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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Mainly for privacy reason:

• TeamSpeak
• Seafile

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

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

For me, it’s a mix of utility, hobby and learning.

I’m a software developer putting my toes into DevOps. I’m using Raspberry Pi for this and other projects. And I have some songs saved through the years not on Spotify, and videos I would like to make accessible easily.

Adguard !== uBlock

One is per device based and the other is solely for DNS blocking, they compliment each other.

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)

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

For me the biggest is probably Jellyfin. Before, I needed to use external drives plugged into my TV, then browse them using the TVs file browser. I didn’t see which movies I already watched, or at which episode I stopped. When I wanted to watch something on my computer, I had to get the drive and plug it in there. The same for when I wanted something new. Now, I have Jellyfin running on my server, all the clients have access to it and I can watch my stuff whenever and wherever I like. It’s also easier to share something.

Using navidrome and jellyfin daily, and komga a lot!

This is a skill issue. Shut down every thing you don’t consider a necessity. Problem solved.

Selfhosted services I couldn’t do without anymore are :

At Home

• Homer
• Home Assistant
• Vaultwarden
• Paperless-ngx

At work

• Promotheus/Blackbox/Grafana
• Netbox
• Gitea
• Vaultwarden
• Mkdocs Material