I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don’t like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I’ve cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
I use the wide majority of what I setup, sometimes I end up taking it back down, but you’re right that it’s a good learning opportunity. Nothing wrong with throwing some stuff up just to check out.
Sometimes things may not be useful for you but may be useful for others as well, if you wanted to share, a music streaming setup could be nice to share with friends.
My usage varies from service to service, but unless I’ve either found a replacement or completely stopped using it, I keep all of them (including the ones I never really use) ready to go, maybe with the container stopped. So far I’ve only removed 2 services, both because there were better alternatives for me.
If I see something interesting, I’ll note it and try to get it up later. Sometimes the service keeps spitting out errors, in which case I’ll just attempt again later if I still find the service to be worthy.
I have an archive folder fool of services I have tried and either failed at or decided I didn’t need it -
backup beets bitcoin bitwarden clamav cockpit crypto cryptpad ctop deluge diskover dlna dockly dokuwiki emby firefox guacamole heimdall i2p jellyfin mail mailu minecraft minidlna mylar3 navidrome portainer pxe setiathome smtp ssl-proxy sync todotxt traefik ubooquity vpn wallabag watchtower
If something interests you, set it up. If you find you don’t need it, take it down.
I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:
- SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
- NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.
These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.
