Topic
Self-Hosting
The art of running your own stuff so the cloud doesn't run you. These articles cover the apps worth self-hosting (Immich, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, and the long tail), the apps that look great in screenshots but bite later, and the boring-but-critical bits — reverse proxies, backups, auth, and not getting paged at 3 AM. If you want a sustainable home lab instead of a museum of half-configured services, start here.
151 articles in this topic.
Featured posts
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Riemann: The Forgotten Event-Stream Monitor for Home Labs
Riemann processes events as streams, not time-series. Here is why that distinction matters and when Clojure-based stream alerting still beats Prometheus rules.
10 min read -
Glances vs Netdata: Two Free-Tier Monitors Compared
Glances vs Netdata: which free monitor wins for your home lab? We compare install effort, UI quality, alerting, and when to ditch both for Prometheus.
10 min read -
Sentry Self-Hosted for Application Errors
Run Sentry on your own hardware to catch real application errors — stack traces, source maps, release tracking, alerts, and when you should just pay for SaaS.
11 min read -
Heimdall vs Homepage vs Homer: Status Dashboards
Heimdall, Homepage, or Homer? Pick the right self-hosted dashboard for your homelab — real configs, Docker auto-discovery, and live API status widgets included.
10 min read -
cAdvisor + Prometheus: Per-Container Metrics Done Right
Stop guessing which container is eating your RAM. Set up cAdvisor + Prometheus to get real per-container CPU, memory, and network metrics in your homelab.
10 min read -
RustDesk vs MeshCentral: Self-Hosted Remote Desktop
TeamViewer costs a fortune, AnyDesk wants a subscription, and Chrome Remote Desktop routes everything through Google. Here's how RustDesk and MeshCentral stack up as self-hosted alternatives — and which one fits your use case.
10 min read
All Self-Hosting articles
- Riemann: The Forgotten Event-Stream Monitor for Home Labs
- Glances vs Netdata: Two Free-Tier Monitors Compared
- Sentry Self-Hosted for Application Errors
- Heimdall vs Homepage vs Homer: Status Dashboards
- cAdvisor + Prometheus: Per-Container Metrics Done Right
- RustDesk vs MeshCentral: Self-Hosted Remote Desktop
- Grafana Alloy: Replacing the Agent After Deprecation
- OpenTelemetry Collector: One Pipeline to Rule Them All
- Why I Built Garrul
- Glance vs Homepage vs Dashy: Home Lab Dashboards Compared
- Backblaze B2 + rclone: Tiered Backup at Real-World Costs
- Beyond Akismet: Spam Protection for 2026
- Self-Hosted Email in 2026: Mailcow vs Mailu vs Stalwart
- Authentik vs Authelia: SSO for Your Self-Hosted Stack
- Ceph for a 3-Node Home Lab: When It Actually Pays Off
- Kdenlive Proxy Editing on Weak Hardware
- Cosmos vs CasaOS vs Umbrel: All-in-One Home Server OSes Compared
- Snapper for Btrfs Snapshots on Root Filesystems
- Plex Pass Hits $749. Time for Jellyfin.
- Kopia Repository Server: Multi-Host Backups Done Right
- Sec-Fetch & UA Client Hints in 2026: What Actually Leaks
- ZFS Send/Receive Over WireGuard for Off-Site Replication
- Restic Repository Maintenance: Prune, Check, Forget
- Blog Comments: Self-Host or SaaS?
- mergerfs + SnapRAID: The Poor Man's Unraid
- Object Storage on a Pi: SeaweedFS Cluster Walkthrough
- Bind Mounts vs NFS for Container Storage
- Bcachefs in 2026: Ready or Not
- Frigate + Coral TPU: AI Cameras Without the Subscription
- GPU Passthrough on Proxmox: Run LLMs in a VM
- Hoist: Label-Driven Docker Updates
- Immich Hardware Acceleration: Stop Cooking Your CPU
- Coolify vs Dokploy: Self-Hosted Vercel for People Who Don't Trust Vercel
- MinIO Is Archived: Move to Garage
- RAID 6 vs RAID 10: Two Dead Disks
- Incident Response for Self-Hosters
- RAID 0, 1, and 5: Pick One
- Escaping Zim: Migrate to Obsidian
- OpenCanary: Honeypots for Your Home Lab
- Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Block Ads for Your Whole Network
- Ollama Model Management: Beyond ollama run
- Restic vs Borg vs Kopia: Backups That Actually Deduplicate
- Suricata vs Snort: Network Intrusion Detection That Actually Works
- Home Lab Hardware Guide 2026: What to Buy, What to Avoid, and What to Beg For
- Continue.dev vs Cody vs Tabby: AI Code Help Without the Cloud
- Jellyfin vs Plex: Your Media Deserves Better Than a Subscription
- Cockpit vs Webmin: Web Admin Panels That Don't Make You Cry
- Cloudflare Tunnels: The Zero-Port-Forward Guide to Exposing Your Services
- Immich vs PhotoPrism: Escape Google Photos Without Losing Your Mind
- Prometheus + Grafana: Monitoring That Doesn't Lie to You
- Fail2ban vs CrowdSec: Blocking the Bots Actually Smartly
- Tailscale Deep Dive: Mesh Networking That Actually Works
- Qdrant vs Weaviate vs Chroma: Vector DB Showdown
- Gitea vs Forgejo vs GitLab CE: Self-Hosted Git
- Wazuh: Open Source SIEM for Your Home Lab
- SBCs in 2026: Homelab on a Budget
- LUKS Full Disk Encryption on Linux
- Rootless Docker: Run Without Root
- Proxmox NAT Bridge: One IP, Many VMs
- Linux Privilege Escalation: The Defensive Playbook
- EmDash: WordPress Done Right, Finally
- Three ways to upload ISOs to Proxmox
- Steam on Linux: It Actually Works Now
- De-Googling: Self-Hosted Replacements for Google Apps
- Running Gemma 4 Locally with Ollama
- Private Docker Registry with Harbor
- Docker Manager Showdown: Pick One
- Caddyfile Patterns That Actually Work
- Obsidian LiveSync: Self-Hosted Sync Without Paying for the Privilege
- Let's Encrypt Without Certbot
- Grafana Dashboard Variables: One Dashboard for All
- LLM Backends: vLLM vs llama.cpp vs Ollama
- The Zero-Trust Home Lab
- HAProxy: Load Balancing Done Right
- Stop Living Dangerously on :latest Docker
- Alpine vs. Distroless: Choosing Your Minimalist Base
- Distroless: How to Build Slim, Secure Containers
- Cloudflare DNS: Beyond Pointing Records
- Traefik: Docker Routing with Labels
- Nginx Proxy Manager for Normal Humans
- Appwrite: Your Own Firebase, Minus the Google Surveillance Subscription
- VLAN Basics for Home Labs: Segment Your Network Before It Segments You
- The Reverse Proxy Timeout That Kills Long Uploads
- Uptime Kuma: Status Pages, Alerts, and Knowing Before Your Users Do
- Watchtower: Safe Container Auto-Updates
- The Header Your Reverse Proxy Keeps Dropping
- You Should Be Testing Your Restores
- IPv6 on Your Home Lab: You Should Care (Here's Why)
- Log Rotation for Self-Hosted Apps
- Self-Hosted Email Is Probably a Bad Idea
- NocoDB: Because Airtable Doesn't Need to Know Your Business
- Open WebUI vs LibreChat: Self-Hosted ChatGPT Alternatives Compared
- BGP in Your Home Lab: Dynamic Routing for People Who've Run Out of Static Routes
- Docker Compose Environment Variable Precedence
- Plausible vs Umami: Privacy-Friendly Analytics That Won't Creep Out Your Users
- Tailscale Deep Dive: Mesh VPN That Just Works (and Why That's Suspicious)
- Why Self-Hosted Apps Lose Data After Updates
- nmap for Your Own Network: What You Should Be Scanning
- Vaultwarden Organization Sharing: Password Management for Your Whole Household (or Team)
- Reverse Proxy SSL: The Cert Chain Mistake Everyone Makes
- Nextcloud Advanced: Federation, Backups, and Making It Actually Performant
- BookStack vs Wiki.js: Picking Your Self-Hosted Documentation Platform
- Paperless-ngx: Scan It, Forget It, Find It Instantly
- MinIO + Nextcloud: S3-Compatible Storage That's Actually Yours
- Portainer vs Dockge: Managing Containers Without the Terminal
- Plex Optimization: Remote Access, Transcoding, and Taming the Beast
- Home Assistant + Node-RED: Automate Your Home Without Losing Your Mind
- Proxmox vs XCP-ng: Hypervisors for People Who Like Their Data Center at Home
- Wiki.js with GitSync: Documentation That Lives in Version Control Like It Should
- Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden: Own Your Passwords Before Someone Else Does
- Ventoy: Boot Any OS, Any Time
- Understanding and Optimizing Docker’s daemon.json File
- Navigating the Storm: Analysis of Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPU Instability Issues
- Docker Networking Essential Guide for All Skill Levels
- Docker Volume Mounts: Essential Flags
- How to Transfer docker Images Without a Repository
- Understanding CMD and ENTRYPOINT in Dockerfiles
- Copying Files Between Docker Containers and Host Machines
- Dockerfile: Differences Between COPY and ADD
- Docker Strategies for Load Balancing and Failover
- Docker Networking: Connecting to the Host from a Container
- Understanding Docker vs. Full Virtual Machines (VMs)
- Multiple Actions with a Single docker exec Call
- Executing Commands with Asterisks in Docker
- WordPress, Docker, NGINX, and MySQL via Ansible
- How to securely deploy Cloudflare Tunnels
- Uptime Monitoring with Uptime Kuma
- Understanding and Optimizing Performance in Proxmox VE
- Automating Docker via Ansible
- Observability and Monitoring for Containers
- Docker vs Podman: Key Differences
- Ollama: Powerful Language Models on Your Own Machine
- Unleash the Power of LLMs with LocalAI
- Supercharge Your Homelab Monitoring with Zabbix
- A Guide to LXC/LXD
- Talos OS: API-Driven, Kubernetes-First OS
- Docker Compose: Orchestrating Multi-Container Applications
- Linux Home Lab Security: Planning for the Unexpected
- Wiki.js for your documentation in docker
- NocoDB DB Management System
- Appwrite Backend-as-a-service (BaaS)
- Wireguard VPN Server in Docker
- Install & use Doxygen via Docker
- Automatic backup of docker Mysql or MariaDB container
- WordPress on PHP-FPM & Caddy in Docker
- Docker Compose useful commands
- How to install NextCloud via Docker
- Install a php script in PHP-FPM & Caddy via Docker
- Install Caddy reverse proxy via Docker
- Access Docker socket via TCP
- Install docker on Ubuntu/Debian