I rent a server from OVH, it's like 20 bucks a month, not expensive, but not cheap.

Here are some things I run for myself, pain points, and solutions

Movies + TV

I run Jellyfin for these, as I am not a fan of Plex's paid services. Jellyfin was easy to st up, and easy to add users to my instance. It's always run pretty well, all the hiccups were moreso serverside, rather than with Jellyfin itself.

Music

I tried using Jellyfin for this at first, but the metadata didn't always want to populate, and it just felt Janky. I switched to Navidrome in docker. It isn't my favorite thing, but the symphonium app on android interfaces with the server in a very nice way. Navidrome's desktop UI isn't my favorite, but it really gets the job done.

Audiobooks

I run Audiobookshelf. I love it. Originally when I tried to run it, i kept hitting issues with SSL, and web sockets not working properly. My second attempt worked okay, I had a better folder setup when I tried. Jellyfin didn't work well for audiobooks at all, so I bore with the snags I felt with Audiobookshelf for a while. Just a few months ago, when I installed Caddy, all my websocket issues disappeared, and I still love Audiobookshelf.

Storage

Nextcloud. Had an easy time with setup, and it's just worked since I set it up back then.

Images

Freaking love Immich for this. Easy setup, great alternative to google photos. Backups take a while on first try, granted I backed up like 12 thousand images, but after that? Smooth sailing.

Chatrooms

I got fed up with discord banning accounts or limiting for meaningless BS, so I started running an instance of Matrix. My original one faced websocket issues I've mentioned before, but now everything runs great. Matrix is decentralized and encrypted, it's very very private.

Searching

I run SearXNG for searching, it's a good way to just get one more google service out of my life. Easy enough setup, I did have to consult Chatgpt a couple times I think, but this was pretty early on.

Misc

I run FreshRSS for my RSS feeds, Privatebin for pastes, convertx instead of random sites I find, N8N for automation, my blog here, self documentation with WikiJS, and I have my site for stories

Pain points and solutions

I originally used Caddy for my reverse proxy needs, but finally switched, very smoothly over to Caddy. Solved SO many issues. I had problems with SSL certifications, and Websockets, preventing me from running some Docker containers, and other software was just broken, but all that went away with Caddy. Everything is simpler now

Next was installing Claude code. It helps me diagnose issues with security, containers failing, configs breaking, and even creating custom things. Discord bots, my story site, even the blog site you have here. ChatGPT Sucks.

Don't solely rely on UI to do things. Having a CLI really helps, especially if you can't get the web UI to work!

Monetary Impact

The costs related to streaming alone have gone through the roof, that is one reason I started to host things myself. With one 20 dollar bill per month, I am able to forgo a ton of streaming services

Disney Plus, Hulu, Discovery, Apple TV, Peacock, HBO, and VUDU

Hosting photos and other stuff on my own service cuts out google photos, which isn't expensive, but I like to own my data.

I don't watch live TV, so I don't need it anyway, but Jellyfin does let you watch Live shows if you really need to. I don't really have experience in that.

I don't need that sub for Audible, or Spotify.

I don't need to pay for some blog site, or some publishing site, I got all that on my one payment of 20 bucks a month.

All said that can be over a thousand dollars a year saved.

Conclusion

To sum everything up simply, use Caddy, don't use ChatGPT, and don't give up. It's a fun hobby to get into, and the amount you learn and save by hosting things yourself is staggering.

NOT AFFILIATED: https://eco.ovhcloud.com/en/ I use KS-2

CPU Intel Xeon-D 1540 8 c / 16 t 2 GHz / 2.6 GHz Memory 32 GB Storage 4 x 2 TB