I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
Getting sick of google having a degree of control over my data and the increasing AI being jammed down everyones throats. Combined with the keylogging keyboards and OS’s which are becoming more and more invasive by the month. Time for some liberation. I also enjoy learning coding, docker, networking etc. Cost is another factor. Although I could lie and say a 1 time fee for a server will be cheaper than Google One. Yeh it was at the start on paper but realistically after you upgrade drives and ram and buy backup drive etc it does start to add up.
It can feel like a lot of money up front, but it really is just up front. If you consider the subscription services and compare that to the life of your hardware, you’re in good shape. With the amount of media we consume, my family has paid it off months ago.
Yes you’re right. When i did the math at the start i calculated it would pay for itself in a few years. However it’s kind of like a car. You get a car and you always want to add new rims, new turbo, new subwoofer etc. I added more ram which was needed anyway. Upgraded the SSD. Want to replace the old SATA. Bought a new HDD to backup too. Then it started to add up. My server is really small and basic too. Just a pre 2020 lenovo thinkcentre. Of course everyone is different too. If I were just hosting my data and not using it as a media downloader and player as well then I wouldn’t have really needed any of that extra stuff. Also you have to consider that liberating your data is a huge benefit even if financially it the numbers don’t look as good as you want. You can’t put a price on that.
I’m a marketer by profession, but I just moved to a new country to be with my husband and am still job hunting.
Growing up, my dad was a programmer. I was a kid in the 2000s, and I wasn’t allowed to spend money online because everywhere just looked sketchy as heck then (and we also didn’t have the disposable income). Over the years I’ve watched my dad build up his own movie downloading and streaming solution, home automation, etc, but never had the opportunity to really try my hand at this stuff till I moved out and suddenly had free unemployment time and a very supportive husband.
I’m still new to it all, but I’ve managed to get docker working, Komodo to manage containers, firefly III for finances, Pelican to run game servers (that none of my friends have really played with me on 😅) and created a basic homepage to link to everything.
I’m considering doing Jellyfin, but I’m not a huge movie/shows consumer, so haven’t really started on that. It was nice being able to ask my dad for help when I was figuring all the basics out though. We never had that much in common to talk about, and this made me feel a bit closer to him, even if I live across the globe now.
I’m considering doing Jellyfin, but I’m not a huge movie/shows consumer,
Well, if you’re paying for [Insert Streaming Service Here] than I’d say it’s worth it. Save yourself the extra 10, 15, 20 dollars a month and use it on a company (or open sourced project!) that actually cares about its consumers, this can be said for Music streaming and “cloud” storage as well.
Oh definitely. Had a friend say I saved him like 100 USD in streaming all 6 seasons or something of a well known show because each season had to be rented separately and weren’t currently on any services. Was nuts when I heard the total.
I’m holding on till I’ve got finances rolling again, but a NAS is definitely in my plans!
I fucking hate tech companies
I wanted more Dropbox space. Self hosted Nextcloud when Docker became a thing.
Ended up getting a job in tech as I got better with containerization and better at programming from scripting and reading Data Structures books
Because I hate big tech and I want control of my media.
I’m a social worker by background. It all started with running Linux on my desktop.
From there, the possibilities seemed endless.
Linux - the gateway drug.
Its gotta be the sox.
That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.
I still have a means of booting up Windows if there’s a need (usually for a firmware flash too that doesn’t have a Linux alternative).
I was dual booting with Windows ME (which worked well for my computer). Distro hopping until I bootstrapped Gentoo from stage one.
Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.
I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica’s black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that’s like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you’re downloading our music on Napster, then we don’t want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find “alternative methods” for every piece of digital media I could, if that’s how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.
I still download and share all of Metallica’s discography out of spite, but haven’t listened to them since.
I love your origin story so much
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Engineer here
What division? Curious. I’m a mech eng specializing in HVAC. I didn’t get to attain my own PE stamp…life happened.
I do civil engineering work, mostly related to soils etc. I have a computer for work but that’s about as far as it gets for me professionally.
Awesome!
Surgeon.
Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.
It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).
sad OSCAR noises
Former healthcare IT, holy crap do all digital health records systems seem to suck. Some of them suck in different ways, but none of the big ones anyway are great.
I get that there’s a lot of semi-special use cases and regulatory requirements and so on, but at the end of the day it’s text and images and a record of the changes to them. And it’s not like this is a surprise problem. People have been trying to digitize stuff since at least the 90s. And yet every single system seems like it’s only been in development for a few months and usually has trouble working with itself, much less any other record system.
as a student, this is much more interesting than studying
As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.
Hey, hosting your own LLM could work out for you in that respect.
i’d rather spend time actually learning and doing things instead of being an LLM slopper lol
Damn, got shot down, lol. I’m not advocating for churning out assignments; just for tinkering with editing and brainstorming. “Actually learning and doing things” is admirable. I’d rather be certain a student is growing instead of the clanker.
One. Of. Us!
What I’ve found works well is giving it a prompt to turn it into a tutor (along with giving it the information) if something doesn’t seem right, look into it without AI, I haven’t had it backfire on me yet. I can definitely respect someone avoiding ai entirely though.
But think about it: You could outsource procrastinating to it and just do other things instead - like herding puppies…
gigachad student
I lack formal education in the tech field, but I honestly wish I didn’t waste my 20’s on drugs (it was fun though, honestly) and an attempt at a rap career, instead of getting my hands dirty in the field, so to speak. I got into computers in the early 2000’s, discovered linux in 2006, and since then I’ve been that friend who’s into computers and stuff.
I kind of forget what exactly got me into self-hosting . . . but youtube probably had something to do with it, with many youtubers like Raid Owl, Level1Techs, and even LTT talking about things like Jellyfin and TrueNAS, it got me curious as to why I never got into it sooner.
The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.
Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.
Dude, yes! Subscriptions are a scam. They hold your downloads at ransom.
I’m a disabled stay at home parent and this is something I can do at times of my own choosing. I’ve always been a bit interested. Taught myself HTML instead of going WYSIWYG back in the day type of person. I like Foss.
And it distracts me from play.m3o.xyz
I’m an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any ‘junk’ they wanted to get rid of. I’d load up my wagon and back to the house I’d go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.
I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests…until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.
My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I’ve had just about one of each since then.
Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real ‘self hosting’ gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that’s about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.
From there, I’ve been selfhosting something or another but it didn’t start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.
Getting out of the grasp of big tech.
Been self hosting for over 10 years before anyone coined the term enshittification. When i started, i could never imagine things getting THIS BAD with tech companies. I am happier and happier with my decision to self host things every day
I work in advertising
Same here, got locked out of my main gmail/google account and there was no real person to help me recover 10+ years of my stuff. Never again.
I’ve always been quite techie (maybe not by trade, but by passion), and been decoupling from big tech solutions ever since the Snowden revelations dropped. Ditched a lot of non-free software and services first (MS Office -> LibreOffice being one of the biggest), then switched to Desktop Linux and degoogled Android. I suppose self-hosting my own services and taking control of my network was the next logical step on this journey. That, and immich. It’s so ridiculously good, it single-handedly made me want to run my first real server.
