Self-Hosted Main

E-mail

Don't host your own email server.

Just trust me.

In my opinion, cloud storage for (zero knowledge) backup. Your backup strategy should include a diversity of physical locations. I had a house fire a few years ago. Luckily, my data drives survived, but if they hadn't, my cloud backup would've been invaluable.

I'd say backups. At least it shouldn't be only local. I follow the rule of threes: two local copies and one off site with backblaze. Yeah, it ties up a not insignificant amount of disk space I could use for other things, but dammit, I'm not loosing my wedding photos, important system configurations, etc.

People saying email, look into using external SMTP servers as relays. Your domain most likely comes with at least one email account with SMTP access. You can use that as a relay to send personal/business emails from your server using the provider's reputable IP addresses.

Passwords:
-> You want to have immediat access to them, even if your house burns down

Notes:
-> You want to be able to read the documentation how to fix your selfhosted service, even when your selfhosted services are down

Public Reverse proxy:
-> A reverse proxy is only as safe as the applications behind. And NO, most selfhosted-applications are not hardened or had security audits
(reverse proxy with a forward authentication proxy is something different)

Okay I understand that email hosting is bad for SENDING email , but what about only RECEIVING email , isn’t it a good idea to keep my stuff private ? I rarely send personal emails, and like to avoid my data being used for marketing purposes Is that bad to have smtp imap open on dynamic ip address ? Just asking your opinion

Don't self-host email SMTP or public DNS. They're hard to set up properly, hard to maintain, easy to compromise and end up used in internet attacks.

Don't expose anything directly to the internet if you're not willing to constantly monitor the vulnerability announcements, update to new releases as soon as they come out, monitor the container for intrusions and shenanigans, take the risk that the constant updates will break something etc. If you must expose a service use a VPN (Tailscale is very easy to set up and use.)

Don't self-host anything with important data that takes uber-geek skills to maintain and access. Ask yourself, if you were to die suddenly, how screwed would your non-tech-savvy family be, who can't tell a Linux server from a hot plate? Would they be able to keep functioning (calendar, photos, documents etc.) without constant maintenance? Can they still retrieve their files (docs, pics) with only basic computing skills? Can they migrate somewhere else when the server runs down?

A password manager because if anything goes wrong, you'll be completely screwed.

What you SHOULD absolutely self host though is a password manager, so you can be in control of your most sensitive data.

Regarding email, I think everyone should absolutely self host it, but it's less and less viable in this google/Microsoft duopoly world. But ideally everyone would self host it. The reason why people advise against it really comes down to lack of real competition, and the two tech giants dictating how we violate every RFC possible.

Primary backups

Password manager. While some may cache on your client devices, by and large if your server goes down, no passwords.

A CDN

The login page to your NAS.

Some generic purpose LLM probably.

E-Mail.

And maybe unpopular opinion:

1. Any service that you use with port-forwarding, besides WireGuard.
   I would never access any self-hosted application without VPN.

2. Password manager. I want to minimize complexity with my most important data (that's why I'm using KeePass instead of Self-Hosted Bitwarden).

Aside from other stuff mentioned here about email. I always assumed I'd become a target for spam that I'd have a harder time filtering out to the point it stops being worth it to have a custom email address.

That and I can almost guarantee I would end up screwing up the backup of my inbox and losing everything rending the whole endeavour pointless.

Clearly opening RDP port on internet. NEVER.

Choosing a service to NOT selfhost is a subjective descision.

I host 18 Proxmox VMs and 20 Docker containers at home. I also was selfhosting a WebDAV server for synchronizing my Joplin notes between devices and Vaultwarden for managing my Bitwarden vault, but decided to push the Joplin synchronization target to Dropbox [free] and to use Bitwarden's free cloud solution for my passwords and secure notes. I did this because I will need immediate access to these two critical sources of information should my house burn down, or get blown over by a tornado. I have extremely strong passcodes for these and trust the hosts.

This was strictly a personal decision. YMMV.

I’ve seen far too many compromised Wordpress installations to ever consider installing it in my home dmz.

Internet-accessible authoritative DNS nameserver(s) (unless you have a completely static public IP).

Mail server, too many troubles related to domaine name blocking/ban, good for internal network/VPN use but not for anything serious

Email

Mail server or anything using RDP.

email service

Email

I think there's a hangup on the term "self-host" where some people are assuming it's going to be exposed to the Internet.

I self-host a ton of stuff that is only available inside my home network or through my VPN, which is not publicly discoverable. I would never open a TCP port to the world from my home network. That's how you end up on shodan.

So yeah, if it has to accept inbound connections from arbitrary other systems on the dirty internet (email, mastodon, etc), it's not happening on my network, and probably not at all because it's a pain in the ass to stay patched.

Push notifications.

It is fine hosting a service that gets requests then talks to FCM or the iOS version. But a service that one's phone stays connected to 24/7 is really hard, and not kill one's battery.

I don't self host anything where it would impact me unduly if it went down while I was on holiday to the point where I'd have to break state and go fix stuff.

I don't want to have to leave my beer or beach and head off to fix things like an email server, restore a password manager db etc. so anything like that which is critical to the point where an outage would prob have me do so means I pay someone else.

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