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Top 10 Self-Hosted Home Server Tools
Hi everyone, welcome back. Today, I will be going over ten things worth running on a home server — photo storage that is not a subscription, media streaming, network-wide ad blocking, a password manager you own, and the small pieces of infrastructure that hold it all together.
If you are newer to this, here is the pitch and the honest cost of it.
Self-hosting means running software on hardware you control instead of paying someone to run it for you. The usual motivations are cost (a photo library that costs $10/month forever versus a drive you buy once), privacy (your files and your viewing history stay in your house), control (nobody can change the terms, raise the price, or discontinue the product), and learning (this is the best practice environment for infrastructure skills there is, and it happens to produce things your household genuinely uses).
The cost is that you are now the operations team. Backups are your job. Security updates are your job. When it breaks at 9pm and someone wants to watch a film, that is your job too. The two rules that make this sustainable, both learned the hard way by everyone who does it:
Start with one service. Not nine. Get one thing running, live with it for a month, learn what maintaining it involves, then add the next. The most common failure is standing up a dozen services in a weekend and abandoning all of them by March.
If it is not backed up, it does not exist. The appeal of self-hosting your photos is…
