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.
For Example
We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
Useful Lists
Uptime Kuma maintainer here. The reason why I made this because I have some services like databases and websites cannot be down for a long time. I need someone send a notification to me if they are down.
If you think it is not improving your life, it is probably because you don't have such similar scenario and you probably don't need this indeed.
My point is that it may be not improving your life, but it improves my life at least, or others'. That's just a choice.
I don't run any containers.
I own my own data.
I back up my own computers.
My email is mine.
You don't need to overcomplicate it, it's not a competition, and you don't have to do what everyone else does.
Having Nextcloud, PiHole and LibreELEC/Kodi is something I wouldn't want to miss
It's all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It's a wonderful mess.
I'd say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.
The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.
I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it's just a fancy way to tag documents. I don't need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.
Mainly for privacy reason:
And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news..
Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There's a "before paperless" era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.
Now, it's a solid 100%.
Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I'd say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I'd still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that's pretty much the only thing.
Home Assistant, Mealie, and Blue Iris are my daily life improving apps. My kids really enjoy the Ark server too.
I need to get more use out of my plex setup, but my Fire Cube v1 in the bedroom doesn't run much reliably anymore.
Both. I have things that I host simply for fun, but most of my homelab is for experimentation.
I practice with different technologies so I can try to learn how they work.
We have many apps that are used daily and improve our lives, the family wiki is trillium, family photos on Photoprism, NAS storage for each person for their documents etc. navidrome for music, various for media consumption, oobabooga for a private chatgpt, automatic1111s stable diffusion UI for graphic design. Some finance logging tools I wrote to manage our finances. A series of cameras viewable that cover the house. Tasmota on dozens on smart plugs/lights/sensors etc. a zigbee network for door monitoring. Pihole. Homer as the dashboard to reach everything. Plus various others. For me it’s the golden age of self hosting, so many mature products now. I’m also pretty ruthless, if there’s something we don’t use it’s deleted.
For me the biggest is probably Jellyfin. Before, I needed to use external drives plugged into my TV, then browse them using the TVs file browser. I didn't see which movies I already watched, or at which episode I stopped. When I wanted to watch something on my computer, I had to get the drive and plug it in there. The same for when I wanted something new. Now, I have Jellyfin running on my server, all the clients have access to it and I can watch my stuff whenever and wherever I like. It's also easier to share something.
Using navidrome and jellyfin daily, and komga a lot!
This is a skill issue. Shut down every thing you don't consider a necessity. Problem solved.
Selfhosted services I couldn't do without anymore are :
Selfhosting a VS Code server was one of the best decisions to increase my productivity.
I host it to have my own data under my own roof.
I've worked in the hosting industry. I've witnessed an internal breach, where an employee abused access over a few corners and fetched files matching a certain pattern from all customer VPSes (Virtuozzo container based VPSes have their root filesystem accessible from the host)
Rely on a lot of my selfhosted stuff like my media stack, immich, syncthing (phone backups), home assistant, vaultwarden. Saves me a bunch of money from subscriptions
Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, local storage and email are used constantly. All bring great improvements.
Ansible and Zabbix provide 'support' for these applications.
Media streaming is a 'nice to have' but not essential. Wireguard is seldom used but still very important.
I moved to self hosting so that I have more control over my data and it's fun. The services below except for GNS3 are what I use on a daily basis
- Homeassistant for all my home automation needs
- OpenMediaVault for my NAS
- Nextcloud for storage, calendars, backups etc.
- Emby and Audiobookshelf for family to stream media
- Netbox to document network installations for work
- Rustdesk as an alternative to Teamviewer/Anydesk etc
- GNS3 to simulate and test network topologies
- Partkeepr as an inventory management system to keep track of my companies inventory
I started doing it for the lols; slowly it became part of my daily activities. I use Nextcloud, SearxNg; Hassio; and Jellyfin mainly.
Started out with a simple samba file server for remote editing
Then expanded into ipsec+ l2tp vpn server, then into ipsec + ikev2, then into wireguard vpm server and its been expanding ever since
Never stopped since then
Both. It's a marketable skill...
"I created a custom CI/CD pipeline using F/OSS to host dozens of microservices in my home lab, ranging from X to Y, including setting up DNS, port forwarding, registering a domain name, setting up a reverse proxy and VPN, managing docker containers..."
I was able to use a similar pitch to prove I had the chops for a new role involving a lot more Devops stuff at work. I've never done devops for work, but I know the theory and have a minimum level of practice that someone only needs to explain a topic once or twice. Hands-on experience is invaluable
Some of the self hosting is a bit pointless, let’s be honest, but it all depends on a case by case basis. Having an automated Plex server is 100% an improvement. Got a new mini PC this week and was messing around with it and setting things up. One was adguard home and whilst it is very good, it does feel like adblockers these days do a very good job. Since I’m in the setting up phase and rebooting the server, internet on devices will go down and I there isn’t redundancy on DNS server.
I think most on this sub are tinkerers at heart and like getting the most out of it and seeing how low power to utility we can squeeze out of our gear or just the pure number of containers etc. I don’t think it matters if you use everything on a daily basis but it’s there when you need it whilst other services do their job just by being active.
And that's a little bit sad, right? The only "Job to be done" self-hosting is a solution for me is ... file management. Nothing else.
But everything is a file - Unix folks
Mostly for improving my administration skills. I am a Linux Systems Administrator and gaining experience with Docker will almost certainly help me in the long term. The self hosted and Nginx proxy, has also contributed.
But in my day to day life? PiHole has reduced the number of ads I see, I believe. And I am migrating the sites that I watch for work from Follow That Page, to self hosted Change Detection. Storing recipes in Mealie might be helpful. Oh, I also want to set up that bookmarking tool that saves pages for me.
My services all serve a purpose.
I host a portfolio website. It gets me exposure even though I’m not actively seeking other employment.
My wife runs her own travel agency so her website is also required.
Pihole is used daily to block ads on our network.
Wireguard is on our mobile devices (phones, laptops) so we always have a secure connection on untrusted wifi, ad blocking, access to our documents that live on our file server. I’m at MCO right now waiting for a flight with full confidence that my connection is secure.
Nginx proxy manager to route the website traffic.
Rclone is used to regularly backup the file server that holds our documents.
Minecraft server because happy toddler = happy life.
I used to selfhost bitwarden (vaultwarden) but changed to paying $10/yr to relieve myself of the added stress that it brought for security/backups.
Sometimes it just little improvements but I enjoy them. A local Nextcloud is much faster than my cloud backup and cheaper. Adblocking makes webbrowsing much more comfortable. Home Assistant helps me to get up easier in the morning when it turns on the lights automatically. So yeah some things are very convenient.
I host because I refuse to pay a monthly fee for cloud storage
Both, docspell has eliminated all of the filing cabinets in my house (the only thing left is the fireproof/resistant safe for things like birth certificates, SSN cards, etc.). Outline is my note taking and documentation tool, Jellyfin is where most of my media lives now, ChannelDVR gives me access to TV via Jellyfin, etc.
But I also really like playing with random open source projects and seeing if they have any use to me.
Bitwarden, Pi-hole, Calibre, Jellyfin, *arr apps. Caddy for reverse proxy which is the only “meta” docker I am running.
That is it for me.
I started down the Authentik SSO path but am thinking that it isn’t worth it and I’ll probably walk that back.
I've found that I use all the stuff that I host except file management. I really need to get on that one.
Double layer for ads. PiHole for stuff that has no extensions/shitty extensions (iOS).
Navidrome for not having a copy of my music library on everything. Not paying for Spotify and having to use a stupid blackbox shared library to access stuff that I paid for.
AirMessage/Bluebubbles because Apple sheep herds love the color blue.
pfSense for remote access RDP.
I'm probably going to add Piped for Yattee soon.
Adguard !== uBlock
One is per device based and the other is solely for DNS blocking, they compliment each other.
I started just for funsies, and in the end narrowed it down to just those items that make life better for us. Primarily, I run 2 Technitium DNS (network wide ad blocking), Jellyfin (for media), Home Assistant (to control lights and other devices without internet access), Mealie (recipes), and Ubooquity (books and comics). I have run NextCloud, among other services, but none of them got enough use to make it worth it to continue.
Little bit of both I suppose. I find it very enjoyable to have a server at home to tinker with, I'm also enjoying providing media to my friends and family (and myself). I don't use many self-hosted apps outside of media though, really only nocodb, immich and memos
It's a little bit of both for me.
I do host things for fun. Otherwise I wouldn't be running my own instances for Lemmy and for Mastodon. I don't need to host services like an IPFS Podcasting node or a PeerTube relay server for Jupiter Broadcasting, but I like giving back to the podcasting community (and theirs in particular, mostly).
Other things could fall into both categories but are a significant improvement on my Quality of Life. Automations fired by Home Assistant make it so things like my bedroom being warm during the winter is possible without having to remember to preheat it before I sleep. Services like AdGuard Home and PiHole help me control segments of my network and prevent ads and other malicious sites from being opened on my LAN. Hosting my own password manager through Vaultwarden and my file and photo syncs through a combination of NextCloud and Syncthing, though it has availability drawbacks should my server ever crash, lets me maintain more control over my data than I otherwise could have.
Plenty of other things are nice-to-haves and not need-to-haves, but they're worth spinning up to try out and see if they fit into my lifestyle. If I didn't enjoy self-hosting, I wouldn't have started to do it in the first place.
For serious business :
For the lol :
I almost disabled everything else.
Daily: (using some without knowing)
-truenas .. backups, files, movies, pictures
-jellyfin .. Multiple tvs on multiple locations
-bitwardwn .. for pass
-owncloud for 1st backup of my phone on one nas (1st location)
-Immich 2nd backup of my phone on 2nd nas (2nd location)
-homeassistant .. Many things
-2x docker
-pfsense
-opnsense
And other things to make all this happen like:
-nginx -cloudflare
And apps that are waiting to be used few times a week:
-partkeepr
-homebox (will replace partkeepr)
-wikijs
In progress: -piohole / adguard
And thats it i guess🤔 i guess im fine with that 15€ of eletricity...🤷
Both, i like setting up the network and trying out selfhosted services.
Definitely improved my daily routines:
- Paperless-ngx, connected to my email. All my bills and purchases are backed up. So easy to find documents/warranty documents.
- Nextcloud, for backing up my phone and personal life. Too much data for cloud providers and pivate.
- Plex/Jellyfin, easy way to watch all my Linux iso's without paying 10 different streaming services. Still subscribed to two steaming services though (family).
- Adguard, lifesaver to browse the web without going crazy.
- Immich, awesome photo viewer with mobile app.
- Syncthing, awesome tool to sync data. Use it to sync my Obisian notes to all my devices.
- Kasm/webtop, have my own OS in browser to access from any web browser securely.
- Restic, tool to backup everything to Backblaze. You can use any storage solution.
- Wireguard VPN, to easy access my services and have adblocking on my phone and laptop outside of my LAN.
I think you've stumble accross few of the huge issues with selfhosting
- Developing apps is too hard, you have all the difficulties of SaaS development but with the added difficulty of having to support people installing your app in various setups
- For the difficulty, the return on investment is low because the community is much smaller than what you can touch with a SaaS software
This causes the breadth of available apps to be quite shallow, and additionally, another factor threaten further that diversity is that
- people gets into self-hosting in one of two ways. Either to create illegal media-center (in which case they install Plex, Jellyfin, *arr, download client, etc...) or to manage their document in privacy (Nextcloud, etc..) seems like you are type 2. This causes most projects to focus around those hot topics, without exploring other things (this year alone at least 4 photos albums backup software started development..)
But this state of affair is not sad or inflicting, it is natural for such as a young community to take time to find itself, especially in this difficult setting (I know selfhosting is not new, but I call it young because only recently did it start becoming so popular). And there are solutions to those problem too. On my end, like many other talented people, I am working on technologies to improve this situation, and hopefully one day we will see a large diversity of application growing, with much more accessible setup for people to run.
What I forsee will be big in the future
- Once we crack federation (I do not think current state of the technology is good enough) social app (Video sharing, file sharing, social media alternatives, news site etc..) will be big
- Going back to news, once we improve the QOL of SH for public sites, news agglomeration is going to be big as well (for blogs and stuff)
- Any mobile/SaaS app could have a SH counter part, that will automatically gain benefits from not being in the cloud. Im thinking things like various task management, productivity tools, and of course, home automation is gonna be the bigger winner for being in the home already, therefore workable offline. An example of this is already happening with cooking/recpies apps (Mealie, Tandorii, Grocy, etc...) which benefit from being at home, private, and accessible from the family, and home-assistant.
- Finally, SH is going to supercharge the development of very niche software. It makes no sense to develop an entire SaaS offering for 100 users (ex. a software to manage your model train would be very niche) because you have to pay for a domain, servers, and so on... But a SH app could literally cost $0 to run (for the devs) while yelding minimal benefits (either from subs or donation).
Give it 2-3 years for those stuff to develop better. In 3 years this sub will be almost twice as big at 500k, and you will have 2-3 times the amount of apps available that's pretty much a garantee
I've self-hosted for over two decades and most of the apps you mentioned I've not heard of or used. I self host email and my web apps and system services I wrote. I do it because I like it.
Privacy is only going to be a more important part of your daily life going forward. So absolutely I'm enjoying selfhosting. Not relying on third-parties and/or death-by-a-thousand-cuts subscriptions is also very beneficial. Learning new skills along the way has also been a little bonus/cherry on top.
TL;DR: Selfhosting is basically a digital 'bug-out bag' for me. For when stuff goes south, you'll not be caught with your pants down.
Music server for my father. He will get a new iPhone and want to download his old songs. He don’t know anything about the subscription based service so I will make one for him!
Oh, I definitely have self hosted services that affect daily life. I don't like when I'm not at home w/ pihole. I love paperless and mealie. Plex allowed me to move my DVD changers (400 each) to smart TVs and/or Fire Sticks which provide so much more in service. Every single user in the house can watch different content. It also allows recording of live content for later viewing. In the previous configuration, I never would have considered OTA content. I also have a service that backs up my Google Photos. I don't usually think about my NVR as a service but I don't want outsiders tempted to watch my cameras, even if I don't point them inside the house. Home Assistant has changed so much of my life and it'd be so much less without Node Red and VS Code Server.
I have to say, I do IT for a living so I go to great lengths to not turn my home systems into a second job. I have undone several systems over the years that just required too much work with much less value in return. Typically, I spend 10-15 minutes a week doing what I call "Care and Feeding" of my systems. Normally, this would be just updating dockers and VMs. I may add work to my schedule when my notes from the previous week suggest that I investigate a new service. I will stand it up and play around with it to see if I can get it to work in a fashion I like and is useable.
My vaultwarden and addi.io (former anonaddy) and immich are a KEY part of my homelab. Me (and my family) heavily rely on these 2 services in specific. All the rest can be considered superfluous.
I self host my Bitwarden instance just for the sake of « it’s in my server, I managed my data » And I self host my website because why not after all ? I’ve fiber internet
What I use daily without necessarily interacting with them:
First 3 with Baikal
What I actually interact with daily:
Occasionally:
All of which I used to use a proprietary alternative before starting selfhosting.
I'm building a home lab to learn. The fact there's functionality and privacy is a good learning driver, but entirely the purpose. I suppose eventually there may be ROI, but that's not a focus at this time. :)
Started as a hobby with an old i5 laptop (sans keyboard and screen), running Jellyfin. I wanted to learn more than just using Debian as a desktop.
Now my home lab consists of...
I love selfhosting at home, and I recommended it for anyone who wants to learn.
Yes, I have fudged up a few times and had to nuke and start again, but with each time I get better and better at what I am doing.
I am now planning on moving my Gitea and the main Nextcloud instance into the cloud, as my poor little fibre line is not coping with the traffic.
I am legally blind. I got into programming and linux specifically so that I can improve my life, even though I don't want to pursue an IT career professionally.
So, the short answer to your question is: most of my apps really do improve my daily life. And a good many of them I wrote myself.
Here's a largely-arbitrary mind dump:
But that's from an accessibility perspective and more programming than self-hosting per se.
Now from reading your OP, I think it is an attitude problem rather than a selfhosting problem. uBlock Origin and AdGuard (blocky, in my case) are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how TF to use them. Since I use uBlock in Paranoid Mode (basically a lite uMatrix mode with filterlists), I don't need to block so-called tracker scripts at the DNS level. My DNS adblocker is only blocking ads. Ergo, things like shopping do not break. You are saying that it is easier to disable uBlock for shopping — but I can change DNS with one script. Just temporarily switch to 1.1.1.1 or something, and everything works. Where's the problem?
I'm not sure what your complaint is with Bitwarden. It is not exactly hard to back it up when it is running in docker, and easier still if you use vaultwarden (much simpler backend).
You say that you use 'Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard' and they are not improving your life.
I'll agree on the first two, but maybe that's just because I hate webuis with a burning passion. But how are Authentik and Wireguard not improving your life?
Do you know why I use wireguard? I'll tell you why I use wireguard.
A long time ago, I needed to go to hospital. I also had a university assignment due the same day as I was in hospital. Thought to myself, 'no problem, I'll just bring my laptop with me; I've got Google Drive Sync set up so I can work on my files remotely'. So I check in, boot up, log in, and what do I see? Old files. Old files from three weeks ago. Why? Because Google Drive decided to go on strike and, in true GUI App fashion, displayed a tiny error notification in the tray icon that you would need a microscope to see. Naturally, being half-blind, I didn't see it. So now I am, figuratively up shit creek without a paddle!
So what do I do? Well, I deploy "KVM over Mom". I ask my mom to drive back home — mind you, this is a 70-minute drive — and get her to bring my machine up. I walk her through getting into my machine and resurrecting Google Drive Sync. And then I spend 4 hours in the hospital queue finishing off my assignment.
That episode taught me a few things:
So, fast-forward a few months and I am using my dad's NAS as a jumphost/proxy into our home network, where I can use wake-on-lan and RDP to connect to my machine. I have also switched from Google Drive Sync to File Stream (as it then was) so that my files are automatically available in gdrive. And that latter bit saves my ass some months later when my dad's NAS has a disagreement with a kernel update and I can no longer remote in. We also have a hoard of Chinese bots hammering away at our internet-facing 16-year-old router, so that's not great either. Also, ssh tunnels are neat, but are annoying to configure.
Fast forward a few years and an Unspecified Virus of Unspecified Origin that temporarily obviated the need for remote access, I now use a VPN. In fact, me being a somewhat cautious person, I use several VPNs, for remote access into my home network. There is a vanilla wireguard "in case things with multiple moving parts break" tunnel and more convenient mesh orchestrators, although I have a hard time finally deciding between innernet and headscale.
And does having remote access to my home computer improve my life? Yes. Most definitely. My home computer and server have much more storage than does my laptop. And sometimes you just need access to your copy of Hanks Australian Constitutional Law 12th ed, what can I say....
The issue I see with many self-hosters is that they start with a solution looking for a problem as evidenced by the frequent "I am bored, tell me what to selfhost" posts we see on this sub. It is much better to start with a problem and try to solve it. Then you don't have to have an existential crisis over whether you are hosting too many replicas of postresql..
:wq
Both.
I think its a fun hobby but I tend to only use apps that will serve a function for me. So, I dont have to many. On my setup I have piHole, a CUPS server, boinc, a QNAP NAS, openmedia vault that backups the NAS, Home assistant, and my most used Komga.