Self-Hosted Main

This is like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don't really need to involve other people in my life.

Also, cost. If I want 18 TB of data accessible from my phone or someone else’s house, how would you do that and not cost a ton of money? I can repurpose old thin clients and I needed the space anyway, so yeah.

because this is the next best thing to Wizardry. I can make something from nothing. Well except for the hardware, thats something, something we all love to tinker with

It's mostly about syncing data between your different devices, without having to use a cloud service. I want to be able to organize the budget on my PC and look it up on my phone for example, without having to keep my PC running or manually sync them.

Another aspect is backups and redundancy. My NAS has all my data, and it does an encrypted cloud backup every night. I don't have to remember that or make sure it gets the latest changes, because it's always running and always up to date.

It's also just a fun little hobby to tinker with it and figure things out.

I have hardware laying around i decide to put to use. In the 3rd world a chatgpt subscription is the equivalent of $100 a month for very little benefit. Instead of queueing and using other people's free resources better to use my own. There are also other reasons like backup strategy using cloud, NAS and archives which require your own hardware. A 1U chassis can fit a chinese recycled board with decent specs, a gpu and 4 hot swap drives cheap. Does decently if you pair with good network hardware so you only wake it up when needed. I use mikrotik for networking. Ive come to a point where my skills are good and paying for the cloud is a big waste.

Google recently had several cases of - which looks to be a developing situation - user personal data losses in the google drive side of operations

Thats right, the SaaS infrastructure that is based on storing user data on a cloud system lost about months of user data

Netflix recently also starting pulling toxic, egregious changes such that its basically insulting to people giving money to them

Look at Nextcloud for example. You can have a Google Drive alternative without google having any of your files. For some people it's more important for others less. You also get more control of what you can do with it (for example add plugins etc.). It just depends on how you want to live your life. For example you can just create a Google account and have everything setup for you, or you can selfhost something like NC and setup everything your way.

Most people want services to be synced across devices. Using the budget app example, I just couldn't possibly do all of my budget tasks from my phone alone. It's too limited of a screen size and not all features are available within the app.

It's an evolution of services and data , those who can, self host. Those who don't self host, can - we don't discriminate here 😉

All views in this post are of my own even though they are hosted on Reddit servers subscriptions sold separately & Batteries not included.

It’s for that hit of dopamine every time I get an application to work.

mainly because its my nerdy hobby .

plus i like the feeling of owning my own data

and learning new stuff

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and it also is quite handy to just have a server to test if somthing is usefull to you self

and can sometimes save you a little money .as you can host multiple things on one server

instead of having to pay for multiple comercial services

at the cost of your own time

The main advantages for me are learning and data.

For instance, with the budgeting app (Firefly 3) I learned a lot more about banks and the data available to third parties (and myself). I also have a lot of data about my consumption behaviour and I can use excel or AI, if I want, to do clever stuff with my data and take better decisions.

• easy to use with multiple people
• easier to manage for multiple people
• easier to backup (since you don't need to do backups per device)
• less hassle when you switch personal devices (or reinstall a laptop for ex.)
• You own your data (instead of a mega corp.)
• Less dependent on internet connectivity*, power outages*
• Its a nice challenge
• Its fun (some of us like the self inflicted pain that comes along with it ^sometimes)

*limited to outside factors like how much you actually self host and how much backup power you can store/generate.

You can host the data and/or the app that can be accessed cross-platform. If you're on someone else's PC be it linux, windows or mac you can pop open a browser and visit a url to access your app with the stored data. Or you could host the data and access it using the clients on multiple/different systems.

I'll add that sometimes the self-hosted version does something that the "official, paid"[1] version doesn't, or at the very least allows you to try to hack it together.

A problem with commercial offerings is that their idea of completed product is different than yours, and depending on the feature there's not enough $$$ incentive to pursue it. This is the major problem with Google, because search is such a ocean of income, that no other project will ever stand up to it.

[1] I say official because quite a few of self hosted versions are clones of some paid product.

Self hosted budget management app is like more advanced user stuff rather than the normal users would do. So hosting that kind of things might sound very weird to you, I get that.

But it is more like a tendency. Most users start their homelab with very basic services like storage management, video streaming, photos, or note taking. There is a huge steep learning curve to run all of them safely and robustly, but once you get over it and there is a wide and very flat area you literally can do anything whatever you want.

Budge management app is like that thing. Many of us wouldn't start hosting budge management app, but we will get there eventually. Because we can.

Because connectivity today matters, namely yes I want an "app" to work on my current device but what if I want to use on another device? Share with family, friends, colleagues or even a random stranger? Then arguably hosting the app with its data is the most logical way.

There's a number of reasons. I would guess for most people here it's really about control of their data, which is a form of privacy. Making sure it stays on their network (ie: in their control) unless they approve it to go somewhere else.

There can be financial reasons (eg: backing up 10s or hundreds of terabytes to the cloud can get expensive), practical reasons (poor Internet access, especially internationally), latency/performance reasons (home automation). Sometimes you'll also get better interoperability with selfhosted stuff since exporting data is usually trivial and there's no walled garden lockin. And that's not everything, just a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head.

But you're right that some of these are often not the case. It can easily become more expensive (depending on how you account for things), it's definitely more work & it's never as easy as "just install and app and create an account".

Finally we can't forget that a not insignificant number of people here are aspiring (or actual) sys admins. This is a GREAT way to learn the trade if that's your thing.

Learning by doing is the main example most people will selfhost things. For example why would you want to solve a puzzle if you can buy it ready made? Why building a statue of lego bricks and not buying the built statue? Because learning about something you like is fun and you gain experience from that which might be beneficial for your present or future job.

Also some consider data privacy more than others. With selfhosting you own your data and not the company behind it. Why should I make an account for a recipe app if I can selfhost it and not needing an account? Why sharing my private information with some random tech company?

There are a lot of things people want to accomplish by selfhosting.

Honestly I would say most of it’s just to do it because you can and also because you get experience in doing all these things that can translate to work. I would say I have a lot more container and virtual machine experience than majority of the people at my job and can explain it better than them.

> Can't you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?

The people who make that app, and host the servers that run it, they often like to get paid.

Not necessarily by you. Maybe they'll get paid by Google in exchange to allowing Google to show you ads in their app.

Maybe they sell the app, then, yeah, they're paid by you. Maybe some other thing. Like doing some statistics with everyone's data and selling the results.

Either way, they're working for you, but you're also working for them, in your own way.

Me, I work for myself. That's just how I roll. That's just how many of us roll. We enjoy the idea of being unaffected when the companies that own our services decides to hike its prices up, or punish users with an ad blocker. We like the idea that we'd be unaffected by a nuclear strike on the Silicon Valley, God forbid. We'll be sad and all, but our apps will still run.

Budget management app is not someone who starts with, its just oh i got a sever, i use a lot of other self hosted server, why not use a budget manager too.

Now is this better then app? of course!

1. now i can backup my data to 3 place

2. my parter dont need to install anything on there phone to see how much crap i am buying

3. i can automate things with n8n with my finance (i never did, but you can)

etc

I killed more PCs by stupidly placing my screwdriver (2) than by static discharge (0). And I opened, build and handled like 100 PCs in my 5 years of IT

I mainly host password, private sensible data, and photos on my own home server. That's it.

Selfhosting is a journey of motivation, frustration and learning.
Perks are: Appliable knowledge in the IT space and understanding of virtual concepts be it Software Stacks or Networking interactions, "offline" Data i.E. selfhosted and not under someone elses thumb/control/exposure

Since you have access to all data, you can basically do magic behind closed doors and reap the benefits.

Setting up a selfhosted Environment means you can pipe in offline ressources just aswell as share access to specific entities without handing the keys over to a 3rd party.

In the case of a budget management app - it's finances. Not everybody is cool with having their finances hosted in an app on a device that can crash or get stolen, we'd rather have access to it when we need and want, but still have that data when all my devices used to access it usually are gone.

i.e. when the Service Provider decides to shut down - this one aint. (shot at google)

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I've started with one ThinClient, then bought two more to cluster them up and experiment with HighAvailability and shared CEPH-Storage between the nodes for 10s Migrations of fullblown VMs.. then bought a Dell Workstation with Two Server CPUs and .. basically virtualized that ProxMox cluster within my ProxMox Baremetal Dell host.

With the knowledge i managed to gather in the last year alone, I'm able to setup a coherent Work Environment for 50+ People with reliable SSO and 2FA mechanisms, shared FAST storage with dedublication of files and continous nightly backups that get checked for validity and automatic pruning of old unneeded backups on - 1 external NAS + Cold Storage on a buddys Datacenter with 20TB of encrypted storage just for me.

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I basically have no care in the world for the data in my house at this point, since everything's backed up nightly.

I can restore from House fire by setting up a new host with ProxMox, mounting the network storage and restoring the NAS and BackupVM - then just clicking restore on everything..
Since the Services are all on a subnet that's managed virtually by a OPNSense VM and VPN is run on the ProxMox host, everything is drag and drop + Setup your own VPN Solution - if I ever want to gift someone my done work without the data, basically.

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Why do i NEED this?
To break the spiral of neccessairy skills and knowledge for 'entry level' jobs in technical positions and understanding behind security implications, proper troubleshooting, documentation and service culture i.e. there's so many technologies i'm somehwat familiar with now, that I understand what others in the buisness world need of me to properly process errors, requests, whatever.

For me, it is a balance between what I am trying to accomplish and the time/energy/maintenance I am willing to put into accomplishing that thing.

I used to self-host a personal website on Wordpress, but now I farm that out to a static site hosting provider because I would rather spend the time building the website instead of spending the same time maintaining the hosting.

I self-host a kubernetes homelab environment because that is a personal investment in skill that i don't want to pay exorbitant cloud prices for.

For me selfhosting is all about privacy and rights on your data. If you can host it, you are responsible for the data and the only one (theoretically) able to read it.

Data is my answer most of the time. Here are some books recommendations.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Afterlives of Data

Black Box Society

Revolutionary Mathematics

Privacy

Because the government will use my data to train the AI overlords.

Also because i can and enjoy running my own services and infra. Helps me land a better job and expand my skills

My primary purpose was to host my own music server. Have tonnes od CDs and what not and ripped them all onto a media server. This then evolved to Navidrome, then Airsonic. It's like having your own, private Spotify. More music you add, woot.

Then, I wanted my DVD/Blueray collection on a server. A simple HTTP server hosts these, and Kodi both accesses them, and offers them up via uPnP for local hosts.

Then there are backups. A small NAS for these. Samba, SFTP, FTPS and even HTTP(s) upload capabilities.

Then using the web server to host some HTML generated from say Cron, to show stats of stuff.

The a logcat server. So everything can log to a central place.

An internal mail server, so local hosts can email their logs to the central logger. Weird some can email, but not syslog.

Then some influxdb to offload metrics from routers and hosts. Then a pretty dashboard from Chronograph and what not.

Everything else after, is just gravy.

Wait, you mean not every one runs a hypervisor at their house with 15 - 20 guest using more technology than most small businesses? 😂

Short answer, it’s just fun!