Guides

Self-hosting gives you complete control over your data and services. But with great power comes great responsibility — if your Nextcloud, Jellyfin, or Vaultwarden instance is misconfigured or exposed, you become an easy target. Security breaches in home servers are real: exposed ports get hit by scanners within minutes of going online. This guide covers the practical security layers every self-hoster should have in place in 2026 — from firewalls and HTTPS to authentication layers and intrusion prevention. You don’t need to implement everything at once, but each layer you add makes your setup significantly harder to compromise. ...

If you’ve been self-hosting for more than a week, you’ve already written a docker-compose.yml file. Maybe you copied one from a GitHub README, fired it up, and it worked. Magic. Then six months passed. You have 15 services, four compose files scattered across your home directory, containers with restart: always that silently fail, hardcoded passwords in plain text, and a vague sense of dread whenever you ssh into your server. ...

Plex has been the king of self-hosted media servers for over a decade. Jellyfin has been chipping away at that throne ever since it forked from Emby in 2018. In 2026, the gap has narrowed dramatically — and for many self-hosters, Jellyfin has already won. This guide breaks down every dimension that matters: features, hardware transcoding, mobile apps, Docker setup, performance, and total cost of ownership. By the end, you’ll know exactly which one belongs in your homelab. ...

You spin up a dozen self-hosted services — Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, your reverse proxy — and then you go to bed. You wake up in the morning and, somewhere in the night, three of them fell over. Nobody told you. Your family was locked out of Nextcloud for six hours. Sound familiar? That’s exactly the problem Uptime Kuma solves. It’s a self-hosted monitoring tool that watches your services 24/7 and screams at you (via Telegram, Discord, email, Slack, or 90+ other channels) the moment something goes down. It’s beautiful, it’s free, and it takes about 10 minutes to deploy. ...

Your homelab is running smoothly. You’ve got Nextcloud for files, Vaultwarden for passwords, Immich for photos, and a dozen other services humming along. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your server dies tomorrow, can you recover everything? Most self-hosters only think about backups after disaster strikes. Don’t be one of them. This guide covers everything you need to build a bulletproof backup strategy for your homelab — from understanding the 3-2-1 rule to implementing automated backups with tools like Restic, Borg, and rsync. ...

Your passwords are the keys to everything — email, banking, your homelab, your entire digital life. Trusting a cloud service to store them is fine for most people, but if you’re already self-hosting your files, media, and apps, why hand the most critical piece of your security to someone else? Self-hosted password managers give you full control over your credential vault. No subscription fees, no data leaving your network, no wondering what a third-party company does with your master password hash. In 2026, the options are better than ever — and three names stand out: Vaultwarden, Bitwarden, and Passbolt. ...

Nextcloud is the gold standard for self-hosted cloud storage. It’s like having your own Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts — but you own all the data. In this guide, I’ll walk you through setting up Nextcloud on Docker from scratch, including the reverse proxy, SSL certificates, and crucial performance optimizations that most guides skip. By the end, you’ll have a production-ready Nextcloud instance that’s fast, secure, and entirely under your control. ...

Self-hosting means running services on hardware you own instead of relying on someone else’s servers. Your photos on your machine instead of Google’s. Your notes in your house instead of Notion’s cloud. Your email, your media, your files — all under your control. If that sounds appealing (it should), this guide covers everything you need to get started from absolute zero. 💡 This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more. Why Self-Host? Let’s get the “why” out of the way, because it matters. Self-hosting isn’t just a nerdy hobby — it solves real problems. ...

Immich is the best self-hosted Google Photos alternative available right now. If you’ve read our comparison of self-hosted photo tools and decided Immich is the one (smart choice), this guide walks you through the entire setup — from zero to a fully working photo server with mobile app sync. I’ve set this up on dozens of machines at this point. Here’s exactly what works. What You’ll Need Hardware Requirements CPU: Any modern x86_64 processor. Intel 10th gen or newer is ideal because of Quick Sync (hardware video transcoding). ARM64 works too — Immich runs fine on Raspberry Pi 4/5. RAM: 4GB absolute minimum. 8GB recommended. The machine learning container alone wants 2-3GB when processing. Storage: SSD for the database and application (even 50GB is plenty). Separate HDD/NAS storage for your actual photo library. GPU (optional): NVIDIA GPU dramatically speeds up face recognition and object detection. Not required, but nice to have. Software Requirements Linux server (Ubuntu 22.04/24.04, Debian 12, or any distro with Docker support) Docker and Docker Compose v2 A domain name (optional, but recommended for remote access) Quick Docker Install If you don’t have Docker yet: ...