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.

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’d say I am 95% homelaber and 5% selfhoster. Most of my stuff is for experimentation and learning. And most of my services are vanilla ones, like samba. So in essence I am self-hosting not much more than a few linux environments.

The things that are indispensable to me are samba, my docker development stack, uptime kuma, and a simple wordpress installation that I use for notes and documentation. Oh and lately Stirling-PDF. That thing is just awesome.

I have tried various tools, but I keep coming back to vanilla samba for most stuff. Like paperless-ngx. For my needs, it’s just a fancy way to tag documents. I don’t need full text search or OCR, and I can find most of my files quickly using a simple directory hierarchy. I do not really need the extra overhead of maintaining paperless-ngx. The same for things like Immich, plex or Owncloud. Samba and file explorer preview works perfectly for me.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

And something I find really useful: ChangeDetection, to monitor changes on webpages, like prices, stocks, news…

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.

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

Paperless has improved my life by at least 12%. There’s a “before paperless” era in my life when there was a 20-40% chance I would be able to find a sheet of printed paper that the bureaucracy of my country thought was more important than Life itself.

Now, it’s a solid 100%.

Nextcloud has improved my life by 3% I’d say. It basically does the same as Google. But I fell 3% better overall to not be so incredibly dependent on Google. If google imploded today, I’d still feel it because of Google Play Services on Android. But that’s pretty much the only thing.

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

Pi-Hole, Nextcloud, local storage and email are used constantly. All bring great improvements.

Ansible and Zabbix provide ‘support’ for these applications.

Media streaming is a ‘nice to have’ but not essential. Wireguard is seldom used but still very important.

I gave up on everything but my backups and a few syncs. You need both hardware security and software security to selfhost. And that requires maintenance.

I’m using a lot less tools that I’ve installed, now I need to remove some of this tools. I use Synology drive/photos, Plex/Jellyfin/Arr environment, mealie, paperless-ngx, resilio to share big files to my friends, freshrss, linkwarden, vikunja and Joplin.

Maybe I will remove home assistant (I’m not using it, I control devices with voice Alexa), snapdrop/gokapi/pingvin (localsend+resilio+Synology fractures cover this better).

I’m considering replace Joplin+vikunja for obsidian, but im not sure if I want to have mobile with syncthing all the to Sync my mobile with pc, maybe it will drain more battery.

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.

Selfhosting a VS Code server was one of the best decisions to increase my productivity.

Both. I have things that I host simply for fun, but most of my homelab is for experimentation.

I practice with different technologies so I can try to learn how they work.

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.