The Self-Hosted Journey

Know what you're building, what it replaces, and whether it runs on hardware at home or a cheap VPS.

Start with the why, then pick a lane: a mini PC under your desk, or a €5 VPS. Everything after this stage works the same either way.

One quiet, low-power box that runs 24/7 — plus the storage, network, and power backup around it.

A modern mini PC idles at ~10W and runs dozens of containers. Add storage when you need it, a UPS so a power blip can't corrupt a disk.

A clean Linux box you can SSH into, with storage laid out so it can grow later.

Ubuntu Server is the path of least resistance — every guide on this site assumes it. Lay out storage once with LVM and shares so adding disks later is boring.

Run any self-hosted app as a container, and actually understand what the Compose file does.

Almost every guide on this site ships a docker-compose.yml. Spend a weekend here and the rest of the journey is copy-paste.

A web UI that deploys, updates, and rolls back apps — so you stop living in SSH.

Dockge if you want a thin UI over Compose files; Dokploy or Coolify if you want a full Heroku-style PaaS with domains and backups built in.

The fun part — replace subscriptions with your own services, one container at a time.

Start with the master list, pick two or three you'll actually use, and get them running on the LAN before you expose anything.

Every service behind a real HTTPS URL — or a private tunnel when your ISP won't open ports.

Two doors in: a reverse proxy with your own domain for public services, and a mesh VPN for everything that should stay private. On CGNAT, tunnels replace port forwarding entirely.

Reachable from the internet on your terms — patched, firewalled, and hardened before bots find it.

Do this the same day you expose your first service. Docker happily bypasses UFW, and bots scan fresh IPs within minutes.

Know within a minute when something's down — and have the graphs to see why.

A 3-2-1 setup — if the box dies tomorrow, nothing is lost and a restore takes an afternoon, not a week.

Restic-based tools do encrypted, deduplicated backups to cheap object storage. Test one restore before you call it done.

Ten minutes a month keeps a lab running for years — updates, disk space, and logs under control.

Your lab is secure, monitored, and backed up. Now make it do things a VPS never could.

Automation, local AI, your own CI — the reasons people fall in love with self-hosting in the first place.