My Experience Self Hosting
January 2022
This is not a guide on how to selfhost. You should look at the following as me talking about what works and what doesnt work.
I started out selfhosting a nextcloudpi instance on a RasberryPi4. For storage I used an old harddrive from a Laptop with a cheap usb to sata adapter. While it was a bit slower than what I use now this definetly worked for me as I was the only one using Nextcloud.
I currently use an old Laptop that I partly dismantelt by taking out the Battery and removing the display as my server. Suprisingly this works really well as a low powered server and has been operating for over 3 months without failing. The only problem that I discovered so far is that it doesn’t automatically turn on if it regains power after an outage. Performancewise it is obviously not as good as a conventional server and you definetly cannnot host gameservers on it(believe me I tried) but it also has a much lower powerconsumtion than a regular server or desktop hardware. For the small amount of users I have an old Laptop still provides enough performance for everything to run smoothly.
The Laptop runs Ubuntu server. I run a nextcloud,a matrix(synapse) and a Home Assistant instance as well as Pi-hole and some bridges for matrix in dockercontainers on the sever. I also use nginx as a reverse proxy and for hosting this site.
I find that Matrix works really well if you want a properly private and open way to communicate. Federating also works easily. I was not able to set up calls on Matrix as setting up a Turnserver is nearly impossible in a Homenetwork. I also have some bridges set up which allow me to use a single matrix client for all my chatapps.
While Nextcloud mostly works it sometimes has problems with its filesync clients. Other than that it works really well for sharing Files with my classmates and syncing them between my Laptop and Pc. It also took quite some time to set up properly. The nextcloudpi instance I had also stopped working after an update which forced me to completly reinstall everything.
Homeassistant is a solid choice to not rely on propriatary cloudservices for all your smarthome appliances. So far I had no problem with it.
I still havent gotten around to properly backing up all the data from nextcloud as well as matrix but I am looking at backing up the entire server to another machine.
Of course all of this needs some tinkering to work propererly. Once set up I only find myself periodically logging into the server to update all of the dockercontainers.
If you have a spare laptop/desktop-pc and some knowlege of the Linux commandline I highly reccomend you try hosting your own services. I think that this is a great learning experience and a fun experience if you like tinkering with computers. Giving you back control over your data and beeing less reliant on big tech is also an added benefit of selfhosting the services you need. With nextcloud it also has the potential to be much cheaper per gb than a traditional cloudhoster since if you reuse old hardware like I did you only have to pay for the power your setup consumes, which is a non negible cost factor of hosting your own server.