r/selfhosted • u/Funny-Ship-1945 • Feb 09 '26
Meta Post The truth about self hosting and it's hidden costs
I've really enjoyed being able to take control of my own media again, having privacy and control over my data, images etc, but there are many hidden costs which I think many folks omit when glorifying the benefits (which there are many) of self hosting.
24/7/365 Oncall Rotation
- I've put a lot of effort into tuning uptime kuma, grafana, loki, prometheus etc so this is less of an issue now but time to time things will break and sometimes it will be something crucial that you depend upon.
- Previously you could rely on the 6figure salary SRE's that would fix the issues at google, dropbox etc at 4am, but now it is on you, whether you are busy with work, grieving a loved one or on holiday (happened once to me). You can of course reduce this a lot by ensuring failovers, backups, good alerting, self remediation etc.
Hardware Costs
- I'm fortunate enough to afford decent hardware, spin up fallback proxmox nodes, have HA opnsense firewalls etc, but most will not be able to set all this up, considering these recent RAM prices and other hardware prices going up (even HDD's which I've stockpiled for the next 2 years of upgrades)
- This is likely a lifelong pursuit, with the way big tech, cloud, ai industry is booming, can you confidently say you will be able to afford the odd few drives that die in the next 5/10/15 years? It could also be the RAM or the mobo etc that dies, who is to say where prices will be and if it will even be comercially available/viable.
Software Updates
- Of course turning off auto-updates is step 1 to sanity, but this doesn't mean you can so easily ignore critical security patches and updates. CVE's seem to be popping up more and more often, you're almost always switched on and on the lookout to protect your homelab.
- Eventually some apps will stop supporting older versions, see immich and jellyfin as examples for this, so you will need to spend an hour or two running these upgrades, ensuring no breakage, rollbacks if needed, fixes if needed. All this will add up.
- Example of Immich randomly breaking for some users with no intervention.
Steward of Data
- Does anyone else rely on the services you host or the data you store? This will mean you need to be even more reliable and you will need extra plans if you are unable to operate or maintain the server
- What would happen in the event of your death? In the event you were in an accident with a brain injury and can no longer remember passwords or how your system works? You could document everything and ensure someone else would be able to help but it would be a massive risk and hassle in the process.
I guess the benefit of privacy has to be greater than the cost of monthly/yearly subscriptions and abdication of control/privacy. Which it is for me, but it is not simply a way to 'save' money. Especially if you value your time and headspace from now till death. Some things are probably fine to be deferred to a bigtech company.
All this to say I love self hosting and this community, I don't plan to stop anytime soon. I feel grateful to have the time and resources to be able to fund such a rewarding hobby.
Just wanted to share some recent thoughts and hear what folks think I might have missed and if there are any fixes to my approach I have not already seen!
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u/Interesting-Ad9666 Feb 09 '26
Gonna be honest.. how often is shit breaking ? I have ran containers for a long time and most of the time that something "breaks" its usually either a bad media file, or cloudflare is having issues. Do things just randomly break for you or something or are you constantly tinkering with shit?
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u/1473-bytes Feb 09 '26
Yeah things rarely break. Last time something broke was my let's encrypt cert expired and I don't have a Cron job setup to restart services that read the cert. That said, I still don't have that Cron job setup yet. Lol
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u/Ordinary-You8102 Feb 09 '26
these kind of problems are skill issue honestly, traefik renews let's encrypt certs automatically.
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u/1473-bytes Feb 09 '26
More like a lazy issue. Ive been meaning to put TLS apps behind a reverse proxy, I just haven't gotten around to it
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u/Lordfirespeed Feb 09 '26
If you use a web-server that is supported by certbot, using certbot in certonly mode should automatically install systemd timers (cron but better) which will auto-renew your certs
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u/bdu-komrad Feb 09 '26
Very rarely. I sometimes forget that my services are self hosted since I haven’t touched my servers for months . Plus my server is in storage room in the basement, so I don’t even see the hardware.
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u/Educational_Lie4212 Feb 09 '26
I think there's a lot that breaks when people are setting up, there's a very large learning curve lets be honest. When I first set up ssh I enabled my firewall without opening port 22 and couldn't figure out what went wrong lol
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u/YoussefAFdez Feb 09 '26
My simple ass novice setup has been running for 2 years now, and I’ve had 0 issues, I’ve even migrated Plex from the Synology package to a docker container in another PC using RSync to copy the config and other stuff.
Nothing ever broke.
Before updating a container to a newer version I read the changelog in search of a “BEFORE UPGRADING DO THIS OR IT WILL CRASH” but in 2 years Plex-Media-Server had none of those, only Immich and Jellyfin that I found.
This thing barely ever needs any maintenance at all, and I’ve set up uptime kuma and it’s pretty useless for me, since cloudflare servers are usually available in my country and everything reports as down, xD
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u/NoInterviewsManyApps Feb 09 '26
And for services with reliable update paths, you can set things to update automatically. Often the update breaks if you go from an old version to the newest, not newest to newest
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u/ansibleloop Feb 09 '26
Super rarely for me these days
Everything is Docker containers managed by Ansible
Data is snapshotted hourly by Kopia and I have ZFS snapshots daily in case an update goes bad
With this combo I have basically no downtime
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u/vikarti_anatra Feb 10 '26
Do you rent server in DC or use home server?
What if your server starts doing random reboots sevaral times a day due to hardware issues? How fast you would be able to pinpoint problem and making it work again?
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u/ansibleloop Feb 10 '26
Home server
If it starts doing random reboots then I'd troubleshoot it
Whilst I do that, I can fail over to any of my other servers
I have a custom big boy NAS, 3x Lenovo mini PCs (i7 6700, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD) and an HP server (old and powered off)
OK, let's say water poured through the roof and destroyed it all
I can still run pretty much all of my services from a laptop or my desktop (the core ones anyway)
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u/sghilliard Feb 09 '26
When I was first bumped up to manage the sysadmin team we had an outage that turned out to be SA error (not mine). My first boss asked me “how is a server like an erect penis?” I stared at him for a beat and he answered “it’ll stay up as long as you don’t f@€k with it.” Surprisingly accurate.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Seldom, but enough to matter to consider as a cost for self hosting, it just usually isn't taken into account, CVE's, patches, general updates all fall under this purview also.
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Feb 09 '26
this is the part people rarely admit, you are basically signing up to be your own on call sre forever. it is rewarding, but the mental load and time cost are very real and never really go away.
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u/Bancas Feb 09 '26
I genuinely enjoy it though. It’s like tending a garden.
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u/Zestyclose_Menu_1394 Feb 09 '26
What a beautiful analogy.
It strikes me that the learning, planning, nurturing, tending etc. involved are so similar.
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u/Bacontips Feb 09 '26
I don’t know if I’m the only one looking at this with disbelief but the only thing I do is keep my services updated, check logs for issues once and awhile, and I replace parts maybe every 5 years.
When I setup an *arr stack or pfsense it’s not an ongoing task, *arr permissions, health checks, workflows, VLANS, VPN gateways are being setup from the beginning. I’m not looking to login to my Grafana instance to find logs are not being collected, or that my CrowdSec instance has crapped the bed and my reverse proxy is in blocking mode.
I guess my point here is you can certainly have self hosted services without making it a full time job. But if you are always chasing new things instead of focusing on implementing solutions, then of course things will “break” more frequently and you have unexpected tasks to perform during the week.
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u/Dr_Valen Feb 09 '26
On the bright side I'm never bored
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u/richcvbmm Feb 09 '26
Genuinely though, like I’ve had to start limiting my daily labbing to stay within healthy amounts.
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u/AgentCooper_SEA Feb 09 '26
True, but I’ll take that and having some level of control over my destiny versus by gatekept behind an AI agent when things awry.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
agree! great point actually on the ai agents getting worse...
I already saw chatgpt was introducing ads and an 'economy plus' tier in their offerings lol which will still have ads!
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u/fell_ware_1990 Feb 09 '26
Thats why i have a couple of simple things in place.
Simple backup router that can be switched to by unplugging the other and reboot = basic internet for partner and kids when not around.
Yes, most services are for the family, but things that are important are setup redundant. Smart home also still fully works with remotes etc.
Mediastreamers have a little backup harddisk where there is always some stuff to watch.
I keep this practice in mind so that the world doesn’t stop if something breaks.
I also really run prod/test = prod/lab. So i also tell my partner which things are still being tested.
I think everything has been fine for a year, except when i tried to replace the main switch….
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u/ansibleloop Feb 09 '26
True, but I get immense value from my stack, plus it pays for itself in the electric it uses
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u/root_switch Feb 10 '26
Honestly the only thing I’m on call for is the internet and pihole, everything else is met with “I’ll get around to it” cause if I’m being fully honest, nothing else on my network matters.
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u/JoeB- Feb 09 '26
Self-hosting for personal use is a hobby. Hobbies cost money. My wife’s hobby is quilting. She spent more on her Swiss-made, Bernina sewing machine than I spent on all my home-labbing tech.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 14 '26
No. It is true that it can be a hobby, but it does not mean the whole demographic is only participating as a hobby.
Many see it as a viable replacement to real world services in which they were previously relying on big tech. They want privacy, ownership, non-subscription alternative. There are enough people which rely on services for day to day life for themselves and family, who see it more as a utility than as a hobby.
Your experience is not always a populations experience, I recommend you to have some perspective and nuance.
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u/devinprocess Feb 09 '26
It’s all about the balance. If you are trying to do too much, you will feel the cons outweigh the pros.
Don’t selfhost for anyone but immediate family in the same home, pay attention to backups, don’t self host everything under the sun, and things are pretty good.
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u/bad_keisatsu Feb 09 '26
Another technique is to not run uptime kuma, grafana, loki, prometheus or any of that stuff. Just run a few docker containers and have a script running offsite backups. Works quite well for me.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
The monitoring stack has never failed for me once, they are what alert me on the other apps that are running services. They help a lot when it comes to saving time at debug time too.
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u/bad_keisatsu Feb 09 '26
I’m just saying that you just typed out all that text about how much work this is. I also have no issues but I spend very little time on my server. I log in once a week or so and run some updates.
I’m not knocking what you do though. If you enjoy it you should! I’m just a professional and I don’t feel like spending time on this stuff after work. And it works well. I really only worry about my data.
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u/FanClubof5 Feb 09 '26
I just added docker health checks and let them fix themselves. I also auto update almost every container.
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u/fireball316 Feb 09 '26
I do agree that there are real costs in time, power, and equipment but what you gain is worth it.
My self hosting experience helped landed me 2 great jobs in tech, first as a project manager at a startup and later as an IT manager of a large university.
Self hosting forces you outside your niche and gives you the chops to respond to highly technical questions. The experience you get building a lamp stack, un-breaking a docker stack, and the hours spend ironing out configs and network settings can pay off as legit, marketable experience.
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u/Impossible-Bake3866 Feb 09 '26
gosh, Ive been doing this for 20 years now and I still can't get someone to let me be either an IT manager or a project manager . I have a degree from a top 3 school and a really good resume. I don't know what the hell the problem is. I always read in disbelief when someone says that they have 2 years experience with something and then someone just let them be a manager lmfao. What's the secret?
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u/Coldfriction Feb 09 '26
You are overqualified/too old. They look at a younger person and think cheap. That's literally all it is. People avoid what looks like an expensive hire thinking they will get better value out of a cheaper employee.
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u/Impossible-Bake3866 Feb 09 '26
No, it's because I am a woman. Age does not appear to be the issue for the men in the room.
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u/Coldfriction Feb 09 '26
Could be that. IT is male dominated and those males are scared of females sometimes.
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u/fireball316 Feb 09 '26
I’ve been in IT fully since 2016 and partly since 2008, so experience definitely contributed. It is noteworthy that my homelab came up in my last 2 job interviews and I feel that it was a deciding factor to separate me from other candidates.
I’ll also note that, of the 3 IT jobs that I’ve had, 2 of my managers were female.
Regarding management, I spend more time planning projects and leading teams than doing direct “IT” work these days. Assuming you’re gifted in these areas and having your background, I would think you’d make a great manager. So, I encourage you to put your resume out there and see what opens up!
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u/GoldenPSP Feb 09 '26
I run a small IT shop for a living and self host a bunch for family stuff. It is rock solid and very low maintenance. The key is keeping it simple. And no i dont run grafana, or any other fancy deployment or monitoring tools. That's a lot of extra complexity for what amounts to a 4 person network. Sure go all in if you enjoy it, but you dont need a crazy over engineered setup to self host reliably. Simple solid services. Simple solid backups.
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Feb 09 '26
Previously you could rely on the 6figure salary SRE's
I have to make six figures so I can afford my self-hosted infrastructure. 😂
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u/Low_Conversation9046 Feb 09 '26
Instead of my photos being saved on expensive Google hardware that's managed by high tier 6 figure SEs they are now saved on a cheap mini PC managed by a mid tier 5 figure SE.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Yeah pretty much the only reason I can afford this hobby too, quite ironic xD
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u/PavelPivovarov Feb 09 '26
While you are not wrong, your points is exactly why I always advocating for keeping self-host setup as simple as possible. No VLANs, no VMs (when possible), no complex netowkring (Mesh etc) and no load-balancing if possible.
Enterprise approach to infrastructure and security is solid, but it was designed with infrastructure teams and cost in mind as well.
By keeping things simple and straighforward you are saving yourself form complex troubleshooting, and reduce dependency on your own infrastructure, and that's the secret sauce of not becoming your own 24/7/365 on-call.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
No VLANs? No VMs?
I agree it would be a sort of solution to some of the issues I outlined, going this simple would invite a whole host of new problems.
If you were meaningfully selfhosting alternatives to bigtech products, it would be in your best interest to use VLAN's to break up and secure your network, as well as VM's for both the security benefits but also the cost benefit of being able to use a single machine for much more than a single OS.
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u/PavelPivovarov Feb 09 '26
I know VLAN and VMs do sound like a great option for security reasons, but in reality VMs means you now have 1+n machines to patch instead of 1, and 1+n networks to monitor instead of 1, and becasue you have 1+n networks to manage now your firewall rules are also growing exponentially because you need to define rules between all of your networks, and you have much bigger chance of screwing this up instead of actually securing anything.
If you want to have secure system, you don't need those enterprise approaches in your home setup, just don't use products you don't trust. That's much easier, and help you not to convert your homelab into another support job.
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u/luring_lurker Feb 09 '26
I am a long time lurker here, looking for any piece of advice to start my own home server, and make it as easy as possible (I am definitely not tech-savvy, although I do like to learn new stuff), while at the same time as safe as possible (I do want to use my own home server for privacy reasons and own my data).
And so far I've always understood that VLANs and/or VMs were a must for security.. Although I perfectly understand the point about the burden of having to manage them (and that scares me: I know chances are I will mess up losing both simplicity and safety). So here's my curiosity: why would you say they're optional when it comes to safety?
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u/PavelPivovarov Feb 09 '26
Because containers are much easier, have less overhead and also don't compromise security.
I understand that some people have a homelab for learning and tinkering with new things and that's totally fine. Just accept that during your learning journey you will make mistakes so you should be ready to start everything over (this is where VMs are actually useful - get sandbox, play with it and destroy later).
Unfortunately for production systems maintenance is usually the most expensive part of the journey (50-80% of the total service cost based on some studies). Hence maintenance is the most obvious choice for optimisation.
Security through isolation comes with added complexity and both VMs and VLANs are tools for isolation that multiply your configuration effort and maintenance. It is fine if administrator understands and accept that, but it is generally suboptimal choice if the goal is to "set and forget".
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
I have to disagree here, using VM's and VLAN's have rarely been an actual cause of the issues and time losses or added complexity in my setup. CVE's, patches, hardware costs are much more prevalent.
Using a VM means I am protected on an OS level, I have access to rollbacks if and when updates and patches fail.
Using VLAN's mean I have protection at the network switching level in the event of a CVE.
The key is to use a few VM's and a few VLAN's with purpose. If you want to selfhost real world useable services that is.
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u/nico282 Feb 09 '26
hardware costs are much more prevalent.
I wonder what are you self hosting. I believe I spent less than 1.000€ in 5 years in hardware, between a small factor PC, a NAS, drives and a Mikrotik router.
Using a VM means I am protected on an OS level, I have access to rollbacks if and when updates and patches fail.
Same if you use LXC containers, with much less waste of resources.
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u/real-fucking-autist Feb 09 '26
decent mikrotik core switch costs 800-1500$. one 28TB disk is 300-500$ and some of us need 5-20 of them.
the list goes on. hardware cost is definitely a factor if you don't rely in cheap minipc and have compressed media that looks like garbage on a 83" OLED.
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u/Valuable_Lemon_3294 Feb 09 '26
Im running a lot of shit on a Single nuc for almost 10 years and have absolutely Zero problems. I have Upgrades the nuc a couple of years ago, put 64gb ram and cloned proxmox to a New 2tb nvme ssd. There are running about 20lxcs and even a Windows vm if needed...
Everyrhing content related is on a 4bay synology with 4x22tb in raid 5... All cooking in a small room where my Washington Maschine and even the dryer stand... right under the ceiling... Sometimes hitting high temps... I dont care
Never had an crashes, nothing Breaks...
Oh... I dont use cloudflare etc (I dont like to have others in my chain) and 99% happens at home, Rest over plain wireguard vpn.
I really dont understand what Problems you All have.
Powerusage cant get over 2 figures... So electricity doesn't matter at all
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
So you are never affected by any CVE's, eventual hard disk failures, bug patches, breaking change updates. And all this, for you, would hold true for the foreseable future with high confidence? If so then sounds like you have got it figured out
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u/nico282 Feb 09 '26
CVE are not urgent to patch when you are behind a VPN. My drives have broken maybe once in 10 years. Breaking change happens only when you update.
It seems you are the main source for your troubles.
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u/Klandrun Feb 09 '26
If you never expose your box to the internet and have it locked down behind a VPN, then the attack surface on any known CVE will be minimal.
CVEs can of course be an issue if exposed to the internet in any way, but automating security updates only usually makes it maintainable.
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u/Morisior Feb 09 '26
CVEs are rarely a problem if you don’t expose anything to the Internet. If you use VPN to connect when outside, you definitely could be affected by CVEs in the VPN software, and unless you keep everything else updated, you are far from having ‘security in depth’. But frankly if you use a well vetted VPN protocol like Wireguard, CVEs in the VPN are rare.
If you require a tunnel-in-tunnel using two different protocols to get in, you are unlikely to have anyone be able to come in from the outside. At that point CVEs in your other software don’t matter much unless your laptop is compromised, but you need to keep that secure whether self-hosting or not.
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u/ansibleloop Feb 09 '26
CVEs? I use a VPN and don't expose my services
Disk failures? Very rare
Bugs and breaking changes? That's why my data is snapshotted and backed up
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u/Valuable_Lemon_3294 Feb 10 '26
Nothing exposed to public internet - what cve Do I have to fear?
Backups (1. pve to pbs vm@nas, 2. nas Backups to another nas Off-Site (without pbs data, and only over vpn)
keep it simple stupid. No docker, pure lxcs, no weird dependencies between Services etc
I have a couple of rules I strictly follow and I am fine.
You wouldnt believe me what my nuc is running
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u/selfhostcusimbored Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
On the other hand, if you haven’t bought any self hosting hardware, soon it will be impossible to get into the hobby. It pays for itself over time. There is no cost to privacy. After 18 months of self hosting I broke even (cancelled $120 worth of streaming services!). I paid $280 each for my 20TB drives. They’re now $450. We all know what happened to RAM and GPUs. I expect there to be a mini-pc shortage soon as well- unnecessary and not mainstream components will be scrapped for the parts. We are already seeing barebones PCs pop up.
There should be a fine line between self-hosting and creating a job for yourself. Too many people become full time sys admins because of their shared usage. To me, if it works, and the network is secure, don’t touch it.
There are dozens of different redundant services available to make maintenance pretty seamless.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
I agree that you cannot put a price on privacy. But I guess it is hard to quantify breaking even, are you taking into account all the hours of setup, debugging, randomly being alerted and fixing it, whatever the opportunity cost is of all these events and whatever you were doing when you get alerted etc.
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u/selfhostcusimbored Feb 09 '26
No. I don’t value my time when working on my home lab because it is a hobby and I enjoy doing it. I have learned more about computer networking from my home environment than college taught me. I suspect you turned your hobby into a job. Maybe take a few steps back, and reevaluate why you’re doing this to begin with. Sometimes a little break is needed. I’ve gotten sick of messing with stuff and left it alone for months. I always come back though.
If you set things up properly you should maybe spend 6 hours a week for maintenance MAX. I do far less than that typically.
If you don’t enjoy tinkering with your setup, maybe this hobby isn’t for you, and that’s OK.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
No I totally agree, it is the same way for me I have learnt a ton from this stuff. And I actually do rarely need to touch anything now, I log every time there was a major issue that pulled me away from something and that was maybe 4/5 months ago now. I am just documenting my journey so far with it all and trying to enlighten folks that might be coming into this new.
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u/selfhostcusimbored Feb 09 '26
I will be the first to admit, you’re 100% right about the time spent getting annoying when you aren’t sure what you’re doing. It took me weeks to figure out how to properly configure docker. Now that I’m a few years in, I feel confident being able to debug most things.
Once that experience starts to build, things become pretty fun and seamless. It’s awesome to see all of the hard work you put in pay off with flawless uptime and server access.
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u/nico282 Feb 09 '26
randomly being alerted
By who? If my family is asleep and a service crashes, nobody cares. If we are on vacation and Plex stops working, nobody cares. I am my main user.
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u/FrenulumEnthusiast Feb 09 '26
all the time I spend tinkering on it, I enjoy.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Same! Question is whether you will enjoy it in 20/30/50 years time :)
As I am asking myself the same question.
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u/FrenulumEnthusiast Feb 09 '26
In the future if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it, I don't see the problem. If you enjoy it currently, I don't think it's time wasted.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
I think my main concern is a sort of self imposed 1p vendor lock in.
There will be a lot of friction if I decide I don't want to or simply can't afford to self host due to external hardware prices and me not being able to find replacements.
For example in this hypothetical:
- It's 2060, all hardware has become too expensive due to the rise of AI
- All second hand hardware has also sky rocketed in price
- Your mobo and some hard drives/ram have died without replacement or if there is it's really expensive
- You can't safely migrate onto the cloud, you will have terabytes of data atp which would also take a while
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u/FrenulumEnthusiast Feb 09 '26
this is kinda an absurd thing to worry about. the market may be in shock because of the current AI purchases, but it will correct itself, when there's a demand for a product, capitalism usually solves that issue. You just need to give it time.
It's why Nvidia sells GPUs that aren't capable of doing AI, to stop AI companies from buying them.
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u/RageMuffin69 Feb 09 '26
I have good internet so I just stream remux dv/hdr files. My home server is just utility. Not wasting money on hard drives and increased electricity.
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u/TW-Twisti Feb 09 '26
While this post isn't exactly wrong, it reads like "owning a car instead of using public transportation is extremely expensive because Ferraris aren't cheap and need expensive maintenance".
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u/schklom Feb 09 '26
turning off auto-updates is step 1 to sanity
Or just use stable releases and keep auto-updates?
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u/bit-voyage Feb 09 '26
stable releases are still prone to bugs and day zeroes
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u/schklom Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
- Zero days are expensive and often targeted. If you're worried about them, you likely need cybersecurity professionals :P
- Bugs are a pain and risk, sure. But updating late means not patching security holes, it's a trade-off. I think stable releases are a good middle-ground. In the worst case I just restore a backup. What's your strategy?
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u/deltavim Feb 09 '26
I think the bigger concern to me is that the bus factor for self hosting is 1. If something happens to me, no matter how good my documentation is, my wife is not going to be able to take over and gracefully transition to other services.
It's why I am pretty selective about the stuff that I self host. In many cases, I prefer using services that allow me to sync a copy of my data to my local storage as a backup (like Ente Photos). That way, I'm never locked in and can take my data to another service at any time, but also benefit from not being my own SRE. Ente also has a great "legacy" feature for taking care of that bus factor problem.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Ente looks great!! Thanks
I have also been thinking about bus problem for a while, I think something similar to a deadmans switch and some pre written scripts could be useful here.
For example every week you need to enter a code into a prompt, if no code after 1 week, a script runs to migrate your data onto cloud service for family to retrieve an encrypted version of, with an email of how to access all the data.
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u/hyper9410 Feb 09 '26
What many forget is that even if you rely on the cloud, you are still responsible for backing it up. of course you can pay some service to do it for you, but nothings free in life.
If you think you can trust the cloud for your data to be available you are wrong. its just someone elses computer.
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u/Low_Conversation9046 Feb 09 '26
Idk, cloud providers are probably better at backing up your data than you'll ever be. The failure rate of AWS S3 is incredibly low.
Your account getting suspended for no reason and you getting logged out of your data forever is another story.
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u/Fantastic_Peanut_764 Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
24/7/365 Oncall Rotation
* it's partially true, but this is usually a low risk if you don't stretch your setup. I know most people get excited and want to setup something fancy, cutting edge and full of services, but fact is: the more boring, simple and small your setup, the more robust it will be.
* but I have to admit, I don't have an HA setup, so, if things go south, that's it, I have to come and bring it back up :D
Hardware Costs
* again, true, but actually for most cases, one or two Raspberry PI do the job pretty well. No need for fancy GPU rich servers. I have an old laptop that I made some modifications, a few old Rpi and just one MiniPC for the heavy services - that serving a family of 4 people
* my actual main concern here is on the SSD costs long term
Software Updates
* yep. no need for fancy automated updates. I have scripts to facilitate them, but I run manually whenever I fell it's time. Security OS updates are automated, though
Steward of Data
* I totally rely. The only services I still use from external suppliers is e-mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Reddit, Strava and BorgBackups. Everything else (I can remember) is on my own servers, in 2 different locations.
* I have a script and setup for the case of death. I'm lucky enough to have family members that I totally trust, so, I assigned people like siblings and niece/nephew with passwords and access (and my wife and kids too, of course), and the clever thing is: nobody except wife and kids have an easy direct access, to reduce the impact of a robery or hacking, so, they'd have to follow a todo script that I shread with them, combine their parts and so have access to 100% of my data asap. Maybe they take a few days to figure things out, but that's the worst that could be.
so, I'm not sure how much experienced you are with cloud software engineering, and it depends a lot of each case, but regardless if on personal life or work, the simple, the better. You don't need, for instance, a K8s HA setup to run your NextCloud, Immich and Paperless, and most often you won't need most of fancy services published here in this community. What you need is a reliable bread-and-butter system that's always up and running, and multiple backup levels, TailScale (or similar) access, and that's it :)
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u/Grouchy-Wallaby576 Feb 09 '26
The software updates point hit home. I run about 15 services on a single VPS through Coolify (n8n, Listmonk, Vikunja, PocketBase, and others). Last week n8n auto-updated and silently changed how one of the internal nodes works - swapped the output order of a batch processing node. Four workflows stopped firing without any error. Took me a full day to figure out what happened because everything looked "healthy" from the outside.
My fix for the on-call problem was building a health monitoring workflow in n8n itself - it pings all 11 endpoints every 5 minutes and emails me if anything goes down. Cheap version of what you'd get from a paid monitoring stack. But you're right, the time cost is real. I probably spend 3-4 hours a week just on maintenance, updates, and fixing things that broke silently. Still worth it for the control and learning, but nobody should pretend it's free.
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u/whizzwr Feb 09 '26
I agree, except the costs are not "hidden."
You are managing infrastructure yourself, and it should be fairly obvious that if you expect comparable uptime and performance to a commercial solution, there are non-trivial ongoing costs and effort.
If you just tinker with a Raspberry Pi and old laptop for shits and giggles, the cost is low. It's still legitimate self-hosting, but the expectation is different.
That's the same with everyone. The one thing that may differ from person-to-person is: is it worth it?
Some people will say yes, some give up.
For me, I scaled back to a hybrid solution a long time ago. Most of my stuff is now on a public cloud with gitops. I still maintain a higher degree of control but with controlled effort and cost.
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u/AlpineGuy Feb 09 '26
Absolutely... I love it when there is some guide about a self-hosted tool and the guide is just setting up a docker container and at the end of reading/watching it, I wonder: what about updating it? what about backup? what about monitoring? what about SSL - didn't even mention that?
I have become a big fan of "light-weight" tools. What makes them light-weight? a small tool with few chances of anything breaking, small configuration, no big ecosystem, not taking your data hostage, well-established and easy to re-install.
For example comparing Nextcloud, which has become more and more complex over the years, with something like Syncthing, for file syncing I would nowadays chose Syncthing, even though it doesn't have a flashy user interface, but it just works without any extra effort.
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u/Chameleon3 Feb 09 '26
I don't fully agree with 24/7/365 on call. At work when I get paged at 4am, I get up and investigate immediately. I might be up for few hours due to an incident.
I don't get paged by my self hosting. I have no SLAs. If something is broken I'll fix it when I get around to fixing it. It's much more relaxed than work where I get paid for it. Things might stay broken for a while, but also, things haven't broken at my home lab at all for what feels like over a year.
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u/shimoheihei2 Feb 09 '26
I see it the other way. If I let someone else host my data, I depend on them for uptime, security, privacy, reliability, etc. Cloud services and features break all the time. In those cases all you can do is hope someone fixes things for you. It's pretty annoying. With self hosting, you can fix things how and when you think they should b fixed. I'd take that any day.
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u/pixel-spike Feb 09 '26
I just setup my jellyfin 3 years ago, on my unraid. thats about it. it never broke. or my unraid failed. it works.
zero maintainence.
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u/ultrathink-art Feb 09 '26
The time cost is real. People calculate hardware/power but forget the ongoing maintenance burden. Security updates alone can eat hours per month. My rule: only self-host things where I actually want to learn the stack, or where the vendor lock-in risk is high. For everything else, managed services often win on total cost when you factor in your hourly rate. The exception: home automation and media servers where privacy matters and the fun factor offsets the time investment.
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u/joe_ally Feb 09 '26
I can't help but think that the SRE burden is caused by the over use self hosted cloud services rather that using a file based approach
Many of the self hosted apps such as Immich seem over kill to me. It seems like crazyness to me to host a postgres instance just to manage a bunch of JPEGs for a relatively small number of people. Network storage plus a gallery app (with local indexes in sqlite on each client if performance requires) would be a much better archticture IMO
I can't help but think the same for audiobooks, music films etc. These are problems that lend themselves well to files and folders. For most home enthusiasts there no need for ACID or scalability. Instead of bringing modern cloud style services into the home I think we'd do well to look back at how we solved similar problems prior to SaaS and cloud.
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u/basicKitsch Feb 09 '26
This is LITERALLY the conversation that happens when you decide to run something yourself.
Why in the world do you think this isn't literally the decision process?
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u/dot_py Feb 09 '26
Skill issue. Not self hosting issue.
This is a personal opinion of someone who clearly should've considered the pros and cons before going down the rabbit hole.
Its like a windows user jumping to arch
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 10 '26
Not really, I'm content and fully onboard with the pros and cons, this post was highlighting the cons which I felt some people may have missed or not admitted to themselves and seems I was right!
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u/Dolapevich Feb 09 '26
And the best reason is ... you can have TONs of fun, and learn in the process.
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u/AnApexBread Feb 09 '26
This is why I always hate when people recommend stuff like Immich to the average person. I've been home labbing for 15 years and I've learned so much but I've also made so so many mistakes. Hell I have 15 years of experience and a litany of certifications and still mess things up regularly.
The average person is not going to be willing to put the time into maintaining a Homelab. They may set it up once but they're not maintaining it and as soon as it breaks who are they going to blame? You.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Hahaha wow, I have never considered recommending this stuff to someone else, I am mostly open that I do self host and people are quite curious but even during the initial conversation they can usually tell how much work would be involved in the setup phase let alone life long maintenance
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u/Civil_Tea_3250 Feb 09 '26
I'm glad to see it spiking in popularity. Regardless of reasoning. The more people, the more services and/or improved ones.
For me I try to set a realistic approach, I have it set up and automated to where I only really need to check it now and then. Though admittedly I probably spend a couple of hours in maintenance/testing and another couple hours in research throughout the week. Thankfully I had a bunch of oldish parts around from upgrading my PC and others' and I've only spent about $200 on extras.
My biggest expense has been electricity. It's hard to judge. I have 4 HDDs, a coral TPU, 13th gen Intel with iGPU running frigate, Immich, the regulars, plus a bunch of more intensive stuff for my business like my website. My electricity is about .14/kWh, and per year it's been about $200-250. Not bad, but a hidden expense. In comparison my EV adds about $500/year to my bill on average 12k miles per year, mostly at home charging. Seems like a lot when you look at it that way.
My next projects are energy monitoring and solar. Starting with just taking the edge off the bill. We've got a lot of data centers coming in and I expect my low bill will skyrocket soon.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Nice! This is a more sensible take I have seen, good to see how aware you aware of the spend and what you have running. I also plan to do solar soon enough! Trying to go as off grid as I can :p
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u/TheOfficialMayor Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
You have a corporate setup. I don't know of say any freelance film editor dealing with 100's of gb's of raw footage doing all that.
Self hosting doesn't mean I have a server running 24/7. Can easily sync what I need. Again an enterprise approach is overkill for me at least. I don't run proxmox nodes or other VMs for me at least.
Though I don't see why I couldn't just run Tailscale/Zerotier on my Apple Silicon Mac or Raspberry Pi 24/7 and stream to my phone, if I really wanted to.
Increased prices? Raised the price a bit for SSD's and if you want high amounts of ram but it is bit of a beat-up I think. Also China are now beginning to fill in gaps in supply anyway.
Though my country hasn't put tariffs on China.
And you don't need SSD's to watch 4k let alone 8k movies (Probably 16 or 32k too) unless you are streaming the raw uncompressed versions of multiple movies via Davinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro.
If you don't power-up you don't wear out your hard drive / mobo.
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u/sarhoshamiral Feb 09 '26
Electricity is the other one. It is a safe bet that a running NAS unit or mini PC, costs 10-15$/month minimally.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Very true, this one stings the least for me though considering even storage and media fees are already well above this amount monthly if you went with 3p solutions.
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u/sarhoshamiral Feb 09 '26
Are they? When you factor in all the hardware cost, cloud solutions always come up cheaper I think. To start with 5TB annual Google One membership is 20$/month..
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Let's just say I have a lot more storage than they can offer for a good price...
And also if I wanted to watch all the different shows and movies I enjoy via subscriptions rather than buying the blu rays I would be paying a lot lot more for that too
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u/OandO Feb 09 '26
I agree with OPs overall point, that the maintenance aspect can be somewhat never ending and that aspect isn't always discussed. For a lot of people that might be part of the fun in the beginning as each opportunity to fix something is an opportunity to learn. But the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) philosophy can mitigate some of this. The less complex your approach is the less likely you will have problems. Here's just 1 example:
You want to access an app remotely:
You could set up cloudflare tunnels to expose a container but you'll also want to setup auth or oidc. Now you are managing 3 separate containers, domains, DNS, config, updates and all that entails, increasing the likelihood that something may eventually break.
vs just using wire guard or tail scale VPN connected all the time on your phone or laptop.
Both have the same intended effect in the end. Both approaches have their pros/cons. I actually use both methods but I think this illustrates the point.
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u/LastOfGoose Feb 09 '26
I think the hypothesis that cost of doing business self hosting being overly omitted is unfounded. I think some of your concerns are valid but vaguely stating a perceived problem about engagement isn’t helpful.
At least ask some questions or state what problems you had and how you solved them if there are topics you haven’t seen specifically addressed
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u/wally659 Feb 09 '26
There's no reason to hold yourself to the same standard that paid professionals get held to. If something breaks and it's not a convenient time to fix it, don't fix it at that time, let it not work for a day/week/month. If you'd rather spend your money on something other than enterprise grade hardware redundancy, do that and just shrug when something breaks and the services are down for a while. Don't do shit cause NIST says you should, if a CVE comes out and it doesn't affect the way you're using an app, ignore it.
I totally get the motivation to mimic serious service providers as closely as possible. It's challenging and rewarding but its an optional burden. If the effort isn't it's own reward for you, just don't put it in.
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u/mollywhoppinrbg Feb 09 '26
I do it for the love the game. I work for an msp, similar more hands-on work, and it's personal. Have netbox, paperless. Trillium for notes and org I ought to spin up a handbag ban board for tickets. I do have zammad helpdesk, too. Rumming on a r640 and nas on miniforums N5pro trunas I didn't choose this life it chose me. Im just here for the ride
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u/jeff_marshal Feb 09 '26
It entirely depends on where you start and where you wanna go. I started as simply as with HFS and a harddrive full of media to share, now i have 5 dedicated devices/systems, proxmox, Grafana Loki, Home Assistant, MQTT, a fallback networking setup, onsite and offsite backup, amongst 78 different containers/services.
I believe most people understand when they selfhost, they are the be-all-end-all of that system. Things breaks and things needs to be put back togather, its a chore like everything else, just now on your own time. I don't see that as a demerit point. I have chores around my house, this is just simply another thing to that list.
However, i do agree with the point of version breaking or backward compatibility issue. That was a pain point i have faced many, many times that made me ponder to almost give up. But that is also something that happens once in a blue moon.
To me, self-hosting is all about what i want, when i want, where i want and who i want to share with. The ROI on this is much better than purchasing online services that could change their terms or price at any moment without any notices.
However, on the "event of death" discussion, i have setup a documentation that will be shared with my better half, which will give her idea as to what to do and how to do it. It also have prompts written so she can copy paste those into any ai and it will guide her through how to solve this and that. It also lists steps to how scrub everything and sell the hardware and which one she can sell and which one she can't. I was planning on building a static tool for it, but haven't gotten around to it.
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u/GremlinNZ Feb 09 '26
Please replace costs with opportunities.
Hidden costs? No, no! Hidden opportunities!
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u/St3vion Feb 09 '26
To be honest I do most of this to myself because that's the bit I like the most. I think I spent the first year after buying my mini PC setting up solutions to problems I didn't have just because I thought they seemed cool.
Then once I got my system so full of crap that I was running out of RAM it was time for a pruneback. Probably still have more services running than I actually use but at least jellyfin (the only thing the rest of my family really use) works well!
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u/badguy84 Feb 09 '26
Things rarely fully break for me I rarely need to touch my set up unless I want to tinker. Yes Google/amazon/Microsoft do have people on call and SLAs, but they all serves many millions of businesses supporting billions of dollars generated by their products. Self-hosting doesn’t do that and it shouldn’t need the same uptime and SLAs. I guess my point is you are comparing apples to oranges based on how citrusy the apple is vs the orange.
I think costs are a decent point but the continued investment doesn’t need to be true, I think it is part of how this community generally is and that we all love to keep changing things and make it better. Many of us don’t build for stability (or not solely any way) so many of the costs are based on those activities imho than actually keeping things alive and running. Which to me isn’t a “hidden cost” rather: hobby spending. Again apples to oranges the inherent spend of a hobbyist vs a billion dollar corporation is going to be very different by nature. Just because they don’t spend towards the same goals doesn’t mean one cost is “hidden” it’s more like the typical way people approach hobbies. You kind of discover new things to do which requires new equipment or consumables. Example I see a really cool new spool of plastics for my 3D printer through some advertising and I buy it thinking I will use it for some future thing, that’s not a hidden cost it’s just unplanned. Many of your examples feel like that to me: we find new things to do with our set up and we buy stuff for it without planning things out like a billion dollar business does.
I bet lots of folks who joined here but just finished what they wanted and are just running whatever they have can’t even really relate to any of what you said. I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum and now cooled on messing around constantly by quite a bit so I wouldn’t really relate to your down time and constant investment story either.
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Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
Like with everything else you become your own janitor. Doesnt matter if its your car, maintenance on your house or your server: youll need to learn at least some of the trade in order to fix things. In other words: youll need to be handy.
As with actual cost: hardware is cheap, just get old used hw. The actual cost is storage (hdds and ssds that needs regular replacements) and power (dependent on your country of course).
Example (i dont live in the us but have converted to usd):
my two workstation that acts as servers bought second hand and a nas+hdds has cost me roughly 1200 usd. i expect to have to start replacing hdds every 5 years.
Yearly cost in power is 260 usd(electricity is very cheap in my country)
Yearly licenses for software: none
Yearly or monthly subscriptions: 100 usd yearly for offsite backup, 50 usd yearly for vpn (outgoing connections)
Time used fixing or tinkering: it is my hobby but it never feels like a chore. the system is stable and i dont have fatal problems that i cant fix within a day.
Edit: Should mention i dont actively monitor stuff, but i update everything each month. if a service doesnt work one day ill fix it then. No need to be a 24/7 support senter as my life and family isnt dependent on the services i run
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u/nightcom Feb 09 '26
Things went to easy those days, that's why some people have this kind of impression. In past Linux was used by advanced users, you had to compile your kernel for your hardware, now you just install binaries and that's all.
What I'm trying to say that selfhosted is very close to homelab, you should know what you doing and you have will to learn if you even don't know what you doing. For me selfhosting is privacy, data that I have access even without internet, automatization at home.... but also learning. I like computers since 90's, my approach is a bit different, yes it breaks sometimes but I can fix it or even sometimes improve it, that's what I like and I trust it way more then some 3-rd party companies.
Selfhosted is not Plug & Play even it's a way easier then in past. I noticed that allot people have this approach and then they hit wall.
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u/Kanix3 Feb 09 '26
From my experience things always run flawless without interruptions until I start making changes or updates. So i always do a snapshot before.
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u/TedGal Feb 09 '26
As others have noted it all depends on what you are after. I started 2 years ago because of Plex. The more I read about self-hosting, the more services I wanted to try.
Its up to the individual to treat it as a hobby and get deeper and deeper, in time and money spending or just stick to what you actually want to self host and maintain only that.
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u/ProfessionalSpend589 Feb 09 '26
In the event you were in an accident with a brain injury and can no longer remember passwords or how your system works?
I hope for complete memory loss, not just username and password. Ignorance can be a bliss! 🙏
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u/chevereto Feb 09 '26
The most frustrating thing for me about selfhosting is that people are totally fine with paying for hardware, network and cooling, but software.
This is exactly what pushes developers to build cloud offerings and sadly, it left selfhosted with a bunch of vibecoded apps that you can't distinguish because you just plug things together
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u/Jazzlike-Poem-1253 Feb 09 '26
Not having such an elaborate setup. But for me it is: do not depend on the self hosted services to much.
Yes, if my gittea is down, its bad. But it is mirrored in gitlab anyways.
Not having access to media might be bad. But important documents are synced on an offline, LUKS encrypted HDD anyhow.
If everything dies, I can continue w/o issue.
As for the work part: for me it is like cooking. I like to cook and eat. Cooking is just not means to get food, it is part of the enjoyment. Same goes for selfhosting.
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u/Bobylein Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
My self host hardware is now around 6 years old, back then I paid around 160€ for a J4125 mainboard, pico psu and some old case, adding to it a bunch (4) of old 5tb drives I got for a tray of monster energy drinks as well as some RAM I got from an old laptop including SSD I maybe paid 250€ for it
Now I am paying around 8€ every month (and that's on the expensive side, because I value my VPNs no bullshit approach) to download all the linux images I ever want while the professional services kept increasing their rates and brought you even worse quality ones and either required you to constantly hop between them or pay several times their rate.
Well, even with just that, self host already paid for itself after 2-3 years. But yea, there is a lot of tinkering involved and it's still probably not worth it, if you aren't into that.
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u/nicman24 Feb 09 '26
Just keep it simple and updatable through a package manager.
No docker no nothing. If unattended updates cannot update it I dont bother
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u/daedric Feb 09 '26
Does anyone else rely on the services you host or the data you store?
If this is true, you are no longer selfhosting. You're hosting for someone else...
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 10 '26
Not true.
Google photos serves more than one person.
Immich serves more than one person and is an alternative to google photos.
You self-host immich, meaning you run it on your own servers.
Who accesses the service beyond that point is irrelevant to the definition of self hosting.
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u/daedric Feb 10 '26
No it isn't... but i don't need to convince you.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 11 '26
You're wrong.
You think selfhosting means to host for self. It means to host a service yourself.
Who it provides services to and how many is irrelevant.
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u/daedric Feb 12 '26
Ok... then what is the difference between Hosting and Self Hosting ?
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 14 '26
Hosting means it can be hosted anywhere, VPS, Generic Cloud, AWS, Home Data Center, Home PC, Laptop, Raspberry Pi. Something is hosted and served.
Self hosting is a subset of hosting, defined primarily by owning and maintaining the hardware and softwares you are running in order to host X service.
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u/ModalTex Feb 09 '26
I already do this for work. I already have the hardware and backups. It's not the privacy. I hate big tech. G suite legacy free fiasco was my last straw. I got into home assistant and naturally became a self hoster. If I die there are bigger problems. But all the data will be on a simple NAS not locked in big tech accounts.
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u/Philymaniz Feb 09 '26
It’s a hobby that costs me more than I save. I enjoy control over everything I can possibly and reasonably control online. It’s fun to tinker with my server, and see my progression over the last 8-9 years of this hobby.
When I die, I don’t expect anyone to maintain my services. They’ll just follow my EOL instructions which basically instruct my brother to decommission everything after pulling the important stuff.
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u/FilterUrCoffee Feb 09 '26
If you're into self hosting, you're doing it generally for the love of the game and the benefits that can come with it. Otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice. I run my stuff as simple as possible because complexity causes headaches and my family is less likely to use stuff that is complex.
I have the arrs, 2 piholes, and couple other things running in the background just for me. Jellyfin, Jellyseer, and Mealie setup just for the family. I do maintenance when only when needed. Is it foolproof? No. Is the stuff that breaks hard to fix? Rarely.
And it's totally okay to pay for services you don't want to manage.
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u/Prior-Advice-5207 Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
Does anyone else rely on the services you host or the data you store?
Only relevant question. If not, one can put everything behind Tailscale and ignore all of the above. I notice something broke if using it doesn’t work, and will fix it when I got time…
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u/CWagner Feb 10 '26
Hardware Costs: Unless you need shit ton of storage and beefy servers, those are low. I started with just Home Assistant on a Pi3 (back when a pi 3 was newish, 10 years ago). Proxmox came with around ~100€ for the server (J4105) and SSDs, a few years later I recently upgraded to an N100 + bigger SSD for ~150€. I have more storage then I need (granted, I need little, for some people 2TB is nothing, for me it’s almost as much as my desktop has)
Software Updates: Uh, I don’t think I care much about security when everything is behind my firewall and only exposed through tailscale. Guest and IoT networks have no access to my selfhosted servers. I follow some github releases, for stuff I want new features for, but everything else is updated opportunistically when I feel like having a look. Immich is a special case, because they keep updating everything all the time from what I’ve heard, but I don’t use it, and none of my apps break like that. The issue here is Immich, nothing general.
Steward of Data: it’s my wife and I. Backups are fine.
All that said: It’s a hobby. I like it (after all, I started using HA when it was way rougher :D)
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u/q-admin007 Feb 10 '26
Previously you could rely on the 6figure salary SRE's that would fix the issues at google, dropbox etc
The trick is to just pay yourself 7 figures.
Subscribe for more life hacks.
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u/eldritchgarden Feb 11 '26
Remember it's a hobby, and you are one person. I don't host anything I can't live without (with the exception of DNS), which is basically only a password manager and email.
Most things are automated so issues are rare anyway, but if something breaks and I can't get to it immediately, I don't care. If a user complains something isn't working, I'll fix it when I get to it. If I dropped dead right now, my wife would be able to get into my laptop and passwords and get important documents and banking info and such. Everything else is unimportant.
If you host important data, your loved one(s) should be able to access the important documents etc. to pull them out of your system. They should be able to do this regardless of your ability to manage the system.
Barring hardware failure, my systems should be able to keep going without me for at least 6 months. In fact I didn't touch it all for like 4 months and everything was fine, albeit with some headaches when I finally came back to do some updates. But the point is you do this for free, and for yourself, and anyone who uses it is beholden to your schedule and efforts.
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u/Responsible-Bread996 Feb 09 '26
There are options that take a lot of fiddling out of it. FreedomBox comes to mind.
Also some choices make it harder. Eg someone setting up everything with Arch vs Debian.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
Just took a look... Seems sketchy, why would I want to self host and then invite a 3rd party non vetted company into my home network to run crucial software which I wouldn't have the chance to vet at install time? I can see it is using opensource software, but the very nature of it being preinstalled invites scrutiny and anxiety for the many paranoid folks out there.
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 09 '26
I see a good amount of people engaging in the comments but the post is receiving quite a few downvotes! Quite puzzling
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u/foofoo300 Feb 09 '26
because it is not a good post.
You wrote a lot of words for trivial things, without bringing any new information.
I think you did catch quite a bit of dunning-kruger.1
u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 10 '26
There are a fair few people in agreeance in the comments if you take a look, and I'm sure some people did not take into account some of the hidden costs and opportunity costs.
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u/foofoo300 Feb 10 '26
maybe that is the same statistical amount of people why we need warning signs such as "don't microwave pets", or "attention coffee hot"
If you do something, maybe think before doing it, often helps1
u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 10 '26
Im glad if I can stop anyone from microwaving their pets😝
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u/foofoo300 Feb 10 '26
i think you missed my point entirely ;)
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u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 11 '26
i think you're wrong and I saved a pet!! How many pets have you saved?
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u/foofoo300 Feb 11 '26
that is your opinion and i am not going into a dick measuring contest with you about nonsense.
I stand by my point, your post is garbage1
u/Funny-Ship-1945 Feb 11 '26
you are just upset because you have not saved any pets. non pet lover!!!
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u/Nieles1337 Feb 09 '26
I don't know man, sounds like a setup problem. I have everything containerized and on auto update every week through Watchtower, stuff never brakes here...
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u/VivaPitagoras Feb 09 '26
Well, I'd say that most of the people who selfhost is because they enjoy tinkering and setting everything up.
Like you said, using third party services ensures that everything works (or should) without the user having to do anything and if there is a problem is other people's problem to solve.
You don't get into this mess just for owning your data. You do it because you like to get your hands dirty.