Cloud

Every self-hosting guide starts the same way: “Forget Dropbox, forget Google Drive — run it yourself and save money.” I’m going to tell you something different. Self-hosting costs money. Self-hosting costs time. Self-hosting has hidden costs that nobody writes about until you’re three hours deep in a broken Docker volume at 11 PM on a Wednesday. This isn’t an anti-self-hosting post. I’ve been running my own servers at home for five years. I love it. But I wish someone had shown me this math before I started. So let me show you the math. ...

You don’t need to pay $10/month for Google Drive. Or $3/month for 1Password. Or $8/month for Notion. You can run all of this at home, on a single Raspberry Pi if you’re careful. But here’s the honest part: some of it is worth the effort. Some of it isn’t. I’ve run a self-hosted cloud at home for three years. This is what I’ve learned. ...

If you’ve ever tried to Google “What is Kubernetes?” you’ve probably seen a wall of buzzwords: orchestration, scalability, microservices, YAML manifests. Somewhere in there, someone will tell you it’s like “a shipping port for containers,” and you’ll want to slam your laptop shut. Let’s skip the abstract metaphors and get to the point. Kubernetes (K8s if you want to sound cool and save keystrokes) is just a smart way to run a bunch of apps across multiple machines without losing your mind. ...