I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
…except email 😑
I self-host email, it certainly isn’t something I’d recommend
Yeah hosting email as a company is a pain. I can’t imagine selhosting it. At least in a company people can search you online.
The worst part really is just getting off the damn spam lists. There is almost no documentation anywhere for do’s and dont’s. I ultimately had to setup a sending relay for the mail on my status monitoring VPS because my residential IP triggered most spam filters, but I only found out that that was the problem from forum posts investigating the same problem. I check with stuff like mail-tester, get back perfect scores and yet most of my outgoing emails have a good chance to land in the spam folder anyway (but at least they get delivered so that’s a plus I guess)
As others in other threads have said: Google and Microsoft have killed the ability to self-host email simply by black-boxing their spam filters. As a user you have no real way to fix your mail server such that your emails get delivered into the inbox reliably.
I feel ya. And this doesn’t take in account users who put one of you mail in spam and it blacklist you for the whole org…