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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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

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.

Mostly for improving my administration skills. I am a Linux Systems Administrator and gaining experience with Docker will almost certainly help me in the long term. The self hosted and Nginx proxy, has also contributed.

But in my day to day life? PiHole has reduced the number of ads I see, I believe. And I am migrating the sites that I watch for work from Follow That Page, to self hosted Change Detection. Storing recipes in Mealie might be helpful. Oh, I also want to set up that bookmarking tool that saves pages for me.

I’ve found that I use all the stuff that I host except file management. I really need to get on that one.

Double layer for ads. PiHole for stuff that has no extensions/shitty extensions (iOS).

Navidrome for not having a copy of my music library on everything. Not paying for Spotify and having to use a stupid blackbox shared library to access stuff that I paid for.

AirMessage/Bluebubbles because Apple sheep herds love the color blue.

pfSense for remote access RDP.

I’m probably going to add Piped for Yattee soon.

Sometimes it just little improvements but I enjoy them. A local Nextcloud is much faster than my cloud backup and cheaper. Adblocking makes webbrowsing much more comfortable. Home Assistant helps me to get up easier in the morning when it turns on the lights automatically. So yeah some things are very convenient.

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.

Some of the self hosting is a bit pointless, let’s be honest, but it all depends on a case by case basis. Having an automated Plex server is 100% an improvement. Got a new mini PC this week and was messing around with it and setting things up. One was adguard home and whilst it is very good, it does feel like adblockers these days do a very good job. Since I’m in the setting up phase and rebooting the server, internet on devices will go down and I there isn’t redundancy on DNS server.

I think most on this sub are tinkerers at heart and like getting the most out of it and seeing how low power to utility we can squeeze out of our gear or just the pure number of containers etc. I don’t think it matters if you use everything on a daily basis but it’s there when you need it whilst other services do their job just by being active.

Music server for my father. He will get a new iPhone and want to download his old songs. He don’t know anything about the subscription based service so I will make one for him!

And that’s a little bit sad, right? The only “Job to be done” self-hosting is a solution for me is … file management. Nothing else.

But everything is a file - Unix folks