Self-Hosted Main
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
For Example
- Service: Dropbox - Alternative: Nextcloud
- Service: Google Reader - Alternative: Tiny Tiny RSS
- Service: Blogger - Alternative: WordPress
We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
Useful Lists
- Awesome-Selfhosted List of Software
- Awesome-Sysadmin List of Software
Holy Shit and WOW! Very nice. So glad to find this. Thank you so much!
No problem, I thought there was an awesome list of awesome GitHub’s lists but can’t find it. There are multiple “awesome” lists, like awesome-docker, awesome-web-archiving and more!
I'm just going to save this comment and thank you now. Thanks!
I'd focus more on the infrastructure instead of choosing what apps to run if you want to improve your knowledge. Running an application is easy. Automation, security, observability, etc. is the hard part.
Learn about Ansible, Terraform, GitOps, backup solutions, logging, network security, etc.
If you're happy with those services ... maybe you shouldn't?
I self-host because I prefer to house my data locally when possible. It's easier for backups and I'm not subject to the whims and financial decisions made by a company about whether their service will remain available, what it will cost, what functions it will offer. The tradeoff is work on my part, but I enjoy tinkering and learning.
In my case, I self-host a NextCloud instance for remote access to my docs, a Calibre Web server for eBooks (and to share those with a few trusted friends), a Vaultwarden instance because I'd prefer my vaults not be stored by a company whose servers are likely a major target for bad actors and that could change its TOS or offerings in the future.
Network wide Adblock, using pi hole or AdGuard home
And another one too lazy to even use the search, let alone look at the sidebar.
And of course, look at the subreddit sidebar, find the awesome-selfhosted list and work your way through that. There is also a big fat sticky "Please read this first" thread that you ignored.
If you do this as a learning experiment, then I'd suggest you self host even those you don't need and see if you can get to a quality of service similar to those services you pay for.
Self hosting is en mostly about keeping control of your data, paying capex instead of opex and having something to play/learn with. If you don't need any of those you probably don't wanna self host tbf.
Lots of people here have quite a large media collection and storage costs can addup pretty quick in opex. I basically have 15TB of media in Jellyfin so just imagine the cost of that in public cloud.
Gaming server? VPN? File-sharing?
You can start by getting out of reddit and hosting your own Lemmy instance. :)
Plex/sonarr/radarr
How much are you paying for Google storage? I have terabytes of photos and video, not a teeny 15 GB. Google ended unlimited photos about 2-3 years ago. Where have you been?
Bitwarden is annoying when they are down and as a personal account that’s one thing but it’s not free if you share a family group vault.
May want to look seriously at Pihole. Lots of other things like nocodb, excalidraw, private VPN (Tailscale). Also I’m an engineer so I have thousands of documents. I convert the raw PDFs with the OCR/PDF utility then Sist2 can search them in like 2 seconds. No way to do it manually. Been collecting since 1989 and a lot of stuff doesn’t exist outside my files. There is NO equivalent.
Plus when I run Google Photos on my phone, Google grabs my photos, location, and number and delivers it to every criminal spam/scam system in India. Within minutes I get spam calls. They can go fuck themselves.
Well bro, I just learnt the basics of docker by setting up a bunch of containers and giving it a front end with Homarr, learnt about SSL's and reverse proxies with nginx, letsencrypt, and duckdns.
The services/containers I'm running are: -FreshRSS -Syncthing -NextCloud -VSCode -Trillium -JellyFin -AdGuard -Qbitorrent
This was quite the process but if the uni-style workflows are successfully implemented. It is very worth it. Even just to learn or suppliment your knowledge.
Well, YMMV may vary and seems to from the above. But for me self-hosting, especially on home machines, is largely about privacy and reduced cost as well as learning. Google in particular will hover up all data possible and profile you to hell and back selling the results. I used to use Dropbox and a higher price plan to get their [dubious] encryption and so on until I realized I could meet all my needs and more data across multiple machines with a NAS or NFS among other solutions.
Hosting only *arr is not the one who insist himself loves to learn definitely..You are just a random guy who does not care about learning and tech at all.
If you really love to learn then you can literally self host anything. You just don't love it that much.