People twist themselves into a knot talking about AI as the future. Its more of a bubble waiting to pop. Self hosting is the real disruptive future.
The hardware to accomplish most things that we rely on from cloud vendors is absolutely trivial. My own home server is a used super cheap and tiny machine. The hard disks don't even fit in the box and yet it has plenty of CPU and memory to spare.
The software is getting easier to configure year after year eventually creeping to the point where elderly people too lost to use a remote will be running this stuff. The real challenge will be solving for easy access to private networks from public spaces across the internet. Right now everybody seems to be centering on vendor solutions like TailScale for this.
Self hosting has never been easier and I imagine the average person has never been further from trying it. No one will ever get anywhere close to hosting this much sruff
I self host (I have a large overlap with the services in TFA), and love it. I will never go back and think that more people should self host (or at least...join small groups of people who designate one person to manage it for a small number of people).
And believing that the current AI economy might have a period of rapid devaluation in the near future is pretty reasonable. But, much like the original .com bubble, the idea that AI as a technology will not survive and thrive through such a pop, and become an ever more important part of our future, is a belief that I can't comprehend. Anthropic and OpenAI very well may go belly up. AI as a technology isn't going anywhere.
And as much as I'd like to believe that more people may self host more things in the future, self hosting will never, even if it was adopted by literally everyone, become as big a deal as AI, even if AI hit a wall tomorrow and didn't get any better than the current frontier models.
> 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.
Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.
Some isolation is nice. I say some because I’m told it’s security is not to be trusted, but I still like that even a non nefarious binary has ootb boundaries on what state will persist.
for long-running services, I've never taken the time to learn something reliable like systemd. with Compose, I can see everything I need to know in one yml file and the commands to go with it. I also don't have to really understand any dependencies or their own configuration and can cleanly remove everything associated with that service with a few commands.
It’s the unified interface for me. Updates, logs, service management, network routing, config and storage mapping are all uniform and I don’t have to wrangle many slightly different implementations of each.
With some small systemd configs each native app is essentially a container these days. The overhead of unique kernels per app would really restrict what could fit on a small box like this
I stared self hosting in 2020 when Raspberry Pis were super cheap (not anymore :( ) and lots of things started becoming available in Docker. Haven't ever considered going back to the cloud. I love taking back full control.
After Google Assistant died I immediately installed Home Assistant on my old PC. Not as good, but at least it doesn't take 5 seconds to turn on a light like Gemini
I have been self hosting for over a decade and recently have seen more people in my circle doing that and I have been helping them.
At first it was hard but then i made it into a product. I am working on Tarvis.io which makes self hosting accessible to non technical users as well. It comes with installation assistant, ssl domains and backups inbuilt into it.
You can install open source apps from a catalog or drop any github repo and it installs and run it for you.
With Tarvis, I have been self hosting more since I am able to install and delete apps with one click, it makes it easy to try things.
Podman + systemd is how I run production workloads at work.
For us it's the perfect balance between simplicity, observability (Beszel) and reliability. Not the right tool if you have dynamic workloads but definitely the right tool for boring and predictable workloads.
At home I run K3S, it's awesome. It also breaks a lot and does add a whole bunch of complexity that I would only recommend if you enjoy tinkering and fixing things.
Docker containers are fine. I've moved between 5 NAS' over the years and docker has enabled it to be seemless.
rsync data directories. docker compose up. Done.
On the consumer or even prosumer nas products which have a semi-locked down system (ie Truenas/qnap/Synology). Technically you have root but as soon as you update the OS all/most of the changes end up being broken. Yes you could probably do something and deal with it. But personally I've spent too long babysitting it on the first and second nas that I no longer care.
I recently bought a Lenovo Mini PC (01Q8X10) for under £300 that has a Snapdragon X1 CPU (and 32GB LPDDR5 RAM!) and it's turning out to be perfect for self-hosting running the newly released WSL Containers on Windows 11 with WSL 3 (it doesn't fully support Linux yet). Podman had some issues with WSL 3 that they're still releasing fixes for, but it's all working with that too.
Good article. I have many of the same services in my setup.
Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary, but what you can do is mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync and use roundcube or some other frontend to view emails and compose.
I use this to easily access mail from different services, and I can also send from any of them.
I also have a seperate service that watches the mail directory and sends a ntfy.sh notification for new emails.
Heya, nice read. I’m wondering how you managed to get LetsEncrypt certs minted when your caddy isn’t exposed to the public internet. Doesn’t LetsEncrypt need to make a request back as part of the handshake to mint/refresh the certificate?
Would love to know as I wanted to do the same in the past and ended up self signing certs.
I've been building and self-hosting my own analytics platform[0] for 13+ years and never had any major issues with it.
The advantage is that if I do want a specific feature, I can just add it, and I am never worried about subscription limits or surprise charged, because I host it on a fixed-cost VPS.
Things don't really need maintenance and don't really break by themselves, the only time when they can sometimes break is when changing things.
You do need to have a proper setup though, for stuff like disk space alerts, knowing the common gotchas of disabling settings that can cause issues, etc.
Especially now when you can snap your fingers and get a semi responsible codified version. Heck just do what you want to them ask the LLM to port your work to something marginally better than a totally hand cobbled bucket of bits system.
austin-cheney | an hour ago
The hardware to accomplish most things that we rely on from cloud vendors is absolutely trivial. My own home server is a used super cheap and tiny machine. The hard disks don't even fit in the box and yet it has plenty of CPU and memory to spare.
The software is getting easier to configure year after year eventually creeping to the point where elderly people too lost to use a remote will be running this stuff. The real challenge will be solving for easy access to private networks from public spaces across the internet. Right now everybody seems to be centering on vendor solutions like TailScale for this.
mtoner23 | an hour ago
MostlyStable | an hour ago
And believing that the current AI economy might have a period of rapid devaluation in the near future is pretty reasonable. But, much like the original .com bubble, the idea that AI as a technology will not survive and thrive through such a pop, and become an ever more important part of our future, is a belief that I can't comprehend. Anthropic and OpenAI very well may go belly up. AI as a technology isn't going anywhere.
And as much as I'd like to believe that more people may self host more things in the future, self hosting will never, even if it was adopted by literally everyone, become as big a deal as AI, even if AI hit a wall tomorrow and didn't get any better than the current frontier models.
Lucasoato | an hour ago
Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.
sergiotapia | an hour ago
I think you can go very very far with this kind of setup especially if it's just for you.
mtlynch | 59 minutes ago
All things being equal, why prefer Docker Compose? From my perspective, a single binary strictly dominates any Docker Compose solution.
unshavedyak | 55 minutes ago
dmtroyer | 51 minutes ago
turtlebits | 47 minutes ago
Don't have to look at cli docs to figure out how to run it.
Doesn't have access to my file system, logs are easy.
asciimov | 35 minutes ago
Easy to migrate to new system.
Easy to upgrade and downgrade. When a new version causes an issue just restart it with an older version.
One directory to backup and restore that contains all the services and their settings.
wilted-iris | 31 minutes ago
Havoc | an hour ago
c45y | an hour ago
DynamicUser and ProtectSystem keep me sane.
Havoc | 37 minutes ago
VCFundedGenYer | an hour ago
ThrowawayTestr | an hour ago
scottydelta | an hour ago
At first it was hard but then i made it into a product. I am working on Tarvis.io which makes self hosting accessible to non technical users as well. It comes with installation assistant, ssl domains and backups inbuilt into it.
You can install open source apps from a catalog or drop any github repo and it installs and run it for you.
With Tarvis, I have been self hosting more since I am able to install and delete apps with one click, it makes it easy to try things.
bix6 | 49 minutes ago
They are so easy / portable but perhaps systemd is a better option as the author suggests.
LaurensBER | 46 minutes ago
For us it's the perfect balance between simplicity, observability (Beszel) and reliability. Not the right tool if you have dynamic workloads but definitely the right tool for boring and predictable workloads.
At home I run K3S, it's awesome. It also breaks a lot and does add a whole bunch of complexity that I would only recommend if you enjoy tinkering and fixing things.
rhymnz | 44 minutes ago
overtone1000 | 42 minutes ago
nozzlegear | 34 minutes ago
ticoombs | 39 minutes ago
rsync data directories. docker compose up. Done.
On the consumer or even prosumer nas products which have a semi-locked down system (ie Truenas/qnap/Synology). Technically you have root but as soon as you update the OS all/most of the changes end up being broken. Yes you could probably do something and deal with it. But personally I've spent too long babysitting it on the first and second nas that I no longer care.
jordand | 49 minutes ago
ebrahimh | 47 minutes ago
Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary, but what you can do is mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync and use roundcube or some other frontend to view emails and compose.
I use this to easily access mail from different services, and I can also send from any of them.
I also have a seperate service that watches the mail directory and sends a ntfy.sh notification for new emails.
It’s a bit complicated cause theres so many services but here are the quadlets: https://github.com/ebrahim37/infra-template/tree/main/homela...
I implemented this about a month ago because the iphone Mail app was increasingly buggy.
jamesstidard | 45 minutes ago
Would love to know as I wanted to do the same in the past and ended up self signing certs.
hexfish | 45 minutes ago
jamesstidard | 39 minutes ago
XCSme | 39 minutes ago
The advantage is that if I do want a specific feature, I can just add it, and I am never worried about subscription limits or surprise charged, because I host it on a fixed-cost VPS.
Things don't really need maintenance and don't really break by themselves, the only time when they can sometimes break is when changing things.
You do need to have a proper setup though, for stuff like disk space alerts, knowing the common gotchas of disabling settings that can cause issues, etc.
[0]: https://uxwizz.com
turtlebits | 35 minutes ago
I self host on a bunch of different hardware, OSes, providers. I want the least fiddling as possible.
jauntywundrkind | 31 minutes ago
lifeisloving | 32 minutes ago