more since I am able to install and delete apps with one click, it makes it easy to try things.