Introduction

Sometimes I feel extremely fortunate I grew up in a very Do-It-Yourself (DIY) family and discovered the DIY music scene in my hometown. All these experiences showed me at a young age that you can bootstrap and will most things into existence. I sit here writing this introduction to the soundtrack of Fugazi Live in Houston 1996. Their vocalist/guitarist Ian MacKaye started Dischord Records with Jeff Nelson out of their home in the Washington DC metro area. Fugazi never charged more than $5 for a show, and their concerts were all-ages to give young kids a third space and something to do. To me, the analogy here is that with enough time, learning, and sweat equity, you can DIY pretty much anything. The real crux of it all is figuring out when it is worth doing something yourself. Starting a band, a business, or any technical or creative project requires a certain amount of DIY willingness on some level. Maybe for technological projects, you want to self-host services to fight the enshittification of the internet, own more of your own data, and learn a little something along the way. All roads lead to DIY from here, it's just a matter of how deep down the beautiful black hole you want to go. Just don't cross the Schwarzschild Radius too lightly—self-hosting is liberating, befuddling, and sometimes just plain fun.

What Is Self-Hosting

At its core, self-hosting means running and maintaining your own services on hardware you own or control, rather than relying on third-party providers. Instead of using Google Drive, you might run Nextcloud on a server in your closet. Instead of paying for a streaming service, you might set up Jellyfin or Plex to serve your own media library. The spectrum ranges from simple single-board computer projects to full-blown server racks.

Networking and Firewalls: Most self-hosting journeys start with taking control of your home network. Consumer routers from ISPs are often limited in features, security, and configurability. Open-source firewall solutions like OPNsense or pfSense running on dedicated hardware give you fine-grained control over your network traffic, VPN capabilities, ad-blocking at the DNS level, and intrusion detection.

Home Automation: Smart home devices from major manufacturers often require cloud connectivity, phone home with your usage data, and can become e-waste when the company decides to sunset support. Self-hosted alternatives like Home Assistant give you local control over your smart devices. Combined with ESPHome, you can even build your own sensors and switches using inexpensive microcontrollers.

Home Security: Commercial security systems often come with monthly subscription fees and cloud dependencies. Self-hosted solutions like Frigate for network video recording give you local storage and AI-powered detection without sending your camera feeds to someone else's servers.

Weather Stations: For the data-curious, personal weather stations with tools like Weewx let you collect hyperlocal environmental data. It's a fun entry point into self-hosting that combines hardware tinkering with data visualization.

Data Backups and NAS: Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are perhaps the most practical self-hosting gateway. Solutions like TrueNAS turn old hardware into robust storage servers with features like ZFS, RAID, and automated backups. Owning your data means not worrying about a cloud provider changing their pricing or terms of service overnight.

My Experiences Self-Hosting at Home & Work

I was fortunate enough to be present in places that gradually filled my self-hosting toolbox over my life and career. Grad school reinvigorated my curiosity in computation as a science and led me on the path I walk today. Circumstance led me on a path to the Tucson Arizona Research Bazaar organization, which eventually led to my working for an NSF cloud computing project as an educator. I was rapidly exposed to more modern cyber infrastructure than I had previously experienced in my career and actually had to start using git in a more professional capacity. After leaving the CyVerse NSF project, I took my toolbox on the road and advocated for git adoption at another employer. Little did I know that part of moving to git at this company was my suddenly being in charge of self-hosting GitLab via ESXi hosted virtual machines and Docker Compose behind the company firewall in a blade server in my cubicle. I was completely hooked on hardware/self-hosting after this.

More recently I've tinkered with simple Raspberry Pi clusters inspired by people like Jeff Geerling, which led to many home projects. I recently assembled an ARM64 small board computer low-power self-hosted git server with Gitea, Docker Compose, and a little firewall networking black magic. Seems like Gitea will adequately reproduce the GitLab experience without the memory overhead of GitLab. This has led to a lot of home projects surrounding small, contained services, utilizing automation tools like Ansible.

Self-Hosting Limitations

I think the biggest limitation, as a buddy of mine pointed out, is that now you have to maintain all this infrastructure—the hardware, the code, the databases, all of it. If you also happen to do this as a day job, it can get taxing. Sometimes I've had to step away from my own projects AND work to go outside and touch grass. You also probably need more than an Internet Service Provider (ISP) supplied gateway/router to get started. Some ISPs may lock you in to using their gateway (this happened to someone I know who had a fiber optic connection). If you work or study in an academic lab, you are probably at the behest of your IT department, so getting outside access to your services might be tricky.

Parting Thoughts

If you want total creative, operational, and technical control—maybe you bootstrap everything yourself. There's a middle ground here: by mixing and matching commercially available products and rolling your own services, you might get better results than your gateway alone. I've taken the longer road in terms of "smart home" projects and have methodically expanded the scope at various stages of my life. This was a purposeful decision, and I think it's kind of fun to take a little moment every day and look at something you really put effort into because it was fun and you learned something. Large language model (LLM, or more pejoratively "AI") self-hosting with tools like llama.cpp, Ollama, MLX, etc. is definitely an interesting area I'm actively exploring. Does self-hosting AI make it a little more sustainable? Depends on a lot of factors, most principally your LLM use case.

Additional Resources

Communities:

• r/homelab — The homelab subreddit is a great place to see what others are building and get advice on hardware and software choices.
• r/selfhosted — A community focused specifically on self-hosted software alternatives to commercial services.
• Awesome-Selfhosted — A curated list of self-hosted software organized by category.

Networking and Firewalls:

• OPNsense — Open-source firewall and routing platform based on FreeBSD.
• pfSense — Another popular open-source firewall/router software distribution.
• OpenWrt — Linux-based firmware for embedded devices, great for turning consumer routers into more capable network appliances.

Home Automation:

• Home Assistant — Open-source home automation platform with support for thousands of devices.
• ESPHome — System for controlling ESP8266/ESP32 microcontrollers for DIY smart home sensors and devices.

Hardware:

• Raspberry Pi — The classic single-board computer for hobbyists and self-hosters alike.
• Orange Pi — Alternative single-board computers, often with more RAM or storage options at competitive prices.
• Jeff Geerling's YouTube — Excellent content on Raspberry Pi clusters, home servers, and general self-hosting projects.

Storage:

• TrueNAS — Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system (formerly FreeNAS for the CORE edition).
• OpenMediaVault — Lightweight NAS solution based on Debian Linux.

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Have thoughts on self-hosting hardware or software? Find me on Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Note: This post reflects my own experiences and perspectives. In all transparency, I used Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) to help with link population, grammar checking, and spelling corrections—not for content generation or overall structure.