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Self-Hosted Services for Privacy Enthusiasts
Hey folks! Ditch the mainstream cloud services and opt for self-hosted alternatives.. As someone just starting to care about digital privacy, I'm curious about your experiences.
I recently set up Nextcloud on an old PC at home to replace Google Drive and it's been... interesting. Definitely more control but also more maintenance than I expected. The documentation wasn't exactly beginner-friendly.
Have any of you made the switch to self-hosting services like Bitwarden (password manager), Jellyfin (media server), or HomeAssistant? What was your learning curve like? And honestly, was it worth the time investment compared to just using mainstream services?
Also, for those who've been self-hosting for years - what's your advice for newbies like me who want privacy but don't want to spend every weekend troubleshooting config files?
Comments
Got it.
Random power outages and internet bandwidth caps can make self hosting prohibitive. Plus the power consumption alone can sometimes cost more than a cheap VPS.
I used to self host from 2017 to 2022 but after power outages and having to share the network with my own home usage moved to cloud hosting. One upside now is I can downgrade my internet to the cheapest package since I don’t need as much upload speed.
The one major good upside to self hosting is it is Deadpool-proof. You won’t lose your data due to circumstances out of your control (other than disk failure). But as far as privacy is concerned, be mindful that your ISP may still be monitoring your traffic.
A friend of mine self hosts a lot of servers and it works alright for him. It does suck when the power drops and his services go down. This happened once at a spectacularly bad timing (Murphy’s Law).
Some might disagree but the 2 services I don't self-host are:
My advice for new self-hosters would be to understand the basics of terminal, networking and Linux as a lot of issues come down to those things. I'd also recommend opting for containerization (Docker and the like) as it makes stuff smoother.
I self host Coolify as my main service. It trivializes a lot and gives you solid control but one can choose what they prefer.
Some services to self-host:
1. Umami - Analytics
2. rTorrent + ruTorrent - Torrenting
3. Uptime Kuma - Uptime
4. Wireguard + WireGuard Easy
5. Hiddify and similar
6. Calibre
7. NextCloud, PhotoPrism
This is where a service like Coolify and dockerization are handy because if something goes wrong you can easily delete/restart. There are many similar ones e.g. Dokploy.
Self host on a home server and self host on VPS is different...
Self host on home server? Not for me. Stability may suffer when dogs and kids are present
Self host on VPS? Yes for sure. I have Vaultwarden, E-mail, Seafile, Plex, Notes... a lot of stuff hosted by several providers here...
Self-hosting in this context seems to refer to hosting at your home on your own machines using your ISP’s internet connection. I think the latter is called “unmanaged server.”
Use big providers for production (because they have proper block storage encryption) then backup your prod servers with borg/restic to LET Providers.
Jellyfin has always been horse shit. It's ridiculous that it didn't support parallel scanning until last year.
The open-source world is missing good Movie/TV app, like Stash lightweight fast and simple
While this is partly true - as self-hosting doesn't necessarily mean that you phisically host it at your home - I'd also argue that having physical control and access to your own data outweighs whatever minor electricity cost it has.
I think a year ago I actually had a mini pc as my server at home, and connected it to my BuyVM luxembourg horse cock dmca ignored VPS via wireguard. The only reason why I went back to using cloud is because I was a bit paranoid about it running all day and maybe catching fire, you never know.
For me, I self-host Vaultwarden and Nextcloud, haven't felt the need for anything else. Everything is backed up daily as well.
i selfhost a lot.
i love using proxmox with lxc as they need little resources (shared kernel) but are easy to snapshop/backup/restore.
some of my fav projects are:
using docker compose also helps (you can setup docker on an lxc) and making sure you have a clear structure which apps stores its files where is helpful. docker makes it easy to setup without having to worry about dependencies and stuff and almost everything has a docker container. also make sure you have backups and your stuff is protected (crowdsec, cloudflare tunnels, pangolin etc.)
Place small explosive dynamite that you get from 4th of July that cost less than $2 in the machine that needs all this privacy. This way if anyone breaks into PC, data is secure.
I mean you are already securing so much, why not take the next step.
You are the winner in the end. -$money that you spent on machine.
what
What? Lot's of people who seek privacy have stuff they don't want being shared with people at all.
For Example, Like intimate moments with loved ones, etc...
If a thief breaks into your home, that private stuff is no longer private.
IDK, maybe it's just me, but where I live in Arkansas, US. There has been a large increase in home break-ins.
Very nice idea. For extra peace of mind, get enough to blow up the whole basement.
I'm self-hosting Snikket (XMPP Server based on Prosody iirc). Works fine
There is a popular sentiment about self-hosting email. Have been doing it successfully for the past 5 years no issues. However, I do understand why people are saying this. Otherwise, I have replaced most services with self-hosted alternatives and I love it. On the other hand, remember that +1 instance means more maintenance, backups etc.
You probably got lucky with a clean IP address. The only email self-hosting I do is for a receive-only inbox, which I use on a throwaway domain to make an infinite number of disposable/throwaway email addresses.
I've never sent email on a self-hosted email inbox, and thankfully MXRoute will never require me to do so.
Probably but this is doable.
I have got an account with them as well, great product. But I use them as relay, so storing emails on my server. Another option to self-host.
I used to selfhost extensively around 5 years ago but nowadays with age, life etc the enjoyment dwindled down so most are on the cloud now. I do try to keep portable backups though in case of shit hits the bed, getting banned etc etc, risk of using someone else computer.
I still have an adguardhome on a remote vps currently.
+1 for this.. Im using HestiaCP +noez gre for hosting my mail at home and MxRoute as relay.
It is completely fine, the only problem for small setups is deliverability, but easily fixed with external services offering relayhost
Being able to see all emails that someone tries to send you is a feature almost none (or literally no) services are able to offer.
Btw how much emails do you send on average a day? From my experience, unless you do some outbound consistently, you will face issues with your messages being delivered to spam.
I maintain a few email servers and I do few thousand emails a day consistently, and haven't had any problems with big ESPs for two years. Previously I used to run small personal email server having deliverability issues, but it had only 30 emails a month at most, so I am not surprised at all.
Not a lot, probably less than 30 per month.
I self-host everything except emails and the best advice I can give you is learn Docker and configure a Mesh VPN, (Tailscale/ZeroTier or whatever), because that will simplify your deployments and ease connecting things.
This is a good list of services you can try deploying: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Haha, I'm not the only one then. This was the main concern I had when I explored this route and didn't bother for that reason.
Preferred to pay and let someone else deal with that.
I posted around about it and people kept assuring me that even if it caught fire, on a hardwood floor, which I had at the time, not much would happen.
If there was a huge benefit to doing it I might have tried but since the price was the same or cheaper for a vps there was very little point and so opted for having the peace of mind of having the server/s remote.
Well it is not fine from what I was advised when looking into this. The main problem that I read is that if you self host you will be marked as spam for any outgoing email and it is very hard to overcome that.
is privacy enthusiast a euphemism for virgin
confirm it
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where is your gay video collection hosted then? is it so hot you were worried about it catching fire?
docker compose makes it easy nowadays to set up services in literally seconds however I can't guarantee you won't need to spend a few days troubleshooting stuff.
However it's still much easier than it was without docker.
I'm self-hosting a lot of stuff currently, mostly things people discussed here already.
Other than that - I really like immich as google photos alternative. It became really polished lately.
I tried bitwarden (vaultwarden) but found it bit too complex and personally I don't have a need for it.
I had my keepass synced with syncthing for years and it works just as well.
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