Tom Lee-Gough



2026 Self-host update

I've been self-hosting a number of services for a while. And sometimes, I have a hard time trying to keep track of them all. The different services are spread over several machines. I see a lot of complaints about self-hosting things: hard work, stuff goes wrong, want it to Just Work, etc. I'm kind of lazy as a self-hoster. I find a lot of self-hosting is set and forget.

I find the title of "self-hosting" for some of the software a bit arbitrary. How is self-hosting different from just using software? I suppose it's implied that there needs to be some kind of web interface, but I'm not sure. To me Docker is somewhat of a black-box, which I think really blurs the line between "using regular software" and "self-hosting". I use Nginx alongside the Docker services I run to get a nice URL, but that's not really a prerequisite.

My current self-hosted services:

Honourable mentions:

I pay to have Nextcloud hosted elsewhere. On the one hand, I think that it isn't self-hosted as I pay for a managed instance. However, I'm still responsible for triggering upgrade and updates, and also logging in to Cpanel for other administrative tasks. I'm thinking about moving this back in-house.

PiVPN is now feature complete and doesn't regularly get updates. I suppose this is technically self-hosted, but I think really blurs the line between "self-hosted" and "software I use".

Ampache is work in progress for me. I can listen to music on local devices, so it's not super important for me to use. I have it running in the background, but do not use it frequently.