Self-hosting has become more and more accessible over the years. The growth of communities like r/selfhosted and wider public coverage, like on the Linus Tech Tips or PewDiePie YouTube channels proves that this is no longer a niche hobby, but is slowly reaching the mainstream. A plethora of applications that promise to make the user experience “normie-ready” also exist now. One of the first products of this kind was Unraid, with a community-driven app-store kind of interface to easily install applications, it quickly grew quite the following. Nowadays there are even options like PikaPods, which is basically a SaaS provider for popular self-hosted alternatives to the services of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the like.

In my recent and first-ever blog post, I recommended some neat applications you can self-host. Upon submitting that post to HackerNews, some commenters pointed out the lack of articles discussing the security aspects of self-hosting software. That inspired me to write this post, which I plan to eventually continue as a series.

Let’s first talk about the most common ways people configure their systems. Generally, there are two prevalent setups:

In recent years, self-hosting has emerged as a popular alternative to data-collecting, big-brother services. For a time, I must admit, I was almost addicted to trying out new software, building dashboards, and adding applications I didn’t really need. Now that my setup has remained largely the same for over a year, I wanted to take a moment to summarize what I’ve learned and highlight some software that I found particularly helpful, yet not as widespread as they could be. (And I also needed a topic for my first blog-post ever^^) . I am not trying to present anything as “the best solution.” After all, problems vary, and so do their solutions. This is not an ad for any of the softwares presented.