Self-Hosted

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. ...

Google Photos keeps getting worse. The free unlimited storage is long gone, the AI features now require a Google One subscription, and every year they find new ways to nudge you toward paying more. If you’ve been thinking about taking your photo library back into your own hands, 2026 is the year to do it. I’ve tested every major self-hosted photo management tool over the past two years — running them on everything from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a dedicated Proxmox server. Here’s the honest breakdown of what works, what doesn’t, and what you should actually install. ...