Why I self-host (and what I've actually learned from it)

I run a LOT of services on hardware in my house. People ask why. The tl;dr is simple: self-hosted alternatives to mainstream services are cheaper, privacy-respecting and fully customizable.

Here are some of the services I host

Going into more detail

Privacy:

My notes, photos, and finances are on drives I physically own, in a house I live in. No company has them, indexes them, trains models on them, or loses them in a breach.

No subscriptions:

Look at some of the most popular subscriptions. Netflix, Notion, 1Password, iCloud, Google Photos. The subscription economy for software has gotten VERY expensive.

My monthly costs are a Backblaze B2 bill that rounds to ~$5, plus electricity. PSE charges ~$0.20/kWh in Seattle, so running my servers 24/7 would add about $24 a month. However, I don't actually leave them on all the time. With smart cron jobs (shutting off servers at night because I'm asleep), I can reduce that cost to closer to $15 a month.

Either way, that's about the same as Netflix's top tier subscription alone, let alone the combination of everything above.

It works the way I want:

Self-hosted software lets me configure it properly instead of working around the choices a product team made for a different user.

Customizability and reason I actually keep doing it

I learn more from running this infrastructure than from almost anything else I do.

Debugging why a container can't reach the NAS after a network reconfiguration teaches me more about networking than any course. Writing the backup scripts taught me more about filesystem semantics and I/O scheduling than I learned in school. Setting up NUT and testing the shutdown sequence was the first time I had a real, working answer to "what happens to your data when the power goes out?"

Self-hosting gives you a production system you're allowed to break.

The honest cost

Hardware Costs:

I got lucky that I got into self-hosting when memory prices were absurdly cheap (~2023) and so I had purchased all my hardware then. If you wanted to get in now, you would have to cut corners or pay an absurd amount.

As general advice, I would recommend buying used from FB marketplace. You don't need PC-grade hardware to host Joplin notes. However, if you ever plan on doing any GPU transcoding, you will need a GPU or an iGPU.

Time:

There are two things that take up time. Setting services up and then those services inevitably breaking.

Containers need updates. Docker images change behavior between versions. A dependency updates and suddenly a service won't start. Most weeks nothing breaks. Some weeks I spend three hours on Saturday figuring out why Nextcloud can't see its database after a Postgres upgrade.

However, the more things break, the faster you get at fixing them. You learn niche bugs that can break docker services, etc. You build up your notes on what breaks and what doesn't and how to fix it. Sometimes you'll get a repeat error that your notes will have a solution for. Sometimes it might be similar to the error in the notes. Time is the greatest cost with self-hosting, but to me it is time well-spent.

Responsibility:

If Notion loses your data, Notion is liable and probably has backups. If my Nextcloud instance loses data, that's on me. The 3-2-1 backup system I run exists because I've lost data I cared about and it was entirely my own fault.

Complexity tax:

Every service I add is another thing that can fail, another set of logs to check, another auth system to configure. There's a point where the complexity of managing everything starts to cost more time than the subscriptions would have cost money. I try to stay below that point by being selective about what I actually run.

What I don't self-host

Email. Actually sending and receiving email from your own server in 2026 means fighting deliverability constantly. I use Protonmail for the actual email account and run a Protonmail Bridge so local clients can talk to it. It's a compromise that works.

Anything where availability matters to someone else. If my personal Jellyfin goes down, I'm the only one who can't watch a movie. If I ran something other people depended on, I'd need reliability guarantees that I can't provide.

Who it's for

Not everyone. If you have no interest in how computers actually work, self-hosting is a bad deal. You're signing up for operational overhead to get privacy and control you may not care that much about.

But if you're the kind of person who wants to understand what's happening under the hood, running a home lab is one of the best ways to build that understanding. You get a real system, real failure modes, and real consequences for getting things wrong. Except no one depends on it except yourself.

...Or more likely, your parents yell at you for the wifi being down because your pihole instance stopped working for no apparent reason. :)

That's the part no tutorial gives you.