Self-hosting
A few years ago, I was convinced by a friend to get a NAS. They showed me how they used it to store his music library and their photos and back up their computers. I don’t do photography, but having my local music library on a server that I could access from any of my devices was very intriguing. And as a bonus, I’d have a backup server for all my computers.
Turns out, these things ain’t cheap. I ended up buying it, initially, with only two disks to limit my costs. After playing with it, I started to see all the possibilities and things I could do with this new toy. There are so many open-source tools that you can self-host.
Need something to track your finances? Self-host it. Media center? Self-host it. E-mail? It may be possible; I wish you good luck! Jokes apart, I’ve moved many of the online services I used, most of them paid, to a self-hosted one. With a little bit of effort, it is not only possible to reduce costs but increase your privacy. You own your data, and that’s something I value a lot.
Here is a list of the things I’m currently self-hosting, and I hope to expand this list soon. I plan to write a post with more details for some of these.
- Firefly III, to keep track of my expenses. In the past I’ve used YNAB, and although Firefly III does not follow the same philosophy, it took little time to adjust.
- Miniflux as my feed reader.
- Linkding replaces Pinboard as my bookmark manager.
- I use Plex as my media server. Granted it is a paid service, but you can self-host it, and the [Plexamp][pleramp] is neat.
- Taiga is a pretty cool product management tool that I use for my personal projects, and it makes me dislike Jira even more.
- And from the same folks that make Taiga, there’s Penpot, which replaced Sketch.
Other tools that are worth mentioning are LanguageTool, wger, Resilio Sync Home, Learning With Texts and ollama-webui.
There’s a lot more I want self-host; here are a few things from the top of my head: blog, books (epub), password manager, SCM (Git, Fossil, etc.), music scrobbler, analytics tool, and so on. If I got you curious, check the Awesome-Selfhosted list to find the right tool for you.