When many people talk about self-hosting they are talking about a private server on the internet which is rented by you from a company that has servers. I am going to tell you about another way to think about self hosting. Do it at home right on your local network. It used to be that doing this required a great deal of technical knowledge (or hiring someone and having them on call if something broke), but this is no longer the case. There are programs out there to make things much easier. Yes, you do need to follow the setup steps and sometimes they are tedious. I think it is worth the effort to invest some of your time to set some of these up for yourself. Self-hosting at home will help you to organize your photos, videos, documents, music and more.
Here are some of the things you can self-hosting at home
Jellyfin
Make your own Netflix. Seriously, why would you need to pay for streaming services or cable TV? Why stick with the privacy invasive services every month? Self-hosting at home makes much more sense!
NextCloud
Be your own Google Calendar, Google Drive and other services. It is much more private and secure hosing it on your own. Your information should be your own and nobody’s business.
Bitwarden
You can host your own instance of Bitwarden and keep your passwords private – I mean really private not on someone’s cloud.
Links about hosting Bitwarden:
https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/
https://bitwarden.com/help/licensing-on-premise/
https://bitwarden.com/blog/new-deployment-option-for-self-hosting-bitwarden/
In Conclusion
These are just a few of the many things you can do with self-hosting at home. I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible when you start to “get away from” invasive tech companies that want to sell your data and your privacy.
Start thinking about the things you use every day to run your digital lives and ask this question: “Can it be done from my own setup at home?” You may be surprised that many things can and that there are open source projects that are secure and will help.
