What else should I self-host?

Just from the top of my head:
Navidrome (Music)
Audiobookshelf (Audiobooks)
Paperless-ngx (documents)
Joplin (notes, lists and more)
Komga (comics)
Mealie (mealplanner, recipes, shopping lists)
Edit: I left out some stuff that you or others already mentioned. But here’s the extended list so I can copy/paste this if someone else asks in the future.
Immich (photos)
Home Assistant (home automation)
Jellyfin (Movies, TV series and more)
Calibre & Calibre-Web (ebooks)
Pi-hole (DNS sinkhole)
Vaultwarden (password manager)
Nextcloud (data sharing)
Homarr (Dashboard)
Headscale (Tailscale Server)
Honorable mention:
Proxmox (Hypervisor)
Portainer (Container Management) - I know a lot of people wouldn’t recommend it for various reasons, but works alright for me
- As someone who works in security, I don't personally recommend self hosting your password manager unless you're planning on never opening it up outside your network or you're willing to be on top of all potential security issues. These are your account credentials we're talking about. You WANT them safe, and the people paid to make sure they stay secure are likely going to do a better job than you.
- Why not Jellyfin for music? I’m curious as I run plex and Plexamp myself but have been considering switching over to Jellyfin for media.
  
  I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin's Android TV client still can't handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.
  
  Jellyfin is quite capable for music, however Navidrome has a much better client ecosystem. Personally I use the Finamp beta on mobile as it does everything I want and is quite stable, but if you want Android auto/apple carplay you will have to use a client that isn’t as reliable or proprietary (paid.
  
  I’ve set up navidrome a long time ago, way before I’ve started using Jellyfin. And it just runs like a charm paired with some great clients for the subsonic ecosystem. So honestly it never even occurred to me to use Jellyfin for music.
  
  I use Jellyfin for movies and TV shows, but never tried for music because I already had Navidrome set up. It is so good, really one of my all-time favourite pieces of software. It greatly repays a well-tagged collection, relying on embedded metadata only. Not sure how Jellyfin works here, maybe there is some ability to scrape album info from online sources (?), but I believe it's pretty strict about directory structure (one folder per album), which Navidrome doesn't care about.
- That’s a big list. I already use joplin, but never knew you could self-host syncing! I’ll do that then :D

AdguardHome/Pi-Hole (for DNS Filter)
DrawIO (MS Visio equivalent)
Invidious (Youtube privacy frontend)
SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
Vaultwarden (Self-hosted Bitwarden server)
Miniflux (RSS Reader)
linkWarden (Link aggregator)
Also, checkout https://selfh.st/apps/
- SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
  SearXNG is more than just a front end for google search, it’s an aggregator, if configured properly can collect results from Bing, Startpage, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Brave.
  
  Yacy is a web crawler/search engine that IIRC you can self host and use as a SearXNG backend
  
  That's correct. Thanks for the correction.
  
  I'm no expert, but I read that self hosting your own instance doesn't actually help with privacy since the search providers still track those requests and if you're the only one using it, that's just tracking you with extra steps.
  Of course if you use a public instance, you have to then trust that the instance isn't tracking you
- How safe is it to self host something that you open up to the web? I've been thinking about a keepass self host, but I need it to be accessible from anywhere... I'm just really worried what that does once you open up your local server to the world
  
  If you want to expose a container based service just for yourself over internet, you can -
  If you have static IP4 or IPV6 - Setup Wireguard VPN on your homelab/server, and wireguard client on client devices[1].
  If you are behind NAT or CGNAT - either Cloudflared Tunnel[2] or Tailscale[3].
  In either scenarios, you need to setup firewall of your server to allow connection from LAN to port of your docker container/services. By default you should set your firewall to block all incoming request from anywhere except LAN.
  I'm personally using Cloudflared Tunnel, but planning to migrate to Tailscale.
  [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04
  [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/
  [3] https://tailscale.com/

You may or may not be a developer, but I would like to vote for Gitea/Forgejo. Should you ever get a grasp of git, a git forge is great for keeping code and even plain text documents recorded. It’s my favorite self-hosted service by far.
It can even operate as an OIDC server, so you can create a single login for all your services (that support OIDC).
I’ll also recommend Grist, an alternative to Google Sheets (and Notion, I believe?). It’s a web interface to spreadsheets that supports Python code as formulas. (I’ve also tried Nocodb, another Notion alternative, and I much prefer Grist.)
- I am, indeed, a developer. I might try locally hosting Gitea/Forgejo as an extra backup. I assume you can have multiple “origins” in git, right? That means I can back my repository to both codeberg and server.
  Grist seems pretty cool too.
  
  Absolutely! I have used multiple origins for posting my projects to Gitea/Forgejo and GitHub. You can also mirror repositories from one site to another, too, although it requires a clean slate for pulling from another remote.
  The biggest use case for me is documenting (as code) my home network setup on my private forge.
- I love Grist!
  My wife and I were frequent Google Sheet users and since a few years ago we started using Grist a lot. We tried some other alternatives before, but none of them felt even close to right for us.
- update: I've installed forgejo! Super easy once I figured out I had to create a new user. I've set up a second origin for my repos called "local", since it will be a nice local backup for all my code.
  
  I have mine configured with my SSO (Authentik) for login. It's nice being able to single pane login, and for services where it makes sense, utilize the LDAP outpost feature to login with the same username and password at least (Jellyfin, calibre-web).

Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.
The reason you might want to do this is that it's probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you're away from home.
- Actual has been great for my partner and me. Highly recommend!
- I just cannot get this working without HTTPS even though it says in the documentation it's not required. I think I'm going with Firefly-iii
  
  https://actualbudget.org/docs/config/reverse-proxies/
  
  I’ve had the same problem with getting Actual set up.
  
  Correct. It refuses to run without https. That is by design.

Paperless if you want to keep your digital documents organized.
Jellyfin/Navidrome for music streaming if you have a collection.
AudiobookShelf for streaming & tracking progress of audoobooks if you have a collection.
Kitchenowl for organizing your household (expenses, shopping lists, recipes, planning meals)
FreshRSS for RSS-Feeds (News, Blogs etc)
LinkDing for Bookmark Management
Game-Servers (like Minecraft or others)
EDIT:Added Linkding & GameServers
- Are you using Kitchenowl for storing recipes? If so, what's your experience with it?
  I've tried Tandoor, the common suggestion for recipe management, but I've found it too clunky to add recipes to. I like the concept, but it would take a long time to move all my recipes into the specific format they use, and the web UI does not make things easier.
  
  Worth checking out Mealie, too. Can't say how it compares to Tandoor or Kitchenowl but I've been happy with Mealie for years now.
  
  My experience with the function is limited, but I think it's decent. Markdown support, import from websites etc. If you add the items to the recipe with their amounts and then write them out in the text it automatically give you the amount you need based on the portions specified.
  On app.kitchenowl.org you can create a demo-user and household. Within that, you can try the recipe function. Sign up requires a mail-address, but it does not need to be a valid one.

Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?

Host a pangolin reverse proxy on a free oracle cloud VPS! It's super nice to redirect online traffic to a LAN resource, that way you can share your home lab with friends and family without having to forward any ports or loosen your security posture.
https://blog.thetechcorner.sk/posts/Connect-to-your-homelab-over-CGNAT-with-tunnels-homelab-2-0/
I also highly recommend this suite of tools for downloading and streaming legal media via torrent because I would never endorse piracy.
https://github.com/TechHutTV/homelab/tree/main/media
- From what I have seen, oracle is not a good host. They randomly delete servers for no reason. I’d steer clear of oracle
  
  I don't trust oracle at all. The guide uses them because they're free (It includes a business generator so that oracle doesn't reclaim your box)
  I personaly went with IONOS because they have a 2.99 plan with unlimited bandwidth which is great for pangolin as that's routing traffic for my "media" box
  
  That's because they are free. You really do get what you paid for - or not in this case. It's in the t&c's too

can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?
- I'm thinking about moving my Nextcloud calendars and addressbooks to Baikal. Why? Because I like one "tool for one thing" better than "one tool for everything".
  Small update: Today I moved to Baikal successfully.
  It's missing some features, I noticed.
  There are no shared addressbooks, so a shared user is needed. Addressbooks also cannot be read-only.
  There is no birthday calendar. There is a Python script for MySQL to run from cron. I ported it to PostgreSQL today.
  
  that makes sense, not having all your eggs in one basket.
- I hosted radicale first so already had my events sorted out. Wasn’t really bothered moving them again. Also, I like radicale, it’s simple and it works.

As you mentioned Immich, Nextcloud and Radicale - don't forget to make regular backups. If you haven't automated them, that's your next project now ;)
- Yes, back up your stuff regularly, don’t be like me and break your partition table with a 4 month gap between backups. Accomplishing 4 months of work in 5 hours is not fun.
- that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!
  
  Just a quick add on: not only do and automate backups - do also test them every now and then.
  
  And don't think that you can just back up using a file-copy process. These things have databases that also need to be backed up. It's not as simple as it first seems.
  Source: been selfhosting for an embarrassingly long time without any backup!
- How do I set up backups for Immich, Nextcloud, and Radicale? I see lots of different options, I can't pick!
  
  I only host Nextcloud in an old setup (read pure PHP, MariaDB, Apache - no docker, etc.)
  That server is set-up to be snapshotted daily. Also there's a script running about 30 min before each snap shot that will also dump the database to disk (as otherwise the snapshot might contain a random state of the database). It's not perfect, but it works - also because everything of this is done in the night, when I do not use the system, so chances are really low, that the snapshot of the disk and the database dump in it are not desynchronized too much.
  I do not know what's the best practice for a modern Nextcloud setup with docker is or how to handle the other two...

Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them

I'm absolutely loving immich. Definitely check it out. Via Docker compise is a breeze.
- I’m already hosting Immich, I feel it was the most painless to set up out of the three. There was a weird error with python modules with radicale and Nextcloud was a bit more complex to set up, but they were all relatively easy to get started with.
  I particularly like Immich’s mobile app. I just clicked a few buttons and BOOM all my photos are backed up (you can even change what albums to include and exclude, and duplicates are automatically removed e.g. if you have the same photo in multiple albums)
  
  Just as a side node, make sure to backup your immich / nextcloud services too.

Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).
- what is your favorite app for android?
  we like conversations, but our phones don't treat it like a regular calling app. navigation and music still play over the conversation phone call.
  
  I use conversations on android as well. I think it's the best app for android. You can ask in the conversations support channel for help, there are very knowledgeable people around:
  xmpp:conversations@conference.siacs.eu?join

Vaultwarden
- I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…
  
  Haha, I don't trust my own server either, but I don't trust anyone elses even more.

I run a small setup on a seperate server segment (2nd router behind my main router) so it is on the internet. I run nextcloud, an dendrite and conduit instance (matrix chat-server servers), a mastodon and go-to-social instance (fediverse), bitwarden (password manager), and others.
If there is a service that you do not want to be publically accessable by everybody but you do want to access from everywhere on the internet yourself, check out client-side TLS (https) certificates. The server does is accessable from the internet put only people who have a TLS certificate on their client signed by you can access it. For services that do not require incoming connections from other machines (e.g. nextcloud, bitwarden, ... but no federated services like matrix-chat or the fediverse) that is a very good option to protect your servers.

Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It's the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.
- If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That's what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.

I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?
- Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
- Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.
  For Immich, official docs were fantastic!
  For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)
- I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
  There is a learning curve but it's not too steep and I've enjoyed it.
- There a million ways, and you will probably find tons of tutorials each different - Docker, Docker Compose, native install, VMWare, Kubernetes, Portainer, etc. I recommend starting with a clean machine - preferably with an attached monitor - and installing your favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu is among the easiest), getting Docker and Docker Compose running, and familiarizing yourself with these technologies.
  Then you can start with a simple app like Paperless (document digitization), Vikunja (TODOs), BookStack (wiki), or PrivateBin (pastebin), getting it running and persist state over a period of time, then setting up a reverse proxy so you don't have to use IPs all the time (with just editing your hosts file to point a URL to IP of your machine), and then it is a free world.
  Of course, having the whole setup secure, independent, and easily manageable is partially eyperience and partially understanding your needs.
  You will probably even find whole ready-to-deploy git repositories that are easily configurable, so you can go with that too.

searchxng, libretranslate
- It’s searxng but yes. That is a good suggestion.

I've been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.
First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you've not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don't want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.
I also recommend Pihole - it's an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It's really improved my experience on all my devices.
Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.
Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.
Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.
- Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.
  
  I selfhost Anysync for Anytype. In this way I can sync my notes with my family.

What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.
I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I've written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.
I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for 'read it later' type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.
I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.
- How do you host Obsidian? Last time I checked, it only ran as a local install, so the "hosted" version was just a virtual machine running a local copy. Is it still that?
  
  https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-obsidian
  It uses the Kasm VNC. Takes a little to get used to, but it rocks.

Run a RocketChat server for me so I don't have to pay $8/mo anymore
- But a Pi and recover the cost in under a year.
  
  I would but I prefer a server hosted outside of my country.

I host a number of alternate frontends. Alexandrite for Lemmy, Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube. And then I have the Privacy Redirect extension make any links to Reddit or Youtube go to my local.
- Is Invidious still working? After the latest round of API patches on Youtube's end, I didn't think it was.
  
  No, it doesn't seem to be. That's ashame.
  
  There are still active instances out there. They are a pita to maintain as you'll be playing catch me fuck me with Google ad nauseam. I gave up running my own instance and just rely on the public instances since they seem to be good at whack a mole a la Google.
- Ah, that seems pretty cool :D
- Invidious
  How do you keep Invidious running? I've tried all the alternatives like Piped, etc. I can't keep them running for more than a week before it gets banhammered by Google.
  
  Well, its apparently borked and I didn't realize it. I've never gotten an IP ban but I also wasn't using it a ton - mostly just for when I'd search for instructions on something an a YT vid was my only option.
  I mainly use Nebula for watching videos. And the handful of creators I follow who are strictly youtube, get slurped up by ytdlp via Pinchflat

What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?

If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.

Firefly III in order to track your expenses
- Actual Budget if you're more into envelope budgeting. I came from YNAB and could not get the same workflow out of Firefly as I could YNAB. Actual Budget does provide that.
  I do think setting up HTTPS is required for Actual so if you don't have that yet, then Firefly is the way to go.
  
  Hi, I've tried Actual Budget but I've found more interesting in terms of options Firefly, so I've chosen for it :)
- In my experience, firefly is not aimed at household or personal finance. It is very obviously made by and for accountants.
  Actual Budget is much more approachable for the normal home user, and very similar to the successful YNAB.

Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.
I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.

Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.
- just installed it, and it works great :D

I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.

Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
- I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.

I want to add dockge, for making it easy to manage / update your docker containers.
https://github.com/louislam/dockge
Love it. Saves me lots of time.
- If you don't want a GUI, dockcheck is an easy way to update many containers at once from the CLI.

If you have a car Lubelogger is a solid maintenance tracker.

Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.
- ooh I might try that then!

Little subquestion how fast is your nextclous instance? Cause mine is pretty slow don't really know why

Mozhi its searxng of translators
- I've got LibreTranslate installed so don't need another translator, but Mozhi seems pretty cool though :D

What are the specs and how are you finding the performance?
- It’s just an old laptop I had lying around. 8GB of ram, 256GB of storage, some old intel i5 processor (10th or 11th gen I think?). No performance hiccups, everything works well :D
  I have another older laptop with a dead battery, 6th gen i3, 4GB of ram, and 128GB of storage that I haven’t touched yet, but might do so in the future.

Struggling to read all the comments on mobile so apologies if this is a duplicate, but if you need recipes, Tandoor Recipes. I use it for hosting my own edits of recipes. Since I do baking streams it's great for me to easily link to my stream for folks who want the same recipe including any tips I've added or variations, or something I've kinda come up with that's based off a standard formula.
Plus, using the Kitshn app on a tablet makes for an absolutely gorgeous kitchen companion for reading recipes. Split screening it between the recipe and the chat has been awesome. For real, Kitshn is absurdly polished for an open source app.

Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway