I have had a foot in the self-hosting world for a long time, going back to running a website from a Linux box under my bed during my freshman year of university. Over the years I ran Myth TV and then XBMC, later known as Kodi.
After living in India, where streaming services are inexpensive by western standards, I found I was unwilling to pay western prices for Netflix, Disney Plus (Hotstar in India), and Spotify. I was also fed up with the engagement treadmill, especially with my son. Constant "recommended for you" and "up next" prompts caused conflict, and limiting content on each service was too much upkeep. So I cut the cord in a different sense, ditching streaming services for self-hosted Jellyfin. Within a year and a half, Jellyfin opened the door to self-hosting many other services, reducing my dependence on cloud providers and bringing welcome stability. I no longer face unnecessary redesigns, questionable new features, or floods of terms-of-service emails. I read release notes and decide when to upgrade.
My main rule is that I do not expose services directly to the public internet, except for VPN servers on my router. With AI-assisted hacking in mind, I don't think that is wise. My ISP uses CGNAT for IPv4, so my home network is not directly reachable over IPv4 anyway. My VPN is reachable only over IPv6, which has downsides, such as rarely working on public Wi-Fi.
I prefer running services natively and will containerize only complex ones. I've also dropped Docker in favor of Podman, which integrates well with systemd. Hardware is a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC with an Intel N100, 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB SSD, plus a 6 TB drive for media. I paid EUR 180 for it, while the same listing now costs EUR 359.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing