What I self-host

I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For several years I ran MythTV, then XBMC (later known as Kodi).

Recently, I lived for a few years in India, where streaming services are extremely inexpensive by western standards. We had Netflix, Disney Plus (Hotstar in India), and Spotify. After leaving India, I was unwilling to pay western prices for these services. But I had also become fed up with the engagement treadmill, particularly for my son. We wanted to limit his viewing choices to certain programming, but the constant “recommended for you” and “up next” caused conflict. While there are ways to limit content to specific titles, or disable auto-play, doing this for each service and keeping track of when client applications change and need to be reconfigured is too much work.

So, I “cut the cord” in a different sense, ditching streaming services for self-hosted Jellyfin. Over the course of the next year and a half, Jellyfin opened the door to self-hosting many other services, reducing my dependence on cloud service providers, and providing a welcome stability. No longer am I constantly confronted with unnecessary site redesigns, new features of questionable value, and a barrage of e-mails about terms-of-service updates, binding arbitration, data breaches, etc. I read the release notes of new versions of the software I host and decide if and when I want to upgrade.

With the exception of VPN servers that run on my router, I do not expose any services directly to the public internet. I don’t care how convenient it would be, or how secure an application is. Especially with AI-assisted hacking, I simply don’t think it’s wise. My ISP also uses CGNAT for its IPv4 addresses, so my home network is not directly reachable from the public internet via IPv4. My VPN servers are only publicly routable on IPv6, a limitation that has some downsides but is workable for my use cases, and likely helps limit unfriendly attempted connections. The biggest downside is that my VPN will almost never function on a public Wifi network, since these rarely offer IPv6. When using my phone, I can disable Wi-Fi and connect over mobile data… if there is service.

I prefer running services natively when possible, but will containerize complex services or those with many dependencies. Love: a service that’s a single Go binary. A service that only comes as a Docker compose file and wants to run MySQL, Redis, and three other containers? I’m already looking for an alternative. If the dependencies aren’t overwhelming, native is better, faster, and more efficient. I can use the same management tools and commands across multiple services. There’s no mental overhead of having to get into this container to run some command, finding out this container is missing curl, that one runs busybox so all the arguments are different, or dealing with a virtual network and host port mapping.

Related, I don’t do Docker anymore. It’s not really a principled position, but I grew tired of having to manage a completely separate service control system on my server. I’m already using systemd, and at this point Podman’s integration with systemd is excellent.

Last year I bought a Beelink Mini PC, specifically an S12 Pro with an Intel N100 processor, 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB internal SSD. It was before the rampocalypse, so I paid EUR 180. The same listing on Amazon is currently EUR 359. Ouch! Attached to the server is a 6 TB hard drive for media storage.

My comment on Hacker News about what I self-host prompted some questions about how all of this could run on 16 GB RAM. As I describe below, there are some choices I’ve made that reduce resource demand on my server, but ultimately it turns out you don’t need much hardware to run a lot of stuff. Obviously I’m not running any local inference on this hardware, but for everything non-AI, it has just worked out of the box, or with some simple configuration tweaks.

Budgeting software with desktop clients and a web application, custom reports, and rules-based categorization. I only use this for budgeting and checking/savings/credit accounts. For tracking investment accounts, I use a cloud service. Some day I’ll try to move away from the latter…

While Actual Budget supports automatic transaction import from various banks, I don’t use this feature. Instead, after each month end, I download the prior month’s transactions (OFX format preferred, CSV if no other option) and import them manually. This works for me because I primarily use Actual Budget for expense tracking, not… actual… budgeting.

Add, download and store audiobooks and podcasts on your server, listen to them on your phone. I haven’t used the audiobook feature much, I set it up more for my kids, but it has very nice chapter handling. In the past for podcasts I used PlayerFM, then Pocket Casts, but now unless I’m out of the house without VPN connectivity, I use Audiobookshelf.

ARM automates ripping and transcoding DVDs (and Blu-rays, but I don’t do those). Yes, it’s 2026 and I still rip DVDs. Remember, we cut the cord, so not only is this a conduit for new-to-us content, but it’s also a way for us to get bilingual content (English and French).

Web UI for Restic backup software. Backups are important! Especially for Immich (photos). Restic does a good job deduplicating and compressing backed up data, and Backrest makes it easy to manage the storage retention policies. Notifications in case of failure go to Gotify.

Beszel is a simple monitoring dashboard that collects basic stats from agents (in the old-fashioned sense of a small background service) to display CPU load, memory and disk usage, temperature, battery, etc. Helps me keep an eye on various other hosts I have around the house (several Rapsberry Pis and a Proxmox cluster that may be the subject of a future post).

Caddy is a web server and reverse proxy. Early on I didn’t understand the value of a reverse proxy, and I thought I would be fine accessing my services with a local DNS name, or even IP address, and port number. But then I started adding more and more services, and some required HTTPS. So I got a domain name (not this one) and set up Caddy to automatically obtain LetsEncrypt SSL certificates, and now nearly all of my services are accessible on my LAN (or over VPN) with HTTPS and friendly subdomain names. Adding a new service is a quick edit to the Caddyfile.

Cockpit is a web-based admin console for the server. It uses normal system authentication methods. For me, it’s mainly useful for spotting failed services when no notifications are set up for them.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, and deploys as a single binary. Github’s uptime is the butt of a lot of jokes these days, but I also appreciate the speed of having my own git remote. Eventually I’ll set up CI/CD and runners, if only to deploy this blog.

Network video recorder (NVR). I first started with Zoneminder because I’m of a certain age. But it became clear that Zoneminder is past its prime. Frigate has been fantastic. I run it with 8 IP cameras. It provides alerts for people and cars entering the driveway, integrates with Home Assistant to power various automations (e.g., when a person is detected in the backyard, turn on the camera floodlight). I may write a future post with some details about my IP camera adventures.

I run all of my cameras at lower resolutions than they support, primarily to avoid Wi-Fi network congestion. Most cameras also support an even lower-resolution RTSP substream, which is what Frigate uses for motion and object detection. Keeping the camera resolutions low avoids excessive CPU and memory from video processing, and excessive disk usage from recordings. They are good enough to identify faces, and privacy laws in my country prohibit filming public rights of way, so my cameras are not aimed at distant points.

Subsonic-compatible server written in Go. I purchased a perpetual Subsonic license a long time ago, but the original project is ancient and the modern alternatives are better. I run two separate instances of Gonic, one serves kid music, the other serves adult music.

Simple notification service written in Go. Many self-hosted services directly support Gotify notifications, or can send them via a custom HTTP POST. In conjunction with Uptime Kuma, I use Gotify to get notifications about any services or devices that are down, what my kids are watching on Jellyfin, when a new podcast episode is available in Audiobookshelf, etc.

Home Assistant probably deserves its own post. It’s fantastic, and I cannot imagine trying to accomplish the same things within a proprietary ecosystem like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Apple Home. Things are better now that device manufacturers are standardizing on protocols like Matter, but the control and flexibility you get with Home Assistant is hard to beat. It has a steep learning curve, though, and I need to think about realistic ways to handle potential server failure without compromising the functionality of my home.

At some point I realized I was running so many services, I needed another service just to keep track of them all. Homepage was a good solution. It has widgets for almost all the services I run, so I can get a quick overview of what’s going on, or just a quick link to the subdomain of a service.

Google Photos alternative. I was tired of Google constantly promoting paid storage plans in their apps. I was able to manage my storage space, but my wife was always about to run out of room. We moved to Immich last year, just after version 2 was released. It’s much faster to load pages full of photos when all the network activity is within your house. I’ve come up with a solution for sharing albums with family, as well. Still a lot of work to do with Immich - I have many duplicates, and now that storage isn’t a concern, I’ve been less disciplined about culling photos and videos.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I’ve self-hosted media for a long time, going all the way back to MythTV twenty-some years ago. Jellyfin is opinionated about its media organization, but it generally works well. I only use it for movies, TV, and home videos, so I can’t speak to its other features (e-books, music, photos, etc.). While my son still remembers Netflix, he is satisfied with Jellyfin. I appreciate the lack of auto-play, never seeing recommendations, and not having to scroll past a bunch of garbage to find what I want to watch.

One of my ways of managing resource demand is by generally preferring 720p media over 1080p or higher. And obviously when ripping DVDs, it’s either 576p or 480p. I do have a 4k TV, but it’s not extremely large, and while I can tell the difference in resolution between SD and HD, for almost everything, 720p seems to be good enough for me.

Sometimes there are solutions that just work, and don’t really need to change. I think MPD is one of these. It’s been around for 23 years. While Gonic is great for listening to music on my phone, even streaming music from home to my phone while I’m away via VPN, MPD is how I play music through Snapcast to the whole house audio system. I run two instances of MPD, one for music, and one for podcasts.

I used to keep track of transactions and receipts for special accounts (HSA, 529, etc.) in a SQLite file I accessed directly with SQL Workbench/J. But things became more complicated as I moved between countries, currencies, and different insurance systems, and also wanted to offer