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.

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.

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.

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.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

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

Self-Hosting helps organizing my life, on productive days i plan every minute of the day,

from my self-hosted services i use multiple times a day:

iobroker

wekan

nextcloud

gitlab

mail

grocy

multiple telegram bots

​

sure for all of this is a commercial alternative, but i really hate paper and i’m fully organizing my life with this. All paper i have is scanned and saved, i don’t think it’s a good idea to give this amount of detailed data(including health and tax data) and important documents a commercial provider.

And i would feel everyday bad about my data being scanned. Self-Hosting is really important for me every day and makes me everyday happy

We have many apps that are used daily and improve our lives, the family wiki is trillium, family photos on Photoprism, NAS storage for each person for their documents etc. navidrome for music, various for media consumption, oobabooga for a private chatgpt, automatic1111s stable diffusion UI for graphic design. Some finance logging tools I wrote to manage our finances. A series of cameras viewable that cover the house. Tasmota on dozens on smart plugs/lights/sensors etc. a zigbee network for door monitoring. Pihole. Homer as the dashboard to reach everything. Plus various others. For me it’s the golden age of self hosting, so many mature products now. I’m also pretty ruthless, if there’s something we don’t use it’s deleted.

I’ve self-hosted for over two decades and most of the apps you mentioned I’ve not heard of or used. I self host email and my web apps and system services I wrote. I do it because I like it.

And that’s a little bit sad, right? The only “Job to be done” self-hosting is a solution for me is … file management. Nothing else.

But everything is a file - Unix folks

Everything I self host I use each and every day (every other day, if I’m busy). I don’t keep stuff hanging around just because.

For me its like:

Im using a service and I like it. I exceed some limit. I have to pay. No *free* (hosted) alternative. Looking for a selfhosted alternative.

I currently only hosting Cal.com, Listmonk, Some Scrum Planning Poker, Authentik and self programmed software.

I host it to have my own data under my own roof.

• Nextcloud (everything from pictures, over tax stuff to my keepass database)
• Matrix server (even more important with every government on this planet pushing against encrypted messengers)
• PiHole, that i can also use via DoH from my phone
• Traccar instance to keep an eye on my car, when it’s in for service / maintenance / when i’m abroad
• …

I’ve worked in the hosting industry. I’ve witnessed an internal breach, where an employee abused access over a few corners and fetched files matching a certain pattern from all customer VPSes (Virtuozzo container based VPSes have their root filesystem accessible from the host)

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.