Self hosting absolutely everything I feel is not practical as of today. Hopefully it will be possible one day, but currently is not. In that case, what can we actually self host? Maybe the question to ask is, why do we self host?
Why do we self host?
Privacy : Placing all our personal data in the hands of large multi national companies which in-turn sell our data or use it to train their large scale AI models is unfortunately the world we live in today. With self hosting, privacy is protected.
Cost : Sometimes the storage costs of certain services mean that the subscription cost of services tend to be prohibitive. Self hosting that service means that we don’t have to incur that cost.
Why don’t we already self host everything?
Although this sounds like a stupid question, its very important to think through this one. The reasons I specifically do not self host for the longest time is
- Deployment complexity: A non issue with projects like Caprover
- Opportunity cost of failures: sometimes the opportunity cost of an action failing is higher than the subscription cost itself. For example, the opportunity cost of an email send or receive failure could mean a lot. During some ops work or because of some other random reason, what if the disk gets corrupted or data gets partially deleted. Can I just hit a button and restore my stack back what it was today morning? This seemingly simple ask is surprisingly complex.
- Missing Network effect: Cannot move people from Instagram or Whatsapp. With the current setup, meta knows everything and there is nothing we can do about it if we want to live normally in this society unfortunately.
With this information, what is that I use day to day but can’t self host (for context, look into the stack post)
- Finance apps : PayTM, Fi bank etc.. obviously
- Social media & distribution channel apps: Instagram, Whatsapp etc.. cannot ask people to move to matrix suddenly. Similarly Uber, Youtube, Prime video cannot be a self hosted solution since the moat is the network.
- Critical communication apps: gmail, google calendar. The cost of missing an email or an invite is super high and not worth it. Better to switch to more secure apps like proton mail etc..
So what can we self host then?
App picks
Library streaming solution – Jellyfin
Libraries tend to be irrationally large after a while, hosting jellyfin on a old PC at home & using that as a base and streaming media to your TV / mobile across your family members & yourself is extremely cost effective. Going the subscription route will be extremely expensive.
Password management – Vaultwarden
Bitwarden is a beautifully done software to manage passwords across all kinds of devices. Vaultwarden is the rust implementation of Bitwarden.
Bookmarks management – Omnivore
Looking forward for omnivore to wrap up their self hosting setup so that I can start self hosting. Right now it does not exist.
Status monitoring – Statping
Simple, straight to the point and solid. Recommended!
Missing apps in the ecosystem
- A great to do app similar to TickTick with solid reminders, good apps on mobile & collaboration.
- Sync solutions for photos & files. Automatically backing up photos, videos & documents so that information is not lost. An alternative for iCloud.
- A great note taking / voice notes app with solid mobile apps and collaboration. Alternative for iCloud notes, simplenote etc..
- Health tracking, ideally with hardware.
Also, checkout The self hosting dream
