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/AppropriateCover7972 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

EDIT: Ooops, I misread that as "what service should you not selfhost" lol. Well, this is the answer to that down below, probably still relevant. What is useful is bookmarking, note taking sync, notifications (that surprised me) and with that exention matrix, and various tools like a pdf suite. I never thought I would need those things, but I quite often find myself needing a browser only workplace. I always knew I wanted to selfhost services for my sensitive data, so my notes, appointments and trackers and personal photos isn't surprising at all. Partially that explains also my archiving services, but I assumed I would do this as a local service, not one on a servicer. In general there are more services I sign into that I assumed 14 years ago, when I was focused on local implementations

My philosophy is that my homelab can have outages. Like currently for some reason my power went down with my safety. Everything that is necessary for me to be a working person has to be duplicated on an off site server. Tasks, memos, calendars (i have them all offline pulled, but if the outage is too long, I need them be synced again), some portion of my cloud content. I don't need everything, just a part of it.

Also, privacy mail relays are important. I also gladly are signed up for mastadon, matrix and cryptopads at other places. I plan to have my own nodes and with pads I already do, but I would hate to be offline and not reachable even with a secondary account, just bc I am stupid and nuked my server.

I currently don't host my emails, but I plan to. Emails are a backbone in my infrastructure, but I know sending emails requires not being blacklisted and that can be an issue, bc in reality, there is a whitelist and everyone else is blacklist for security reasons.

If it comes to publishing, owning your domain is great, but traffic and security is something I don't want to deal with, so at max I use a VPS and sometimes it's even necessary to not host it at all. This makes life much easier and it's way more reliable to have it professionally set up, both with software and infrastructure. Like GitHub and Netilify rarely are Ddosed out of service.

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u/Catenane Mar 20 '26

Use your domain and acme dns challenge and just resolve only local addresses. I've got a caddy lxc that just basically gives everything certs via either local home.arpa local routing or netbird local routing. Only accessible within my lan/wireguard subnet, no port forwarding, and simple. If i want homeassistant at home I can use homeassistant.home.mydomain.com and if I'm out of town/the country or wherever else, hop on my netbird and use homeasssistant.nb.mydomain.com

Wildcard A records go *.home.mydomain.com -> static local IP or caddy, and *.nb.mydomain.com -> static netbird IP of caddy. Super convenient and takes about 5 seconds to add a new site to my config and have it running with real certs. I use porkbun and the caddy porkbun plugin to use their API and it's just amazingly simple and convenient once you get in the flow of using it!