I’ve been self-hosting for about a year, and it’s been a blast. I’ve learned more from this project than I ever expected. This is just a quick dump of what I’m using for future reference.

Hardware

HP Elitedesk 800 G4 Tower

• i5-8500 3GHz
• UHD Graphics 630
• 16GB RAM
• Drives:
  • 256GB NVME (boot)
  • 256GB Sandisk SATA SSD (docker)
  • 8TB Seagate SATA HDD (media)
  • 2TB Seagate SATA HDD (temp storage)

A note: The 2TB drive listed was salvaged from an old PC, originally. It has more than six years of power on hours, but Scrutiny says it still passes SMART tests. Due to the drivepocalypse, I intend to continue using it as long as I can, but I won’t trust it with anything important.

Software

• Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS
• Docker Compose

Services

I currently run four main services: Jellyfin, Navidrome, Kavita, and Home Assistant.

Jellyfin serves up movies and shows to my smart TV, iPhone, and any other device on the network. The perks of this setup is it’s able to transcode locally when my device can’t support the native format. This is particularly handy because my TCL Roku TV is persnickety.

Navidrome serves up FLAC files ripped from my collection of CDs that’s been growing since the early 2000s. I use flo on my iPhone and Feishin on Linux, though there’s tons of options for Subsonic-compatible apps.

Kavita is Navidrome for my comic book collection. If anyone had told me that I’d spend 5 hours updating metadata on comic books…well, who am I kidding, that does sound like me.

Home Assistant is a behemoth of an application, and has been the focus of most of my tinkering. I hate voice assistants with a passion, but getting my lighting just right for an evening on the couch has been satisfying in a way that’s hard to describe.

The Future

Eventually I want to get something like PiHole or Adguard Home running, but these are being shelved until I’ve finished moving to a new home.

Self-hosting is definitely a project I’d recommend to techy folks who enjoy tinkering, though I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone who wants things to “just work.” It’s been a lot of headaches, including the time I accidentally chmod’d myself out of any access to the server and had to wipe the whole OS. But if you care about privacy and owning the things you buy, it’s probably the best hobby out there.