Self hosting nothing changed my life.

So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅

As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:

Paperless_ngx

ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts...). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to "scan" it, upload it, then bin the paper.

An actual life change that i didn't know i needed.

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I've always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool

Swinger parties?

Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:

• AdGuard Home is IMHO so much easier to use, although it has been a while since I've used Pi-Hole.
• CouchDB for the Obsidian LiveSync plugin
• Immich for a self hosted Google Photos alternative
• Nginx Proxy Manager for exposing all of my services
• Vaultwarden is invaluable for us

Portainer - For docker containers.

AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.

HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation

SearXNG - private search.

Whoogle - private search.

Shaarli - Bookmarks.

youtube-dl - downloading videos.

PaperlessNGX - document storage.

Trilium Notes - notes app

These are the ones I can't live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.

Home Assistant. It's a rabbit hole, but it's great. I've got motion enabled lights, thermostats for "dumb" heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.

WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don't want to expose while you're out.

Parties.

Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.

We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there's a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn't need to be always on whenever we leave the room.

Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.

I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.

It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.

I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.

If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!

For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi

Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing

A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee

Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren't in the cloud.

PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).

https://www.photoprism.app/

For me it's 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I'm dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:

• Maps
• Calendar
• Email
• Markdown editor (I'm using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
• I haven't tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
• a bunch of other stuff I've never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.

Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.

PiHole!

One of the easiest installer I've ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.

Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.

I'll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich

Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix

Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you'll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.

FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one

Trillium notes and Bitwarden.

The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things

Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.

I'm hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server

Actual Budget I use to track my finance.

Duplicacy for backups to OneDrive and Backblaze

Photoprism as Google replacement

ActualBudget. If you don't already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/