Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Self-hosting is having a moment, but as interesting as it sounds, figuring out what you want to self-host is just as important as the process of setting it up. You can spin up containers all day long, but unless they’re solving a problem in your life, it’s just tinkering for tinkering’s sake.
It’s the problem I faced when I started dabbling with building a home server years ago. Community forums, Reddit, and even YouTube channels were full of interesting projects that looked cool. I wasn’t sure where to begin. Did I want my own cloud? A media server? A smart home hub? The more I read, the more options I saw, and the less clear the starting point became. Did I even need half of these apps and services?
Over time, I came to the same realization most self-hosters and data hoarders come to. Self-hosting isn’t about replacing everything. It’s about picking the right places to start, the apps that justify the effort, as well as identifying the apps that you’ll want unobstructed access to. After years of self-hosting, these are the ones that stuck for me, and what I feel make for the best starting point for most people new to the hobby.
Do you self-host services? 553 votes Yes, most of software stack runs on a server I control. 44 % Yes, I've dabbled in the basics like a media server. 37 % No, I'm happy with cloud services. 9 % No, it's too complicated for me. 10 %
Portainer
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
If you’re kicking off your self-hosting journey, it’s inevitable that you’ll go down the rabbit hole of Docker. The containerization platform is the deployment tool of choice for most popular open-source apps and makes it easy for apps and services to include all dependencies into essentially a single file.
Let me put it this way: Docker is both the gateway and the gatekeeper to self-hosting. Everything runs on it, but it’s also the biggest reason beginners give up. While I urge anyone new to self-hosting to familiarize themselves with the command line, when faced with a wall of YAML files and cryptic commands, most people start to wonder if setting up a media server is really worth it.
Portainer makes managing Docker as easy as clicking a few buttons.
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