Bringing Down the Cloud: An Intro to Self-Hosting and Home-Labbing

This blog post is my attempt to provide and introduction to the world of Self-hosting and Home-Labbing. It’s adapted from a talk I gave to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society on 4/3/2025.

So, let’s start with the basics!

What is Self-Hosting?

Self-hosting, as the name may imply, is the practice of hosting digital services you that might otherwise turn to outside companies or organizations for… yourself. This can come in many forms and serve many functions, but a great way to think about it is that you’re making your own personal cloud. What do I mean by that? Well, we use the cloud for any number of services:

Storage:
- OneDrive
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- iCloud
Productivity
- Google Docs
- Office 365
- Adobe Express
Media Consumption
- Amazon Prime Video
- YouTube
- Spotify

And much, MUCH more…
These are incredibly useful and convenient services and they are what make the cloud what it is. So what does it mean to make your own “Personal Cloud”? See, the cloud is a marketing term. What the cloud really is… is someone else’s computer.

The companies that provide these services to us build massive datacenters that use SCADS of power – we’re talking Giga and Tera watts of electricity – and tons of water for cooling just to host your documents and cat memes.

But YOU don’t use all of that.

You use, like, this much.

Just that little highlighted bit.

So, what if you moved your usage away from this and instead used something smaller – something like this:

Something with just enough compute and storage capacity to provide you the services YOU need while keeping your data secure and using only pennies a day of electricity. It’s not only possible, it’s not that hard to do and there is a massive community of people who do it too. So, what does a personal cloud look like?

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

Well, the most basic thing, and where a lot of people start is by self-hosting their files. The idea is that you have somewhere that isn’t your regular every day computer that you can keep files and documents on that you can access, share, and even use as a backup. Looking again at services like Dropbox or One Drive, the self hosting world has an equivalent: Network Attached Storage or a NAS. Storage that’s available to you and any other device on your home network and even remotely. This is a great option that a lot of people don’t even know they have, especially if they have a lot of data.

As a content creator, I used to have to have 6 harddrives in my desktop to keep all of my working data and asset libraries. Terabytes of data. And since I would go on trips, if I needed any files that weren’t on my laptop or on OneDrive, I was SOL. I COULD remotely connect to my desktop, but that means it would have to either stay on, all the time, or someone would have to go turn it on for me. Once I got my first NAS, all of a sudden, my desktop didn’t have to be this big hulking tower and my data could live on a device that pulled a tenth of the power my desktop did.

Fun fact, if you have a wireless router with a USB port on it, you actually have a very simple NAS. All you have to do is plug in an external drive and configure the router to share it. But storage is only one thing.

Self-Hosted Services

There is a whole universe of things you can host yourself, most of the time for free. Here is a short list of popular self-hosted services:

Audiobookshelf – Fully open-source self-hosted audiobook and podcast server. It streams all audio formats, keeps and syncs progress across devices. Comes with open-source apps for Android and iOS.
Jellyfin – Media server for audio, video, books, comics, and photos with a sleek interface and robust transcoding capabilities. Almost all modern platforms have clients, including Roku, Android TV, iOS, and Kodi.
Navidrome Music Server – Modern Music Server and Streamer, compatible with Subsonic/Airsonic.
SwingMusic – Swing Music is a beautiful, self-hosted music player and streaming server for your local audio files. Like a cooler Spotify … but bring your own music.
vod2pod-rss – Convert YouTube and Twitch channels to podcasts, no storage required. Transcodes VoDs to MP3 192k on the fly, generates an RSS feed to use in podcast clients.
Kavita – Cross-platform e-book/manga/comic/pdf server and web reader with user management, ratings and reviews, and metadata support.
BookLogr – Web app designed to help you manage your personal book library with ease.
Paperless-ngx – Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents with an improved interface (fork of Paperless).
FreshRSS – Self-hostable RSS feed aggregator.
Nextcloud – Access and share your files, calendars, contacts, mail and more from any device, on your terms.
Home Assistant – Open-source home automation platform.
Immich – Self-hosted photo and video backup solution directly from your mobile phone.

And this is just a smattering of free offerings. For a comprehensive list (and to see where I cribbed these descriptions from), visit the Awesome-Selfhosted list of awesome self-hosted list.

Why Self-Host?

For a lot of people, myself included, There are plenty of practical reasons people self-host. You may need a level of personalization or customizability in a service that other available options don’t provide. You may want to handle data that is private, sensitive, or controversial which may violate the terms of service for more conventional options. Or you might just feel safer keeping your data or regularly used services on your own hardware or “on-prem”. There are lots of reasons people choose to embark on their self-hosting journey.

And of course, there are the top three reasons you will find in just about every conversation that has to do with self hosting, and this will be no exception:

1. Corporations Can’t Hold Your Data for Ransom

When you self-host your data, corporations can’t hold your data for ransom. This happens all the time in the tech world. A company starts offering a service, like storage, for free. Then, once people start using it, integrating it in their daily lives, they say, “Oh, hey, yeah, we eliminated the free tier, maybe you missed the email? Anyways, pay us or we’ll have to lock out some of your data”.

This isn’t a hypothetical.
This isn’t even an anecdote.
This happened to me and my wife.

My wife had a Pixel phone for a long time and, as one does, used Google Photos which offered the security of having all of her photos backed up to the cloud with unlimited storage of full resolution photos and videos, for free, so even if something happened to her phone, the photos and videos, her memories, would still be safe.
In 2021, she got a message on her google account. Google had reduced the free tier of the storage shared by all google services, account wide, to 15GB. Her account had, not just photos and videos, but documents in Google Drive, and Emails in Gmail going back more than a DECADE. This account storage cap meant that she not only couldn’t backup any more photos, she couldn’t make any documents. She was even, according to Google, at risk of not receiving emails. IF, she didn’t pay them.

She did NOT pay them.

Instead, we downloaded an entire backup of her account, about 300 Gigabytes, deleted what was up there, and started self hosting an Immich server. It’s not perfect, but now no one can hold the photos of her kids when they were little hostage.

2. Cost Savings*

Much like getting solar panels, owning chickens, or planting a vegetable garden, if you are paying for cloud based services, self hosting can save you money over the long term.
For example:

I don’t pay for extra OneDrive storage because I can access my data on my server anywhere around the world.
I don’t need to pay for multiple backup service subscriptions because I backup my computers to my server, and just backup the whole server.
We are actively unsubscribing from streaming services because we buy and rip movies and tv shows to our server. Now we own those movies and shows and they wont go away just because some service lost distribution rights.

Why is there an asterisk? Anyone who has gotten solar panels, owns chickens, or has planted a vegetable garden knows exactly why. For the rest of you, don’t worry, we’ll get there.

3. Personal Data Sovereignty

Self-hosting is a way of asserting personal data sovereignty.

This is a philosophical choice.

The biggest con perpetrated by the tech industry writ-large is that we, as consumers and users, should EXPECT to have our data, our emails, photos, personal files housed, processed, analyzed, and repeatedly leaked and mishandled by giant corporations that, more and more, insist that we should have to pay for the privilege while also selling that data to advertisers. This is a scam.

Personal Data Sovereignty is caring about what happens with your data and doing something about it. It’s about taking back control, even if that can come with inconveniences or downsides. I’m writing a more detailed post about this (subscribe to the newsletter to be notified when it comes out!) but, suffice it to say that this is a BIG part of why a LOT of people learn how to self-host services for themselves and consider the investment (and there is an investment) ultimately worthwhile.

So, we’ve got lots of great services, available for free, and a ton of good reasons to get into self-hosting. What’s the catch?

The Catch

Well, Self hosting, even with ready-made appliance level hardware, still puts you in the position of cosplaying as a sysadmin from time to time. You will need to learn things. There are lots of products that make it a lot easier, but it definitely wont be plug and play. Thankfully there are plenty of resources to learn from, if you know how to find them.

Here’s how to find them!

There’s also cost considerations.
How much a person will spend on hardware is widely variable but most people will need to purchase some amount of hardware. Be it a computer, a NAS appliance, or even just drives (You do NOT want to go cheap on drives).
And there’s energy costs to consider as well. Commercially available NAS’s can use as little as 8 watts at idle and 18 watts when being accessed, but if you’re building a home server yourself then it’s not likely to be anywhere near as efficient. And, no matter how little power it draws at idle, that number will be a continuous draw, 24 hours a day. And even small figures can add up.

Lastly, there is a risk of failure with self-hosting anything.
Commercial services like Onedrive or iCloud come with a guarantee: If you pay us money, we will do the work and maintenance FOR YOU. The control (and arguably privacy) you give up comes with the knowledge that your data and access to it is backed up by scads of servers in dozens of datacenters with hundreds of sysadmins working to keep all that up and running. With self hosting, it’s just you. YOU have to make sure that you are handling redundancy, blowing out the dust, paying attention when a hard drive failure happens (yes, “when” not “if”) so you can replace it before you lose data.

You have FAR more control, but also the responsibility that comes with it.

So, assuming you are comfortable with all of that, how do you get started?

How to Get Started

Well, that depends on your particular mix of two things: what your level of technical skill is and what your budget is.

Part of every self-hosting budget should include a budget for drives.
For a two drive system (One drive for storage, one for redundancy) you should have a budget of $300-$350 to get the best dollar-per-storage ratio, though you can certainly spend less for more if you’re okay with recertified drives. ServerPartDeals is a very reputable dealer of recertified drives but, being drives oriented towards enterprise-grade servers, they may be incompatible with some hardware setups.

Low Technical Skill, Moderate Budget:

If you have a relatively low level of technical skill and a decent budget, your best solution is to buy a storage appliance like something from ASUSTOR. Their NAS devices have won award after award and feature a robust OS that is both accessible to new users and capable enough to let you build up to more advanced usage should you want to. Entry level models start at $180 and go up depending on what you need in terms of expandability, but they are good quality products across the board.

High Technical Skill, Low Budget:

If you have a high level of technical skill and a low budget, then I recommend reusing a spare computer you have lying around or finding yourself a cheap Facebook marketplace special and putting your money towards a couple of refurbished hard drives. You can even build a reasonable home storage server with a Raspberry Pi 4 if you’re creative enough.

Low Technical Skill, Low Budget:

If you have low technical skill AND a low budget, this is the point where you can learn skills and figure out if self hosting is something that’s worth it to you.
Start with learning how to host services from your computer. Lots of selfhosted services are useable as something called a docker container and if you can follow tutorials on YouTube, you can learn how to use docker.

Some Recommended Resources:

High Technical Skill, High Budget

IT’S HOME LAB TIME!

Home-Labbing

What is the difference between Self Hosting and Home Labbing?
If there is a difference to be had, and some would argue that there isn’t, in MY opinion, that difference is this:

Self Hosting is about satisfying a utility need.

There is “X” need you have and you are choosing to satisfy that need by hosting it yourself.

For example: You want a simple website. Rather than paying for a whole hosting package, you decide that you’d rather just buy a domain name and host the website itself on a server in your home.

Home-Labbing is about creating an environment where you can learn skills, test things out, and generally play around with things.

You’re not so much trying to solve a problem or satisfy a utility as much as you are just kinda messing around and chasing your curiosity. There is A LOT of overlap and a lot of times things will migrate from a home lab into the rest of a person’s self hosting environment.

For example: I’ve got a pretty stable set of services I offer on my home network, but in my home lab I’m experimenting with a single sign-on authentication system so anyone I give access to will have just one set of credentials to access everything instead of a set of credentials on every service. This hasn’t been rolled out because it’s still something I’m learning, but that’s why it’s in my home-lab and not more widely accessible.

People can go kinda crazy with home-labs. Some people buy multiple huge server racks, set up phone systems in their house, buy tens of thousands of dollars of enterprise grade equipment, run PETABYTES of storage, and consume kilowatts of power… but there’s also people who keep a few computers on a shelf in a coat closet and run game servers for their friends, or try to min-max on efficiency, or combine the power of used office pcs into a compute cluster. There’s even a new trend of mini-racks.

You think model trains is the deep end of nerd hobbies? You ain’t seen NOTHIN.

What people do with their home labs can be equally as varied. Some people use it as a tool for their other passions:

People who are into preservation of media use it to store and provide easy access to digitized versions.
People with an interest in AI use their labs to train models for custom uses.
Cybersecurity experts use their home labs to simulate entire networks and test against them.

There are also those whose home-labs evolve out of their self-hosting hobby. A gradual accumulation that grew to match their needs until it eventually reached a point where, yes, it must be a home lab. After all, one does not accidentally buy a server rack, load it with hardware, and write ansible configurations. It is a choice. And that choice… is to home lab.

Wrapping Up

Whether you choose to start your self-hosting journey, dive deep into home-labbing, or even if you decide it’s not for you, the point of this whole thing isn’t to push you towards any particular thing (though I’ve certainly made my preferences known). It’s more to inform you that there is another way if you’re frustrated with the status quo.

If you have any comments or questions please let me know in the comments section below. I always try to reply to any comment.