For the most part.

I started this journey towards self-hosting with a Raspberry Pi 2 back in November 2020 and I just finished deleting everything out of my Google Drive and Google Photos. I still have Gmail because it’s a good junk mail pit but other than that, I have migrated all of my cloud services to my home server. It feels pretty good to be out of the cloud and to have total ownership of my data.

Home server

Here’s my setup:

Services

  • Document Storage: Nextcloud
    • Of course. I wish there was a less bloaty option but it’s the best in the field.
  • Document Editing: OnlyOffice Document Server
    • I tried hard to make LibreOffice work but OnlyOffice is just so clean
  • Photo Management: Photoprism
    • Solid Google Photos replacement. Has facial recognition which is a must-have for me.
    • Using Photosync for automatically uploading photos from my phone
  • Smart Home: Home Assistant
    • But of course. Awesome app. Wish I could get a job there.
  • Network Video Recorder: Frigate
    • Seriously one of the coolest parts of my home server. Totally local object detection and 24/7 recording. Better than any paid cloud service garbage.
  • Media Streaming: Jellyfin
    • I tried to get into Plex first but everything beyond the basics cost money and I’m really not going to be using it enough to be worth it.
  • VPN: Wireguard
    • Classic.
  • Server Notifications: Gotify
    • Simple app for being notified about certain events on my server
  • Log Aggregation: Graylog
    • It’s really not a great app but we use it at work so whatevs.
  • Backups: Restic
    • Great CLI tool for deduping and encrypting backups.
    • Uses the snapshot model and can backup to S3.

Equipment

  • Macbook Pro 2012, i7 2.6 GHz, 16 Gb RAM. Running Arch Linux (btw)
  • Intel NUC 5th gen i5, 8 Gb RAM. Running Arch.
  • Synology DiskStation NAS DS1019
    • 2x WD Red 4TB
    • 1x Seagate Skyhawk 2TB
    • 2x 500GB NVMe cache drives
  • Linksys WRT3200ACM running OpenWRT
  • 3x Reolink 4k IP Cameras
  • 1x Amcrest IP Camera

Still on the Cloud

  • ProtonMail
  • Gmail
  • Off-Site backups on Storj.io
  • Bitwarden
    • I was self-hosting this for a while but I figured, for 3 bucks a month or whatever, I can let them handle all my secrets.

Future Plans

I don’t really know yet. I’m pretty happy with my setup. I’d like to get my server put together into a rackmount setup but it’s working for now. I’m sure I’ll find something else to self-host in another week or so.