Ask HN: What's your experience self-hosting in 2026?

Is it worth it vs SaaS? What are you self-hosting and what did you give up on?

27 points | by rustcore 2 days ago

12 comments

  • sandreas 3 hours ago
    I self-host private git, notes, audio, photos and syncthing - basically everything I don't want to store in the cloud.

    Hardware is an old Fujitsu D3417-B, XEON 1225, 64GB ECC and a single 2TB WD SN850x.

    OS is Proxmox on ZFS with a docker portainer vm sharing the Main storage from the host. Internal DNS is fully SSL via duckdns, letsencrypt and NGinx proxy manager.

    Hosted are

      Gitea
      Immich
      Audiobookshelf
      Navidrome
      Flatnotes
      Syncthing
    
    and some other minor services.

    A Windows vm with USB passthrough is used for ripping audio CDs [1], which are then auto converted from flac to mp3 / m4b and integrated into audio services and syncing my iPod Nano 7g (yeah, I'm old).

    Backups are done via zfs-auto-snapshot every 15 minutes and external USB drive via Tasmota Power control via zfs send. Additionally Photos and documents via restic on an external Tasmota 500GB drive.

    Flatnotes dir is auto-committed into git to keep the history.

    Works pretty well so far, consumes 12W idle and is accessible from everywhere via wireguard VPN.

    Maintenance is managable thanks to docker and portainer stacks, but still pretty much work compared to spotify notion etc. However, I am OK with it.

    1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

  • p0d 2 hours ago
    Loving a migration from Dropbox to Nextcloud and client tls certificates through Cloudflare to work around my very tied down workplace :-)
  • carlnewton 1 day ago
    I've just moved away from hosting on AWS to buying a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060 and installing docker compose on it. Traffic comes in using a cloudflare tunnel. The only costs are electricity (it's very low power and virtually silent) and the domain (if you need one), and I'm thrilled with it.
  • mikewarot 22 hours ago
    I'm working on a replacement for discord for audio and video chats, hosting is $2 per month so far. Mostly I just need a reliable way to do NAT hole punching.
  • yevgenyhong 1 day ago
    Recently, I slefhosted "actual budget" in my server.

    It is really good software for managing personal finance.

    also i built custom wake on lan page for turning on to home PC for remote work

    I always worried about security problem, So i tried apply mTLS to Caddy proxy. it works for me.

    p12 certificates working greate.

    My wife also using this Wake on Lan tool every day. She learned how to use RDP over ssh tunneling from me

  • allinonetools_ 1 day ago
    I have tried self-hosting a few things over the years. It is great for control and privacy, but the maintenance overhead adds up quickly. For me it works best for small tools or personal utilities, while bigger systems are usually easier to leave as SaaS.
  • Kenny_007 1 day ago
    I ended up somewhere in the middle. A few things run on a small machine at home, but anything that needs to stay reachable lives on a cheap VPS. Mostly just a couple of docker containers and some basic monitoring.
  • phippsytech 23 hours ago
    The only thing I've decided to not bother trying to self-host is email. IP reputation and managing deliverability is hard.
  • rohitmaruriats 1 day ago
    I tried self hosting for a couple of months and ended up deciding to buy GPU power. Cloud services (renting GPU power) seemed easier when it comes to scaling my SaaS.
  • moomoo11 1 day ago
    Does using Hetzner instances count?

    I'm finding it is so much easier to just deploy to my servers there, with some cloudflare offerings in the mix.

  • skydhash 1 day ago
    I’m not self-hosting much. My server is more of a file server with compute at the top. I have Jellyfin for Infuse on my AppleTV, gonic for my music library (with minidlna to play on my AVR), and Calibre for ebook. Everything else is backups or some random experiment (the main point is that it’s an always on linux computer with wired connection). I have a VPS for stuff I want online.
  • codevark 1 day ago
    [dead]