Why I Self-Host Everything
On the philosophy of running your own infrastructure, owning your data, and why I'd rather debug a Proxmox cluster at midnight than pay for another SaaS subscription.
I self-host almost everything. Email filtering, media streaming, password management, identity, monitoring — if there's a self-hosted alternative, I'm probably running it. People sometimes ask why I bother when there are perfectly good cloud services for all of this. The honest answer is a mix of principle and stubbornness.
The principle part is straightforward: I want to own my data. Not in a tinfoil-hat way, but in the practical sense that I want to know where my data lives, who has access to it, and what happens if a provider decides to change their terms or shut down. When your photos are on your own Jellyfin server and your secrets are in your own Infisical instance, those questions have simple answers.
The stubbornness part is that I genuinely enjoy the process. Running Proxmox VE as my virtualization layer, spinning up containers in Docker, wiring everything together through Cloudflare Tunnels and Nginx Proxy Manager — it's the kind of infrastructure work that scratches the same itch as building software. You're designing systems, solving problems, and occasionally staring at logs at 1 AM wondering why Authentik decided to invalidate all sessions.
Is it more work than just paying for SaaS? Absolutely. But it's also more educational, more flexible, and more satisfying. Every service in my homelab is something I understand end-to-end. When something breaks, I learn something. When something works, I know exactly why. That's worth a few late nights.