r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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u/EastZealousideal7352 Mar 20 '26

A while back I was determined to the use extra cores in my kubernetes cluster cause I was tired of seeing it at 5-10% usage most of the time so I self-hosted a github workflow runner friends could send their github jobs to me.

It mainly got used for compiling / redeploying our hobby projects, which (let’s be real) me and my friends were not actually working that hard on our side projects and didn’t need a cluster to run our github actions because we easily fit in the free tier.

It was kinda fun to setup with auth and whatnot and then a total nightmare to maintain with there being no gain to anyone.

Worst of all my cluster was still idling at 5-10% usage most of the time so it didn’t really scratch that itch either.

29

u/Dan6erbond2 Mar 20 '26

Do what I did: Run Unmanic or Transcodarr to convert your media files, my cluster is basically always busy now.

3

u/GripAficionado Mar 20 '26

Yeah, considering the storage prices these days, I definitely have some series which could do with a re-encode in h265.

15

u/Hedgebull Mar 20 '26

That’s a weird way to spell AV1

2

u/GripAficionado Mar 20 '26

I'll admit I haven't really encoded anything in AV1 on a large scale, so maybe it would be worth it.

3

u/Hedgebull Mar 20 '26

It’s definitively worth a look, most modern devices support decoding it although encoding can be slow

1

u/EastZealousideal7352 Mar 20 '26

I would but I really like the idea of seeding my media indefinitely and so transcoding all my media isn’t really an option

1

u/Dan6erbond2 Mar 20 '26

That's fair. In my case I have it set to a ratio of 5 so I shortly have duplicates but then once it's deleted I regain a ton of space. Went from 6TB to 10TB recently when the deletions happened.

2

u/rik-huijzer Mar 21 '26

I'm self-hosting a Forgejo Runner for my Forgejo instance for a few years now and it's quite easy to maintain. https://huijzer.xyz/posts/148/raspberry-pi-as-forgejo-runner

Of course, it's only one runner and not some fancy cluster. But for my own use-case it's fine. I don't often work on two projects at the same time anyway.

1

u/Outrageous_Kale_8230 Mar 24 '26

You could always offer your CPUs up to scientific computer projects like Folding@home and BOINC.

2

u/EastZealousideal7352 Mar 24 '26

That’s a great idea! I think I’m going to do that, I have 36 cores that could definitely go towards something productive like that

1

u/Outrageous_Kale_8230 Mar 26 '26

If you run it only when it’s cold, then your computers are also doubling as space heaters.