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.

I don't run any containers.

I own my own data.

I back up my own computers.

My email is mine.

You don't need to overcomplicate it, it's not a competition, and you don't have to do what everyone else does.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news..

It's all shits and giggles for me. Whatever service I fancy gets spun up, poked at and then left running until I need to free up resources for the next thing. It's a wonderful mess.

I'd say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it's just a fancy way to tag documents. I don't need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There's a "before paperless" era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

Now, it's a solid 100%.

Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I'd say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I'd still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that's pretty much the only thing.

Having Nextcloud, PiHole and LibreELEC/Kodi is something I wouldn't want to miss

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.

For me the biggest is probably Jellyfin. Before, I needed to use external drives plugged into my TV, then browse them using the TVs file browser. I didn't see which movies I already watched, or at which episode I stopped. When I wanted to watch something on my computer, I had to get the drive and plug it in there. The same for when I wanted something new. Now, I have Jellyfin running on my server, all the clients have access to it and I can watch my stuff whenever and wherever I like. It's also easier to share something.

Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, local storage and email are used constantly. All bring great improvements.

Ansible and Zabbix provide 'support' for these applications.

Media streaming is a 'nice to have' but not essential. Wireguard is seldom used but still very important.

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.

Both, i like setting up the network and trying out selfhosted services.

Definitely improved my daily routines:

​

- Paperless-ngx, connected to my email. All my bills and purchases are backed up. So easy to find documents/warranty documents.

- Nextcloud, for backing up my phone and personal life. Too much data for cloud providers and pivate.

- Plex/Jellyfin, easy way to watch all my Linux iso's without paying 10 different streaming services. Still subscribed to two steaming services though (family).

- Adguard, lifesaver to browse the web without going crazy.

- Immich, awesome photo viewer with mobile app.

- Syncthing, awesome tool to sync data. Use it to sync my Obisian notes to all my devices.

- Kasm/webtop, have my own OS in browser to access from any web browser securely.

- Restic, tool to backup everything to Backblaze. You can use any storage solution.

- Wireguard VPN, to easy access my services and have adblocking on my phone and laptop outside of my LAN.

Little bit of both I suppose. I find it very enjoyable to have a server at home to tinker with, I'm also enjoying providing media to my friends and family (and myself). I don't use many self-hosted apps outside of media though, really only nocodb, immich and memos

For serious business :

• Jellyfin
• Paperless-ng
• Mealie (only MY receipes)
• Home assistant (cool stuff with domotic)
• Yourls
• ruTorrent
• ytdl_api_ng (download videos directly on my server)
• pihole (bye bye most of ads)
• gitea
• seafile (more reliable than nextcloud)
• overleaf (easier to install on docker that install a LaTeX distribution on all my computers)
• Deemix
• Custom backup report
• Custom uptime report

For the lol :

• Aria 2 (no real usage for me)
• Nextcloud (bad desktop client, gave up, still useful to share some files)
• Wikijs (to lazy to maintain documentation)
• Memos (can't replace google keep)
• Portainer (I manage things manually)
• Webmin (for some dangerous things only)

I almost disabled everything else.

Both.

I think its a fun hobby but I tend to only use apps that will serve a function for me. So, I dont have to many. On my setup I have piHole, a CUPS server, boinc, a QNAP NAS, openmedia vault that backups the NAS, Home assistant, and my most used Komga.

Using navidrome and jellyfin daily, and komga a lot!

Rely on a lot of my selfhosted stuff like my media stack, immich, syncthing (phone backups), home assistant, vaultwarden. Saves me a bunch of money from subscriptions

I host it to have my own data under my own roof.

• Nextcloud (everything from pictures, over tax stuff to my keepass database)
• Matrix server (even more important with every government on this planet pushing against encrypted messengers)
• PiHole, that i can also use via DoH from my phone
• Traccar instance to keep an eye on my car, when it's in for service / maintenance / when i'm abroad
• ...

I've worked in the hosting industry. I've witnessed an internal breach, where an employee abused access over a few corners and fetched files matching a certain pattern from all customer VPSes (Virtuozzo container based VPSes have their root filesystem accessible from the host)

I moved to self hosting so that I have more control over my data and it's fun. The services below except for GNS3 are what I use on a daily basis

- Homeassistant for all my home automation needs

- OpenMediaVault for my NAS

- Nextcloud for storage, calendars, backups etc.

- Emby and Audiobookshelf for family to stream media

- Netbox to document network installations for work

- Rustdesk as an alternative to Teamviewer/Anydesk etc

- GNS3 to simulate and test network topologies

- Partkeepr as an inventory management system to keep track of my companies inventory

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.

Both. It's a marketable skill...

"I created a custom CI/CD pipeline using F/OSS to host dozens of microservices in my home lab, ranging from X to Y, including setting up DNS, port forwarding, registering a domain name, setting up a reverse proxy and VPN, managing docker containers..."

I was able to use a similar pitch to prove I had the chops for a new role involving a lot more Devops stuff at work. I've never done devops for work, but I know the theory and have a minimum level of practice that someone only needs to explain a topic once or twice. Hands-on experience is invaluable

I went through a long phase of fiddling around. Trying out multiple hypervisors, operating systems, docker containers, etc.

I have settled on the following and only do software updates now. I found stuff I want, have it all set up, and now I want it all to just work. I have daily automated backups so if something gets borked, I just restore. Also use Debian and Debian based for everything. Least amount of headache (for me) and rock solid.

1. Proxmox host and Proxmox Backup Server
2. VM's - pfSense, Home Assistant and Debian 11 for docker containers
3. Pi-hole, Cloudflared, Vaultwarden and Stirling PDF in LXC's
4. Docker Containers - UniFi Controller, InvoiceNinja, PiGallery2, LinkAce and Jellyfin
5. NAS - OpenMediaVault with Syncthing
6. Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale to have access to everything when out

I am legally blind. I got into programming and linux specifically so that I can improve my life, even though I don't want to pursue an IT career professionally.

So, the short answer to your question is: most of my apps really do improve my daily life. And a good many of them I wrote myself.

Here's a largely-arbitrary mind dump:

• Windows, unfortunately, has the best on-screen magnifier, so I cannot entirely leave the platform.
• However, most GUI apps and web pages suck. They suck in many fascinating ways that are beyond the scope of this comment, but I have found that some tasks are quicker to perform from a CLI than from a GUI. For instance, managing documents. I can write a shell oneliner faster than I can load a GUI app for bulk file renaming or whatever other thing people tend to do. I can tell gnuplot to produce a graph much faster than I can draw one by hand.
• Until very recently there wasn't a Dark Mode for word processors. So I'd just write Markdown files in VS Code and then convert with pandoc.
• Math is much easier with scripting than with calculators
• Text to speech is a lifesaver. And sometimes you need to write your own whacky scripts to scrap webpages and read them out to yourself.
• I need to conform to academic referencing standards. Who's got time for that? Nobody. Computers can do that for me.
• Web scraping — some websites are so bad, the only way to use them is to scrape then convert.

But that's from an accessibility perspective and more programming than self-hosting per se.

Now from reading your OP, I think it is an attitude problem rather than a selfhosting problem. uBlock Origin and AdGuard (blocky, in my case) are not mutually exclusive. You just need to know how TF to use them. Since I use uBlock in Paranoid Mode (basically a lite uMatrix mode with filterlists), I don't need to block so-called tracker scripts at the DNS level. My DNS adblocker is only blocking ads. Ergo, things like shopping do not break. You are saying that it is easier to disable uBlock for shopping — but I can change DNS with one script. Just temporarily switch to 1.1.1.1 or something, and everything works. Where's the problem?

I'm not sure what your complaint is with Bitwarden. It is not exactly hard to back it up when it is running in docker, and easier still if you use vaultwarden (much simpler backend).

You say that you use 'Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Authentik, Uptime-Kuma, Wireguard' and they are not improving your life.

I'll agree on the first two, but maybe that's just because I hate webuis with a burning passion. But how are Authentik and Wireguard not improving your life?

Do you know why I use wireguard? I'll tell you why I use wireguard.

A long time ago, I needed to go to hospital. I also had a university assignment due the same day as I was in hospital. Thought to myself, 'no problem, I'll just bring my laptop with me; I've got Google Drive Sync set up so I can work on my files remotely'. So I check in, boot up, log in, and what do I see? Old files. Old files from three weeks ago. Why? Because Google Drive decided to go on strike and, in true GUI App fashion, displayed a tiny error notification in the tray icon that you would need a microscope to see. Naturally, being half-blind, I didn't see it. So now I am, figuratively up shit creek without a paddle!

So what do I do? Well, I deploy "KVM over Mom". I ask my mom to drive back home — mind you, this is a 70-minute drive — and get her to bring my machine up. I walk her through getting into my machine and resurrecting Google Drive Sync. And then I spend 4 hours in the hospital queue finishing off my assignment.

That episode taught me a few things:

• Google sucks but I have to live with it
• KVM-over-Mom is not a viable long-term solution
• I need remote access
• Redundancy is good.

So, fast-forward a few months and I am using my dad's NAS as a jumphost/proxy into our home network, where I can use wake-on-lan and RDP to connect to my machine. I have also switched from Google Drive Sync to File Stream (as it then was) so that my files are automatically available in gdrive. And that latter bit saves my ass some months later when my dad's NAS has a disagreement with a kernel update and I can no longer remote in. We also have a hoard of Chinese bots hammering away at our internet-facing 16-year-old router, so that's not great either. Also, ssh tunnels are neat, but are annoying to configure.

Fast forward a few years and an Unspecified Virus of Unspecified Origin that temporarily obviated the need for remote access, I now use a VPN. In fact, me being a somewhat cautious person, I use several VPNs, for remote access into my home network. There is a vanilla wireguard "in case things with multiple moving parts break" tunnel and more convenient mesh orchestrators, although I have a hard time finally deciding between innernet and headscale.

And does having remote access to my home computer improve my life? Yes. Most definitely. My home computer and server have much more storage than does my laptop. And sometimes you just need access to your copy of Hanks Australian Constitutional Law 12th ed, what can I say....

The issue I see with many self-hosters is that they start with a solution looking for a problem as evidenced by the frequent "I am bored, tell me what to selfhost" posts we see on this sub. It is much better to start with a problem and try to solve it. Then you don't have to have an existential crisis over whether you are hosting too many replicas of postresql..

:wq

I went the opposite direction: I did use local clients and migrated from those to self-hosted solutions with web interfaces.

Notes for example: I used to keep notes locally until I discovered first BookStack then Trilium. Trilium does everything I need, but simply having a link to its web interface on my dashboard and editing notes in there is so much more convenient than keeping a local client updated on all my devices and setting up sync.

For the same reason, I prefer using one self-hosted webmail client (currently simply NextCloud Mail) over installing Thunderbird on all my devices.

Same with Vikunja, I am perfectly happy with the functionality and web interface, I find it more convenient than installing many local clients.

Last but not least, FreshRSS has completely changed the way I consume information from the internet. And again, having an amazing web interface, being able to freely switch devices, without having to maintain/sync several local clients, is extremely convenient.

And that's just productivity apps, my whole entertainment setup depends on my media centre: Audiobookshelf, Jellyfin, Navidrome. There is no way I could run this (and freely switch devices) without these self-hosted solutions.

Yes and yes. I do actually use a bunch of stuff but a lot of it is for experimenting. I regularly use Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, PiHole, Nginx, among a few others but for experimenting, I recently set up a container will Mullvad vpn so I can use that vpn networking for my qbittorent container.

I'm building a home lab to learn. The fact there's functionality and privacy is a good learning driver, but entirely the purpose. I suppose eventually there may be ROI, but that's not a focus at this time. :)

I am hosting useful apps and it’s a hobby! So it’s never boring or something I get sick of.

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.

Self-Hosting helps organizing my life, on productive days i plan every minute of the day,

from my self-hosted services i use multiple times a day:

iobroker

wekan

nextcloud

gitlab

mail

grocy

multiple telegram bots

​

sure for all of this is a commercial alternative, but i really hate paper and i'm fully organizing my life with this. All paper i have is scanned and saved, i don't think it's a good idea to give this amount of detailed data(including health and tax data) and important documents a commercial provider.

And i would feel everyday bad about my data being scanned. Self-Hosting is really important for me every day and makes me everyday happy

It's a little bit of both for me.

I do host things for fun. Otherwise I wouldn't be running my own instances for Lemmy and for Mastodon. I don't need to host services like an IPFS Podcasting node or a PeerTube relay server for Jupiter Broadcasting, but I like giving back to the podcasting community (and theirs in particular, mostly).

Other things could fall into both categories but are a significant improvement on my Quality of Life. Automations fired by Home Assistant make it so things like my bedroom being warm during the winter is possible without having to remember to preheat it before I sleep. Services like AdGuard Home and PiHole help me control segments of my network and prevent ads and other malicious sites from being opened on my LAN. Hosting my own password manager through Vaultwarden and my file and photo syncs through a combination of NextCloud and Syncthing, though it has availability drawbacks should my server ever crash, lets me maintain more control over my data than I otherwise could have.

Plenty of other things are nice-to-haves and not need-to-haves, but they're worth spinning up to try out and see if they fit into my lifestyle. If I didn't enjoy self-hosting, I wouldn't have started to do it in the first place.

Home Assistant, Mealie, and Blue Iris are my daily life improving apps. My kids really enjoy the Ark server too.

I need to get more use out of my plex setup, but my Fire Cube v1 in the bedroom doesn't run much reliably anymore.

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 self host because it is fun. I also run an active mail server, and a nextcloud server as my home fileshare. So, both.

Adguard !== uBlock

One is per device based and the other is solely for DNS blocking, they compliment each other.

I started just for funsies, and in the end narrowed it down to just those items that make life better for us. Primarily, I run 2 Technitium DNS (network wide ad blocking), Jellyfin (for media), Home Assistant (to control lights and other devices without internet access), Mealie (recipes), and Ubooquity (books and comics). I have run NextCloud, among other services, but none of them got enough use to make it worth it to continue.

For me, it's a mix of utility, hobby and learning.

I'm a software developer putting my toes into DevOps. I'm using Raspberry Pi for this and other projects. And I have some songs saved through the years not on Spotify, and videos I would like to make accessible easily.

We have many apps that are used daily and improve our lives, the family wiki is trillium, family photos on Photoprism, NAS storage for each person for their documents etc. navidrome for music, various for media consumption, oobabooga for a private chatgpt, automatic1111s stable diffusion UI for graphic design. Some finance logging tools I wrote to manage our finances. A series of cameras viewable that cover the house. Tasmota on dozens on smart plugs/lights/sensors etc. a zigbee network for door monitoring. Pihole. Homer as the dashboard to reach everything. Plus various others. For me it’s the golden age of self hosting, so many mature products now. I’m also pretty ruthless, if there’s something we don’t use it’s deleted.

Privacy is only going to be a more important part of your daily life going forward. So absolutely I'm enjoying selfhosting. Not relying on third-parties and/or death-by-a-thousand-cuts subscriptions is also very beneficial. Learning new skills along the way has also been a little bonus/cherry on top.

TL;DR: Selfhosting is basically a digital 'bug-out bag' for me. For when stuff goes south, you'll not be caught with your pants down.

Both!

I love Jelkyfin and Jellyseer, so does my family. It’s huge for us. Sonarr/Radarr/Bazarr enable the awesomeness.

Home Assistant is the fucking bomb. I can’t even describe how good. Married up with Shelly relays our house is ridiculous, it’s so much damn fun. And takes care of a lot for us.

Pi-Hole. Good lord. I will never live without it.

Unifi Controller. I have 5 APs ( a couple outdoor rated ones in enclosures outside even). Love the seamless roaming and multiple network controls. Guest, IoT, etc.

Vaultwarden. Outstanding password management tool. And no perpetual subscription? swoon

Project Send. Use it infrequently but it’s great.

IT Tools. Some fun little utils that are handy.

ESPHome. Custom IR Blasters, DIY Irrigation Controller. No cloud - perfection.

And yeah I’ve got the backend stuff. Nginx(SWAG), Whats Up Docker, SWAG Dashboard, Homepage, Authentik. But I’m into this stuff. Bachelors and Masters in comp sci. Worked with computers since I was 7 with my 300 baud - BAUD - modem. Worked in IT since I got a job doing warranty work on Packard Bells in high school for a local shop. This stuff is my jam.

Well, I'm running my own CA/PKI just for the sake of it. Still very useful and more private and convenient for my homelab+.

As for apps themselves, some of them are really useful to me:

• bookmarks (own software)
• Samba/WebDAV
• knowledgebase (WordPress)
• IoT stuff (own software)

The others are useful, but I still haven't unleashed their true potential:

• NextCloud+Collabora
• (photos solution, deciding on it now)
• Gitea

The third group helps me to run my homelab:

• OIDplus
• speedtest
• monitoring
• NTP
• sandboxes/playgrounds
• (internal mail server, still choosing)

Tried these, but decided not to use, at least for now:

• PiHole (using uBlock/MikroTik DNS+firewall for now)
• Grist

Daily: (using some without knowing)

-truenas .. backups, files, movies, pictures

-jellyfin .. Multiple tvs on multiple locations

-bitwardwn .. for pass

-owncloud for 1st backup of my phone on one nas (1st location)

-Immich 2nd backup of my phone on 2nd nas (2nd location)

-homeassistant .. Many things

-2x docker

-pfsense

-opnsense

And other things to make all this happen like:

-nginx -cloudflare

And apps that are waiting to be used few times a week:

-partkeepr

-homebox (will replace partkeepr)

-wikijs

In progress: -piohole / adguard

And thats it i guess🤔 i guess im fine with that 15€ of eletricity...🤷

This is a skill issue. Shut down every thing you don't consider a necessity. Problem solved.

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.

My life became less stressfull since I started to depend less on technology. I do need a playground to keep my skills sharp tho.

I started doing it for the lols; slowly it became part of my daily activities. I use Nextcloud, SearxNg; Hassio; and Jellyfin mainly.

Everything I self host I use each and every day (every other day, if I'm busy). I don't keep stuff hanging around just because.

I'm running home assistant and have bunch of automations that improve my life.

I'm also running a WhatsApp/signal not that transcribes voice messages for me. But that's running on a vserver

I self host my Bitwarden instance just for the sake of « it’s in my server, I managed my data » And I self host my website because why not after all ? I’ve fiber internet

Selfhosted services I couldn't do without anymore are :

At Home

• Homer
• Home Assistant
• Vaultwarden
• Paperless-ngx

At work

• Promotheus/Blackbox/Grafana
• Netbox
• Gitea
• Vaultwarden
• Mkdocs Material