I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.

Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.

2024 was the year I got more serious with self hosting and migrating away from the cloud offered by Google etc. But 2025 was the year I pushed to run all my own services and get the family on board as well; trying to educate my kids with running our own services (the wife is so not interested!).

There were some really cool projects released last year and some oddly well-timed ones as I was looking for various services, and Jotty was one of those!

Thanks so much for you work and rest assured amongst the negativity you may receive in certain corners of the web, there are people truly appreciative of yours, and others like you, hard work.

I had Nextcloud running for several years (VM is the best way IMO, I would avoid the Docker AIO). However I found Filebrowser and it rocks as a file share service. Filebrowser Quantum is a fork with more feature as the original no longer has a maintainer. The most I’ve had someone upload to it was 300GB.

I use Filebrowser Quantum if you are happy opening up a port for it. It supports 2fa. Also requires Docker which isn’t too difficult.

Yeah, Caddy was working fine, but the issue was me tinkering with it meant having to reload Caddy for the updated config to work, and that would break any connections people were using for file transfers etc. Also, it isn’t as quick for reverse proxying file transfers.

Therefore trying to run private and public services through it was limiting when I was also trying to tweak it constantly for my homelab.

I’ve found Traefik to be better in that it auto reloads the config live as you edit it, and it’s been faster for file transfers on my 1Gbps fibre.

And now I’ve split my services to separate public/private reverse proxies, that takes the pressure of having to keep one proxy always live. Pangolin uses Traefik, and so do I for my direct services through my firewall, and that makes life easier when only dealing with one type of proxy service.

I too am using a Cloudflare tunnel for my public facing services (such as WordPress), and that also allows you to put the WP login page behind another auth login as well which is great for security, so I do also vouch for Cloudflare.

I’m using Pangolin for private services on a VPS.

Plus, I have one service that is direct to my home IP for file sharing to one particular remote IP that is the only service directly through my firewall.

Therefore I have 3 ways my services are accessed and this has been the game changer for me recently, as previously I tried to run all this through one Caddy reverse proxy directly to my router and it gets painfully fragile mixing public/private services through one bottleneck when you’re tinkering as a selfhoster. So splitting it up has helped massively.

Good tip with the Cloudflare alts though!

I’ve relied on a Wireguard VPN for remote access until recently, I’m now playing with Pangolin via a VPS. I question why I need public (private) access, but it seems cool to operate that way and allows family members easier access.

I ran Blue Iris, but despite my love for it, my disdain at having to run it on Windows made me move away. You can run it still in a VM, but it’s not ideal, and also not meeting your requirement of moving off Windows.

I would recommend Home Assistant with Music Assistant for music playback of local library files, and that gives you a web page controller. I see Home Assistant also integrates iSpy DVR. No experience of iSpy, but the Music Assistant integration is superb. I use it to stream all music at home for the family to Chromecasts etc and this way everyone just accesses the same web portal.

Home Assistant can be Docker or it’s own OS.

Perhaps not the size you’re after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).

I can’t quite figure out the downvotes to my first reply for suggesting backups and docker… I think my mention of Windows did it (do please avoid Windows for what it’s worth).

If you have reliable, easy to access backups, then it takes away the doubt of self-hosting. Hence the suggestion for Backblaze as it’s so easy to implement. Put in an encryption key and your remote data is private. I use it for everything except Plex media, which is something I wouldn’t care if I lost.

I jumped to Unraid about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Docker on Unraid is as easy to use as it gets, and now my confidence with it has grown and my demands are getting slightly more complex, I’m moving to Dockge for Docker stacks, and Pangolin on a Hetzner VPS for remote access. Hetzner have a great firewall feature for your VPS, so you can lock it down to home access to get you started once you start on a VPS journey.

But I would recommend Unraid for sure on ANY old HP desktop PC from eBay. I got an Z1 i9-9900, 32Gb RAM for £250. Bonkers cheap for what it is.

Good luck!

Backup. I use Backblaze personal which is $179 for two years of ‘unlimited’ storage. All my important self hosted data is duped to some old 2.5" external drives connected to my work machine that then is backing up to Backblaze. I also have 1yr retention, so any deleted file is accessible for up to 1yr.

After backups are sorted, stick with the OS you know best. If Windows (I hope not), then HyperV for VMs is good. Try the official Nextcloud VM from Hanson IT. Nextcloud is a good catch-all, but it’s beaten by other specific tools. I now host all I need from specific Docker containers: photos, calendar, email backup etc etc

But I would say Docker. Docker desktop if Macos or Windows if your thing. Get to know docker and the world of self hosting is your oyster.

As what others say, keep it all to your home network and tread carefully when trying to remote access it all.

I’ve run Nextcloud several ways, the smoothest, easiest and most powerful being the official image by Hanssen IT. Run that in a VM and use their setup/update scripts to do all the hard work. I highly recommend.

I’m on Vodafone here in the UK (CityFibre), and they let me use my own firewall to the ONT, and give me a static IP for no extra cost. It’s a PPPoE connection with a VLAN id. With work recently I’m using about 5-6TB monthly data. I should count my blessings for their service given all I’ve read here!

I had issues with connectivity around 2020 and they wouldn’t engage with any help troubleshooting it unless I used their provided router, which was a pita, but a few days of speed tests and they escalated it and fixed it.

Just to say I’ve tried this today and love it. Was running Authelia but wasn’t happy with the way it was configured. I spun up VoidAuth in about 5mins and am impressed. Running as basic auth for a Caddy reverse proxy, this feels very slick. Well done!

Easy to follow documentation as well. Less is more sometimes.

I like the way you have it checking SMTP credentials in the background with a simple ‘this is not configured properly’ on the UI.

just schedule an email to send at a later date/time, then if you don’t login to cancel it, off it goes.

I spend my days working on a MacBook, and have several old external USB drives duplicating my important files, live, off my server (Unraid) via Resilio to my MacBook (yes I know syncthing exists, but Resilio is easier). My off-site backups are to a Hetzner Storage Box using Duplicacy which is amazing and supports encrypted snapshots (a cheap GUI alternative to Borgbackup).

So for me, Resilio and Duplicacy.

I guess there is no one-size-fits-all for self hosting. We all have different requirements. Mine is NAS based, so hence Unraid. I think mostly we all rotate around the core of photo storage, and Immich is likely what’s fuelling a lot of self hosting now as it’s a legit alternative to Google Photos. As I’ve moved out of the Google eco system now for everything; it creeps me out to think how much of my information they used to have access to.

I read your post last night, thought I’d reply this morning and am disappointed in the replies you’ve already had. So you’ve got issues with your self hosting, and it annoys people you haven’t figured out the solution?!? Odd.

Anyway, well done on recommending Runtipi as I’ve never heard of it and looks interesting. I’m on the look out for things to recommend to people, and that looks good.

As for what else there is, there was a thread here this week asking similar, and lots got mentioned in there. I’m too lazy to find the link, but dig about on the 1st page. Most have already been repeated in here already.

I think self hosting is a journey, where you learn as you go. It’s all part of the fun of it. And perhaps using a platform that has a healthy amount of solutions already posted is the key for you rather than focussing on a one-click interface. I myself use Unraid, and that community is full of Q&A for every type of user.

Yes, as @Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca says, just create a new user for each event you want to share photos about: ‘BeachBBQ’, ‘WeekendStay-July’ etc, then bind those user accounts to whatever folders you want to have the photos in and set the user restrictions to upload, share, but not delete for example.

I also use various FileBrowser instances, with a different subdomain pointing to them, also as a way to filter out usage as well. collegefriends.mydomain.com could take you to a FileBrowser instance that only has access to photos from a certain friend group. Not sure how useful that would be to you, but it’s another way of controlling the data flow.

I’ll admit I’ve not tried Traefik yet, but I see Caddy as being to web servers (and reverse proxies), what WireGuard is to VPNs.

It does what it needs to well, with a minimal config file. And if I learn and get comfortable with Caddy, then I know it can do anything I will ever need of a web server down the line with no need for me to ever change setup.