I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
I’m trying to deGoogle/deFAANG/deBigData so I try to host FOSS alternatives to every service I use on the internet, though some services won’t be possible or practical (e.g., email).
I host:
I use the d.rymcg.tech framework. It’s a little over my head, but the framework makes it pretty easy to use all the apps. It’s a bit tricky to add new apps to the framework, but it’s fun and all the source is there to learn from and the developer is really nice and really helpful.
I am also trying to degoogle/debigdata my life, but it seems we’re taking radically different approaches to it. I wish you luck in your journey!