I don’t have a home server yet but I’m exploring and sometimes I get confused about some posts here.
For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a “self hosted budget management app”. Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? What’s the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?
I hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.
Most if not all apps on phones will require you to sign up and your date is out of your control as it is not hosted by yourself. Plus you are usually limited to doing everything on your phone which is a pita.
Selfhosting is a way of life. I enjoy providing services to myself and my family that I control with the peace of mind of knowing that data stays with me. And it’s fun doing it too!
My guess is once you start selfhosting yourself, you’ll eventually come to the same conclusions.
However, selfhosting isn’t without it’s dangers. You have to ensure you have backups of the data. You are also responsible for securing it and you have to maintain your infrastructure as well
When you use a “free” app, you pay with your data.
Thats something a lot of us don’t want to. Additionally, it makes fun and is kind of a hobby to build and maintain this stuff.
Even when you pay for an app, chances are you are still paying with your data.
Total control. Let’s take the budgeting app for example. I started using Mint in 2009. There’s more than a decade worth of banking, spending, and investment information in there.
Mint is shuttering in about a month. They gave all their users a month and a half notice. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
When a self hosted app is used (with appropriate backups, orchestration, etc) YOU the user get to decide when you’re done.
If something isn’t working for your life anymore, you can find an alternative and migrate everything over on your own schedule.
There’s more than a decade worth of banking, spending, and investment information in there.
That’s the real reason I would self host something like a budget app. I don’t want a company like Mint to have (and sell) my purchasing and financial history.
Because we can. Just because we can.
I dont understand it either. I host on a VPS, because I trust my hoster more than my ISP and more than my own security-skills. Also its cheaper than running own hardware.
Digital ocean got too expensive for me. The raspberry pi server I’m using will pay itself off in about 5 months.
You can still self-host on a rented VPS. And unless you have a managed VPS, then you’re still responsible for the security, and managed hosting is far too restrictive in terms of what you can do. It’s just up to you to decide if you trust that company to host your box.
And running one at home is cheap as hell.
This is exactly why I host my own stuff. I know how to tighten up the security to the point where it’s just as safe as it would be sitting on some other companies’ system, and I don’t have to worry about what they’re doing with my data, or a data breach. Seen too many companies that are lax on security (such as LastPass).
I throw extra encryption in place when means even if someone were to be able to gain physical access; they’ve got a hell of a brute force to go through just to break one part.
Most of the time it’s just a hobby and I enjoy the challenge of solving a “problem” we have at home.
But for payment related stuff, I prefer having control over my own data. Granted I upload encrypted backups to a Google Drive via duplicati for important data - so technically Google still holds my data. But they aren’t the ones in control and I have local backups too.
Of course, I don’t back up terabytes of media. I’m considering backing up my own rips, harder to find stuff as well as my music (some, I don’t even remember where I got it, because it’s been on external drives for well over a decade).
So I can backup and move my data as I please. Also means if it’s self hosted I can access it from anywhere.
Think of it like the difference between renting and owning something. When you rent a home, you do not own it. You don’t get to choose. Want a nicer water heater? Not your choice. The owner takes 100% of the responsibility, but often isn’t penalized for misbehavior. So they can for instance, decide that they don’t like you, and you no longer can use their servers. Or perhaps they dislike other companies, and strip features from the rental agreement. Even worse, all your valuable data, along with everyone else’s, is all stored in a single valuable location, becoming a prime target for thieves. I half expect some of the “data breaches” we see are inside jobs, where the company leaves a loophole open, tells the “thieves” about it for a small sum of cash.
I personally like self hosting. Once you get into it, and understand how to reverse proxy, and set up a domain, you can essentially self host anything ridiculously easily. Like, for me, setting up a container, and funneling it into my reverse proxy maybe takes like 30-60 minutes, ironing out bugs and stuff? Sometimes if it’s particularly easy, it takes like 5 minutes lol.
I think most of the answers here are kinda lame. It’s not easier to deal with networking rules or backups or flakey consumer grade Internet or power outages or redundancy or a lot of other things.
The only things I find value in self hosting are functional things for the home… A bittorrent client with web front end, plex server, file server for the plex server, a home automation stack, or as a cheap sandbox for testing new software…
You’d save a lot of time and energy just using web or mobile based apps where appropriate. The day to day reliability of those kind of apps will be better as well.
If someone is doing this for a hobby, great. Enjoy. It’s not practical for the overwhelming majority of people though. I say this as someone who’s literal job is ensuring reliability of web services… I am more than capable of doing all this but I’m also practical about seeing when it’s a net benefit vs a time/energy suck.
Open-source self-hosted apps:
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Free - I don’t have to pay for 100 different subscriptions for crappy SaaSes that never get any meaningful updates and sometimes don’t work at all.
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Don’t depend on someone else’s infrastructure - my apps are up because I’ve ensured they’re up. Someone screwing up their deployment, which always happens in the worst possible time, doesn’t affect me.
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Often cost less to run - I have so much stuff stored in my Nextcloud that I would pay the cost of my entire setup for some cloud storage every 1.5-2 years accounting for electricity costs, equipment amortisation and even cloud backups. This point is even more valid when you add your family to it.
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Sometimes better made - for example Nextcloud macOS and iOS apps are much less buggy than Google Drive on these platforms.
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Give me full control over my data - for me that primarily means that I’m responsible for backing up and restoring it. I’ve experienced data loss with cloud services multiple times over the last 10 years, now I don’t trust them with my data. I’m perfectly capable of handling it myself.
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Give me features that the horribly inefficient SaaS businesses cannot afford, like streaming high-res lossless music or compression-free 4K video.
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Aren’t tied to internet speed, ping, server issues at least while I’m home. Nothing can beat LAN, especially when it’s wired.
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Aren’t even tied to the company’s developers to some extent - I can fix bugs in open-source apps myself. I can even fork it and modify how I want.
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Will run forever if I want - any SaaS can be closed at any moment as a business decision. Worst that can happen to FOSS - it gets abandoned. Which is not too bad - I can still run it.
Half of these point only work because I’m a senior software engineer with DevOps experience myself.
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An easy reason to self host apps: share media with the household. Sure you can have a samba share and have people browse trough a folder to find the good movie. Or they can load jellyfin or Plex and have a netflix like interface that remembers where you left off and all the fun stuff. You can then add other stuff that will automatically search, download and organize new TV shows episodes for your, etc…
Another reason is some stuff are only possible when hosting. For instance, grocy is an app that lives on a server and manages your stock of food. You can scan goods with your phone and add them to your stock. You can scan them when you throw the can/box etc to say you used it up.
Then it generates a shopping list for you. The nice thing is that it lives on your server, not on your phone. So if more than 1 people do the shopping, you can have a synchronized shopping list, and update it in real time. And the self in self host part is cool because you decide who sees this and no Google or Amazon makes a profile out of your shopping habits.
You can have an online office suite that works in your browser without anyone unauthorized seeing your files.
You can have a bookstack wiki, where you put notes about the house, or whatever you want, and gave it being reachable only by you and people you allow, without a lot of account management.
You can have your own nextcloud, so you have file sync, calendar, etc, without it going at Google or apple. And it is on your server so you can have as much or as little data backup as you want. And often a good fiber line is cheaper than a VPS or a full dedicated server…
With all of this, you can seamlessly switch between multiple computers . You can also manage the loss/destruction of your laptop. Or phone. You can have a local equivalent to Google photos with photoprism.
You can have a frigate server for video surveillance and object recognition, but all in local, your video files don’t leave your house. A s it will do local AI stuff.
Last but not least: when you self host your stuff, you can still do a lot when the internet is down. You can replicate services on your laptop if you want. You do whatever you want.
After a while, you start to get tired of apps and other online services either disappearing or changing in ways you don’t like.
Security. Having your data in your own control instead of blindly trusting companies, where it’s more likely than not your data is being sold.
Choice. If there isn’t a feature, add it yourself, switch frameworks, change everything if you want, no more “we’re working on it” status updates when something isn’t working or a feature isn’t out. All the options are in your hands.
Pricing. Why pay monthly for “premium features” when you can have the most premium tiers for free. Especially true on anything with storage limits, 1tb of storage drive being cheaper than a few months of 1gb storage on some apps.
Speed. Sometimes it’s just more streamlined when there’s less bloat and you’ve hosted the exact thing you need on your subdomain with a single login page between you and the exact page you need. Less interaction needed to get where you’re trying to go.
Basically yes, you can install the app. Where is the data for that app stored? If on the phone, then your data is lost when your phone dies (maybe even when you switch phones). If in the cloud, that’s great, but then someone else has your data. Selfhosting is to get the convenience of “the cloud” (multi-device/user sync and sharing) without actually relying on the cloud.
Take Jellyfin/Plex/Emby for example. Yes, you can just connect a laptop with and HDMI cable and play from VLC. Or you can just use an USB stick in the TV and play from the file system. But you have 2 TVs, a tablet, and a phone that all want to watch something from your movie collection. Of course you can just plug this stick into other devices, and use it that way. Or subscribe to Netflix that may or may not have the movie you want to watch. But what if you had your own Netflix that can be used by multiple phones, tvs and tablets, even at the same time? What if it even synced the progress of a series so your TV no.2 knows where you left off on phone no. 4? This is what self hosting is made for. You HOST “Netflix” yourSELF.
So we retain control over our private data. Do not trust corporations to value me or my data.