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.
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I host:
Probably forgot some..
Chad.
Do you host on at your house, a VPS or something else?
All on Hetzner.
Thanks for #rexxit destination!
My long and mostly complete list:
These services are the result of years of development and administrating my lab and while there is still some cruft, it's mostly services that I think have real utility.
As far as hardware:
Running pfsense on a toughbook laptop as a router-firewall.
A SuperMicro 24 bay disk-shelf with Proxmox and ZFS for NAS duties and a couple services.
Lenovo Tiny boxes with a Proxmox cluster for the majority of my local services.
Dell managed switch
A few Raspberry-pi's with Raspbian for various things.
Linksys AP for wifi
Edit: Spelling is hard.
Mind blown! Thanks so much for the comprehensive list!! 🙏
Did you get a dual nic in the laptop router, or how did you work it?
It's an older Panasonic ToughBook CF-C2 with an ExpressCard34 slot I'd say circa 2013. I have a gigabit Ethernet adapter jammed in there for WAN. I've been using the setup for maybe 8 years and it's been ultra reliable for me.
Expresscards are an underrated feature of old laptops as a server.
That is impressive. For the sake of curiosity, do you have any photos or diagrams you could share?
Hmmm. I don't have a network/infrastructure diagram or anything yet, but I've been meaning to create one. I'll probably put one together and post more about my setup if there's any interest. I'll be sure to tag you when I do. Thanks for the interest!
Oh my jesus, does this thread really have 400+ comments
Edit: respectfully as an atheist
Yep, people are enthusiastic about self hosting and like talking about what they host :)
And talk about it on a self-hostable platform, no less.
Currently all LAN only, still in the experimental stage finding out what's useful/preferable to me and what I want to keep:
KEEPING
Pi-Hole - ad/malware/tracker blocking
Portainer - Easy Docker
Syncthing - Sync folders between devices
Planka - Kanban board
I.T. Tools - Handy I.T. Tools
Bookstack - Personal documentation
Mealie - Recipe manager/meal planner
Jellyfin + usual accompaniments - Media Management
Navidrome - Music library
Changedetection - Stock monitoring
Gotify - For push notifications from other apps
Filebrowser
That Word Game ;)
UNDECIDED (may swap for alternatives or just remove)
Organizr - Homepage
Jump - Homepage
Homepage - Yup, another homepage!
Linkding - Bookmarks
Shiori - Pocket replacement
Etebase - CalDAV & CardDAV
Whoogle - Google without the crap
Photoprism - Photo management
Libreddit (not being used now!)
QBittorrent - for Linux ISOs
Uptime-Kuma (for when I do open a few services to family)
Ryot (beta) "Roll Your Own Tracker" - Media Tracker
PLANNING TO ADD
Reverse-proxying (likely NPM) + Security (Fail2Ban, Autheilia?)
Audiobooks
Comic book management
Translation service
Document manager
Home Assistant on its own Pi4 when I can get hold of one
As an offensive security worker.... I can't help but read people listing out their attack surface 😂
Nah, it's all safe, it's in containers
I run my own kubernetes cluster in 3 thinkcentres I bougth for cheap. Each of them has a proxmox and an ubuntu with k3s on top of it. The storage is an NFS I run from a good old qnap.
https://files.catbox.moe/8w2e7y.png
I used to have an irc bouncer too but I didn't use it enough.
My short term plans are adding tdarr and transmission.
On 3 Rpis and a NAS around my home:
Nextcloud - Google replacement
Actual Budget - YNAB type server that's super simple and meets my needs
Apache web server - portal to my projects
PiHole - DNS pass/allow list
PiVPN - Allows me to connect to my home VPN when abroad
2009Scape - A little RuneScape Private Server I turn on and off on my desktop when I'd like to afk at work
Docker - A couple docker instances - one on my test pi I use to roll out onto my "prod" servers
Backup server - 14TB backup with an offsite copy :D
Joplin - Note-taking app - barely a server connected through Nextcloud
Plex - Everyone knows about Plex - I'm thinking of switching to JellyFin
rtorrent - kinda old-school compared to the *arr programs but I enjoy manually downloading all my media :)
Hope I'm not forgetting any!
I use TrueNAS Scale for my NAS and Ubuntu server for my VM's/home server. I probably am forgetting something, but, that's what's listed in my Portainer :).
How has Scale been on Linux vs BSD? Any complaints or plug-in compatibility issues?
I would go back if it was easy. The speed difference from just getting a listing of contents in a large directory over SMB is insane. It used to be instant and it takes like 10-15 seconds now. I'm not even using their app setup anymore, I gave up on it after a while because of a bunch of random issues with updates over time and switched to a dedicated box with Portainer installed. I really wish I could go back to core.
I'm sure they'll iron everything out but BSD is still king at the moment.
That’s disappointing, thanks for the info. I had hoped with OpenZFS things would be improved, but sounds like native Linux performance just isn’t there yet.
That’s disappointing, thanks for the info. I had hoped with OpenZFS things would be improved, but sounds like native Linux performance just isn’t there yet.
Most of this stuff runs on my server at home (ASRock J4105-ITX, 8 GB RAM , 250 GB SSD, 18 TB HDD). The mail server and the blog run on a cheap VPS (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD). Both servers run NixOS.
36 TB server:
Raspberry pi:
I'm actually not that into actual self-hosting (it feels too close to my day job). But i love the idea of it, and actually do host my own RSS Reader: It's selfoss (PHP + SQLite, so, very simple) and i have been using ever since google reader shut down. It runs on my uberspace.de instance.
Got 2 24/7 runners in my home:
In addition, I'm hosting a couple of Wireguard VPS in the US and a Nordic country to give me access to regional content (I pay for a few regional services through friends living there - i.e. they pay monthly and I pay them yearly for an account on a region-locked service) - not sure if that counts as "self-hosting" :)
This assortment is run under a combination of Proxmox LXC containers, docker containers, and Yunohost. Mostly I use it to play around, but most are heavily used by my wife and I. I'm planning to rebuild everything and making things more "official". Looking to convert from a "lab" to actually making it "production" with solid failure routes and backups. I am looking to move anything currently under Yunohost to docker/lxc and to start making use of podman. Recently saw CosmOS and think it might be a good alternative to portainer.
Hardware:
You're doing that as a full-time job, right?
LOL
No, just a hobby. Been playing around for about a year. It started small with an old mac mini and Yunohost. Then I decided to play with Proxmox and bought a used m93p. Then I read about Proxmox clusters, so I got another m93p. I was going to use the mac mini in the cluster, but it was getting too slow, so I bought the Brix. Then I decided to migrate the Yunohost setup over to a VM in Proxmox. Then I figured I should learn a bit about docker. And it spiraled.
I spend maybe 10-12 hours a month on installation and configuration. I spend way more time using it. A couple of weeks ago I spent about 15 hours over the weekend importing/uploading my audiobooks into AudioBookShelf. Last year I spent several weekends getting my Calibre library in shape and moving it to the web.
I figure this is a much cheaper and safer hobby than drinking.
Pretty much anything I can. Host OS is mostly Debian with Docker, only the Git Server is running on Alpine. Hardware-wise everything is running on Proxmox with an FreeBSD NAS for backup and data storing
VFIO KVM/ QEMU GPU passthrough for Windows VM for Solidworks. A forked program that I've turned into something completely different, I took some random http server from github and made it convert PDFs to Excel, linked it to my website so it can be used. Got a small network share for all the movies I've got which is kinda a lot Made a VM with a dedicated nic for managing my websites
Everything is on One PC, got 4 more systems that have no purpose and are there if this one dies so I have reserve. Any ideas on how to repurpose them? Also on todo list is an self hosted mail server that I'm yet to do because of domain issues. They are expensive lol
Unraid (3700X, 16GB 3200 Mhz RAM, NVIDIA Quadro P2000 Graphics Card, 7x14TB Hard Drives):
Currently running on an old HP Prodesk G2 with Debian 11:
Plus grafana and prometheus for monitoring, although I haven't fully configured them so they're not terribly useful at the moment.
All are running as rootless docker containers. I've considered switching back to normal rooted containers, since there are some oddities with file permissions and networking (e.g., pihole only sees one client IP address).
All data is backed up to BackBlaze B2 via restic.
Home server is currently running;
All the above are running in Docker.
On the to-do list;
A full setup around managing and download multimedia content
Oh jeez... there's quite the list. I have a Ceph cluster of 3 nodes with 15x HDD's and 3 SSD's... on that cluster I run some VM's that in turn run a Docker swarm. All Ubuntu 22.04, all commodity hardware. Currently I'm running;
Then there's a whole host of ancillary services; BackupPC, Unifi controller container, piHole on a couple of Raspberry Pi's, ts-dnsserver for internal DNS management... probably a dozen other containers and tools I'm forgetting.
Oh yeah, and a Synology NAS as a backup target :)
What's it like hosting your own mail? Been considering it for a while but Gmail features/spam filter/deliverability has been tough to beat.
This is my little setup at work
Kubernetes cluster (created by kubespray)
I have proxmox running on PC in my closet. So far not a ton of things hosted on it:
Current:
Planned:
If you're open to things similar to Plex, I'd recommend Jellyfin! Plex has been making some decisions lately that aren't necessarily selfhoster friendly. A selfhosted instance of Plex still authenticates using Plex's central servers (if you're internet is out or Plex is down and you want to stream your own movies or shows, that won't work due to failed authentication). That's compared to your Jellyfin instance handling authentication locally. If you can contact your server, you can watch your media. Plex has also announced a credit skipping feature, uploading credit timing to their central servers that can be restored on complete rebuild. While they say it's anonymous, they need some way to associate you and the proper credit timings, to send that back to you.
Jellyfin is earlier days in development, and you should check to see what clients are available to see if that would work with your hardware. But Jellyfin is definitely catching up, I've been very happy with their server and applications.
I've been running Arch Linux on a Gigabyte Brix with two USB HDDs for... years now. At least 8. On and off, there were several services, but mostly, this device is meant to host
Since Arch Linux is rolling, it sometimes simply breaks after an update. But since the services have gotten more critical for me over time (especially plex :) ) I plan on putting some of the services to a host in the cloud behind a WireGuard VPN. Also, the Brix should be re-installed with Ubuntu or Debian some day.
Jellyfin for media
Miniflux RSS reader
Home assistant
Pihole
OpenMediaVault for NAS
Kavita for ebooks
Portainer
NginxProxyManager
It's all kind of a mess, but I like it
PiHole on Pi
Tiny Tiny RSS on Docker behind NGINX reverse proxy on Ubuntu Hosted VPS - Accessed through Tailscale
LinkAce on Docker NGINX reverse proxy on Ubuntu Hosted VPS, Accessed through Tailscale
NextCloud on Pi - Accessed through Tailscale
HomeAssistant on Ubuntu
Calibre running on Ubuntu
Windows Desktops running on Hyper-V Server (Cost and extreme time constraints forced me to setup a Hyper-V server on bare metal, at the time VMWare was not playing nice with Win11 and I did not have the time to troubleshoot).
These days I just got a plex server and a project zomboid server running.
