I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it’s easier to have them to domain filtering.
mythtv/kodi, because I’d rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.
LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it’s a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).
Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn’t want to sort out, and it’s useful to have some lights on timers.
I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.