Do you use all your self hosted services? Are there any you found to be not worth it after installing?
I've always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there's no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it's a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
Oh I have quite a few that I've set up then pulled out of service for various reasons. I'm always evaluating potential use-cases for new services and if a different service would better suit my needs than what I have deployed currently. It's definitely a hobby.
Some container-based projects that I'm loosely tracking updates for and have deployed, but since, have pulled out of service (non-exhaustive):
Didn't have much use for this, but it will likely change soon. Since I've stuck with Jellyfin I'll be going with Jellyseer if I decide to stand up this kind of service again.
Did it's job, consumed lots of resources, and no arm64 docker image; though I managed to build my own. Got rid of it when I no longer had a use for the service.
It was alright but decided I didn't need a separate service for documentation, I just use Code-Server with a documentation repo and raneto to give me a pretty page to navigate and for the family.
Inadvertently made my infrastructure brittle with how I had it implemented. Decided to just rebuild my cluster's cloud image on-demand instead of daily and update my apt distros the old-fashioned way.
Used this for a while, but the clipboard situation sucked at the time and I gravitated to just using SSH anyway, and since I have Proxmox on hypervisor duties just used xterm.js or noVNC for console access.
Did it's job but the :latest tag is dangerous to use. I like having change logs, an evaluation environment, and an approval based update workflow so I switched to renovate-bot.
Was a decent option for sure and faster than what I'm using currently in theory, but seemed a little to unnecessarily complicated to keep running for me.
My usage varies from service to service, but unless I've either found a replacement or completely stopped using it, I keep all of them (including the ones I never really use) ready to go, maybe with the container stopped. So far I've only removed 2 services, both because there were better alternatives for me.
If I see something interesting, I'll note it and try to get it up later. Sometimes the service keeps spitting out errors, in which case I'll just attempt again later if I still find the service to be worthy.
I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past... but eventually both came unstuck, because:
SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
NextCloud - just wasn't a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn't that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I'm not using it.
These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I'd had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.
Once upon a time I set Grocy for my wife and I. It's a kitchen inventory management site that can do some pretty cool things. I spent a whole weekend scanning every barcode in our kitchen and getting a bunch of recipes setup on the site. After all that we used it for maybe two or three weeks before it felt like to much work lol.
Do you remember if you were able to pull up items based on barcode? I've seen that you can record items based on barcode, but what I mean is: if I'm eating ice cream, can I scan the barcode so I can update the quantity quickly? Been searching their docs but can't find anything 😅
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don't like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I've cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
That's pretty much exactly what I have done. I've hosted Plex, and Matrix in the past. Plex I will host in the future but Matrix was too much for me to host on my own, but the experience of setting it up myself was definitely worth it.
Well I don't have a home server at the moment so I was renting out a server for about $40/month. Mostly because it was eating up a bunch of storage, and I was too lazy to swap from digital ocean.
Also I was using the ansible script and at some point I they changed something that required me to set it up again which I didn't really have the time for.
I will say Ansible was a lifesaver. It made setting up and keeping the server up to date super easy.
I do recommend trying it out tho, just don't use a domain name that is the same as your username or you will have issues with pings, especially if you share the instance with a friend. Learned that the hard way. Anytime they sent a message anywhere I was at, it pinged me, whether or not they intended to ping me.
i'd switch to jellyfin if plex wasn't so polished. i ran into so many issues with jellyfin but plex just worked, even downloads haven't been an issue for me. im sure jellyfin will improve, but I think it needs more time. Plex also has more client apps available.
i love the idea of more FOSS where i dont need to hit someone elses server to log in so here's hoping!
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