Self hosting is the process of building your own internet by hosting apps and services yourself rather than relying on a tech platform. Self hosting is empowering and liberating, and I highly recommend everyone give it a whirl. Here are the things I host:
1. This website: I consider this a psuedo-self host. I paid for web hosting, but it’s my website and my content and I can say / do whatever I want on here.
2. Bitwarden: This is a password manager. I have this hosted on a vps for simplicity. I switched to managing my password manager myself when Lastpass got hacked. I may move this to my own server at some point but I’m not sure.
3. Caliber: Caliber is my ebook library. It runs on my local machine and has about 20,000,000 epubs on it which is pretty great. I never have a shortage of books to read and I probably read 2-3 novels a year so at this rate I will run out in about 10,000 years.
4. Kiwix: This is where I keep my copy of Wikipedia.
5: Plex: This is where I keep my movie, tv, and music collection. I have enough content to stream endlessly for about 3 years 24/7/365 without ever seeing a re-peat.
6: Jellyfin: This is where I keep my photo library, I have 20 years of personal photos which I like to flip through.
Services I No Longer Host
7: I used to host my email, but email is tricky and I relied on a service which shut down. 🙁 I would love to find another solution for this but in the meantime just host it with apple.
8: Pihole, this was my DNS service, I do plan to host it again. I loved having my own DNS at home. A DNS uses plain text to lookup IP addresses and caches them locally. This means overtime my DNS cache grows and grows and forwards fewer and fewer of my requests to a 3rd party, it’s more private. Not sure why I stopped hosting this but I plan to turn it back on again soon.
9: Rocketchat: I loved rocketchat, it was a private chat server. The main issue I ran into was it lacked push notifications and it was a little tricky to set up, and nobody really wanted to use it.
10: Voip: I set up a voip server and it was pretty neat, I could make calls through an app on my phone and the calls were being routed through my raspberry pi. It was another system nobody wanted go use to talk to me, so I got rid of it.
11: Mastodon, a microblogging service. It’s like twitter for nerds. I started using it during covid when the government was censoring scientists, doctors, and concerned citizens over vaccine related discussions, but in the end wordpress served me better.
I like to own my data, and I like to know some of it is only accessible to me and the people I gave a password to. I grew up in a time when we didn’t just trust experts, platforms, politicians or anyone else. In a time when our motto was “Knowledge is power”. I may not have the time to learn how to write the app myself, but I do have the time to mess around with these things and learn about the underlying technology that makes them work, and it’s kind of a fun hobby to know I don’t need a library, a netflix subscription, or a bunch of other apps and services people rely on to get information, media, or to share ideas.