Self-Hosted

I did the arithmetic on a Google One bill last month, then did the same arithmetic on the server sitting under my desk. The cloud won. Not narrowly — by enough that I closed the tab and went to make coffee. That’s the answer most self-hosting guides won’t give you, because “run your own cloud” is a hobby that sells a feeling, and the feeling is free while the electricity isn’t. Here’s the real arithmetic, with every price checked on 10 November 2026: what Google One actually charges, what a cheap VPS actually costs, what a home server burns in electricity, and the one rule that tells you which of the three to pick. ...

I ran both on the same network for a month in 2025, switched one to the other, and then switched back. Neither is a trap. One of them is just a much better fit for a house with a child’s tablet in it, and the difference comes down to a single checkbox that one project ships with and the other one makes you build. Here’s the honest comparison, checked against both projects’ own releases and documentation on 10 November 2026. ...

My old Plex server stopped working for my parents the moment they left the house. Not broken — working exactly as designed. Remote streaming had become a subscription, the person watching from abroad needed their own pass, and I had become the family’s IT department for a media server I’d already paid for. That is the whole story of Plex in 2026, and it is why the answer for most people is Jellyfin. But the interesting part is what the paywall does and doesn’t cover, and how much hardware a free media server actually needs. I have moved two households off Plex and the second was much easier, because I’d already made the mistakes on the first one. ...

The moment I moved my parents off Google Photos, the free 15 GB of Google One became 200 GB of headroom, and I got back the photos Google had been helping itself to. That part was easy. The part nobody mentions is that Immich is a real server, not a web app, and it has requirements Google quietly pays for on your behalf. Six gigabytes of RAM, a disk you will back up separately, and a public endpoint on your home connection — which is where most of the sharp edges live. Here is what actually happened for me when I replaced Google Photos with Immich, checked against the official documentation on 10 November 2026. I’ve run it on a Pi 5 and on an N100 box, and both taught me something different. ...

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. ...

Most homelab beginners make the same mistake: they grab a Docker Compose template, paste it in, and then discover three months later that their “simple setup” is a sprawling mess of undocumented dependencies, a database with no backup, and ports wide open to the internet. I’ve been there. I still end up there sometimes. So I built a tool to catch it before it happens. ...

I wanted a personal AI assistant. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. Something that actually does things — controls my desktop, reads my screen, talks to my smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never, ever sends my data to a server I don’t control. The cloud options are good. They’re not mine. So I started building one. This post is the architecture document for that project. It’s a work in progress — the docker-compose is ready, the Ollama instance is running, and the first agent is next. I’m writing this because the design decisions are interesting, and because someone else might want to build the same thing. ...