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.

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.

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…

• 2x PiHoles (synced using unison and entr)
• 2x Jellyfin (1 for my use as a media server and 1 on a Unifi Cloudkey, which I am using for another little pet project).
• 2x Nextcloud (1 for my business and colloborating with clients on the various projects I get from them, and 1 I am modifying to build myself an online school)
• Gitea
• My own software to do round the clock transcoding of videos using a GPU including videos I create myself in Kdenlive or Shotcut.
• My own software to do managed downloading of content from a well known website
• Transmission
• Unifi (not on Unifi Hardware, the hardware was more useful for my other project mentioned above)
• Calibre-Web
• My own software to do daily incremental archives of my various production servers in the cloud.

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’m using a lot less tools that I’ve installed, now I need to remove some of this tools. I use Synology drive/photos, Plex/Jellyfin/Arr environment, mealie, paperless-ngx, resilio to share big files to my friends, freshrss, linkwarden, vikunja and Joplin.

Maybe I will remove home assistant (I’m not using it, I control devices with voice Alexa), snapdrop/gokapi/pingvin (localsend+resilio+Synology fractures cover this better).

I’m considering replace Joplin+vikunja for obsidian, but im not sure if I want to have mobile with syncthing all the to Sync my mobile with pc, maybe it will drain more battery.

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.

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.

It really has improved my daily life. I may be a bit of an outlier since I’m also a developer and selfhost apps I’ve made.

Multi-scrobbler

I love music and have been recording (scrobbling) what I listen to for over a decade. I created this app to make the scrobbling process set-and-forget across all the platforms and locations I listen to music.

Tautulli Digest

This little app I wrote consolidates “newely added to plex” discord notifications and posts them all at the same time. Makes my discord server much less noisy.

Context Mod

A homegrown reddit moderation bot platform I developed. I selfhost u/ContextModBot and a slew of other moderator bots. This is probably the biggest advantage I get for self hosting. The bot uses a lot of bandwidth and can be CPU-intensive when doing image hashing and pixel comparisons. If I was hosting this on AWS I’d probably be paying hundreds of $$$ a month.

Web Hosting

Between Context Mod and a few other image and text web services used between my friends I do a modest amount of website traffic. Not the end of the world if I hosted in the cloud but still saving me some money for sure.

Home Assistant and Frigate

More common around here. HA has been a QoL upgrade from managing a bunch of different rando “smart home” apps. I also moved away from a Ring doorbell to an Amcrest AD410 with Frigate + Coral for human detection that records events straight to my NAS. No more paying subscription for storage and worrying about amazon peeping on my video.

For me its like:

Im using a service and I like it. I exceed some limit. I have to pay. No *free* (hosted) alternative. Looking for a selfhosted alternative.

I currently only hosting Cal.com, Listmonk, Some Scrum Planning Poker, Authentik and self programmed software.

I’m only self hosting a few things but they are all actually getting used for things

• Shinobi (camera software)
• pihole
• valheim server
• truenas

Eventually I would like to replace other services for self hosted alternatives such as Google photos and onenote. But I am severely limited by my upload speed (only 20mbps). I also desperately need to add a bigger/better UPS and some sort of kvm over ip as my power has been going out at least a few times a year.

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 use my Nextcloud at my employment all the time. It’s a great way to get scripts I have written deployed on client machines.

I use my Exchange server for all my alerting and subscribed mail lists. Plus I have the Proxmox mail filter in front of that which is really good at keeping the spam away.

I have self deployed Bitwarden and have come to depend on that very quickly. Pihole and Zabbix are other tools I use as well as having tftp and anon ftp servers up. So yes, my homelab is part of what allows me to work effectively.

I do it because renting the equivalent capacity from a cloud provider would cost me a hell of a lot more per month than the electrical bill I pay to keep it running.

Plus, having a server rack in my basement is cool :P

Paperless, immich. seafile, nextcloud, minecraft, home-assistant, pihole, jellyfin - they all improve my or my family’s life.

I think it depends on the person. My self hosting is lean and mean - I don’t bother setting up any of the complex meta-self-hosting stuff, my services just run on docker with port forwarding.

Additionally all my services are things I absolutely use daily. Very rarely does a day go by that I don’t listen to audio books on my AudiobookShelf server, and my wife uses our Plex daily to watch her favorite shows, which also allowed us to ditch a few streaming subscriptions

If there’s a cloud app that offers good value for the money - I use that instead, afterall self hosting isnt free, you pay with your time (and electricity bill, but that’s negligible)

If you find that the only worthwhile thing you host is your file management stuff, why not just ditch the rest? There’s no gold medal for “most things self hosted”, the point is to make your life easier, not harder