Why I Self Host

November 20, 2025

A letter to myself on why I do this

This is a bit of a different blog post and also feels weird to write. Almost like I am trying to justify this hobby to myself, because it is a hobby, right? Something you gain enjoyment from? My running theory is that I am actually a masochist because who would continue to persist with something after it causing so much pain? This does allude to some future blog posts that I hope to get out soon, which continue my previous writing spells theme of “things break, I lose data, I get sad, but its fine”.

But I also wanted something of a reference to share with people when they ask why do I do this. And it’s also a reference for myself because believe me, there are many moments where I question is it all worth it. Every time, the answer is yes, but it takes time to arrive back at that conclusion. I’m writing this, as a bit of a letter to myself, to catalog the initial journey that lead me down this path. To also underscore the things that I believe in, which self hosting enables me to embrace those beliefs. To cap off a recent tumultuous period in my life, partly sponsored by the woes I recently experienced in my self hosting domain. To enable a reapproach of the space so I can make progress towards my goals that I hope to achieve, with self hosting, an activity I enjoy.

And truly, I do enjoy it, no matter how much it puts me down or causes me pain. I just need reminders of that enjoyment from time to time.

I’m including a table of contents, as there is approximately 4,000 words according to Obsidian. So, if you want to jump around, or just read a section at a time, hopefully this is of use.

• When feelings about Big Tech started to change
• Trying to leave the Big Tech garden
• Going a step further thanks to a colleague and a podcast
• Hesitations
• Conclusion

When feelings about Big Tech started to change

I was struggling to think of a start date for this, reconsideration of how my digital life was lived. This was towards the end of my college days I think, so about 2018-2019. I remember conversations with those I was living with at the time, sort of a peeling back the veil on the surveillance capitalism model. Which was sort of hard to believe for me. Studying tech and being nerdy, there’s this sort of, love and admiration you get for the big tech company’s. You’re in college / university and there’s always talks about Google, or Amazon, or Facebook, how they’re these great places to work for. Indeed I remember going on a little day trip up to Dublin with the college in I think first semester of first year, so 2015, to the Google offices. And it was class! It was some super interesting talks and a cool vibe. I remember talking to one of my lecturers at the time who came along the trip and we were both saying, “Google is so cool!”

You leave one of these events, thinking yeah I wanna work here! That’s certainly how I felt, albeit the level of effort I put into securing an internship there was minimal. But to circle back, it almost feels like a level of brainwashing when it comes to Big Tech. College at least to me ended up being this way of solidifying that Big Tech is cool vibe, so you fully embrace these ecosystems. Never mind how the tools you use to just simply do college stuff, are predominately Big Tech too. G Suite (now Google Workspace) for all your emails, docs, notes. Or Microsoft Office. Furthermore, everything is absolutely free really as a personal user. You get all these tools that enable you to do so much, seemingly from your own perspective, without any trade in return.

But of course, nothing in life is free. It’s something I want to write another post for, I can already feel this will be a long post itself, but to touch on it briefly; I think it’s very common for us to forget there is always a transaction. There is always a cost, there is always a trade, there is always a transaction. This transaction tends to get obfuscated online, through the simple action of “I agree to the terms and conditions”. Full disclosure, I rarely read those documents myself, even with my fast reading speed. But it’s become commonplace for us as people, to transact with these company’s for the services we want, in return for our data. Data has been and will likely continue to be, the oil of the digital age. Especially with the current obsessions around large language models.

Back to Evan in 2018-2019. Those conversations with housemates, started a very long journey that continues today, with many twists and turns, on trying to turn the table at least for myself personally. I was starting to recognise this transaction I was making, where for all the services I was using, Big Tech received in return, my entire digital life really. A healthy dose of paranoia entered at this time too, I think this was a lot of coverage started around microphone permissions on phones and were these social media apps listening in. Which, they assure you they don’t, but I definitely noticed instances of the advertisements being shown to me, changing based on conversations I had. Which again I admit - paranoia, but it was just more fuel for this fire that was starting.

I tried to start tackling what I saw as the biggest issue, Google. Since again, it in effect had a complete monopoly on my presence online. Which, is also scary! There was examples of what kind of effect this monopoly can have, if for some reason you lose access to the garden. I signed up to ProtonMail, as a first step. At the time I had at the very least three active Google accounts. My personal one that I had since I was probably way too young, my college account and then another one on Google Workspace for my side business. Changing the last one to Proton Mail to start with, made the most sense to me since Proton is a paid experience if you want all the features. I owned multiple domain names at this point too, so making a change to using a custom domain name, was also part of the plan. I configured my personal gmail to auto forward all incoming email to Proton and began to slowly update that use of that gmail address in terms of my accounts online.

Very slowly, but very surely, I started to make the changes required to take control. I didn’t quite know yet how far I would go, but evidently, it went very far!

Trying to leave the Big Tech garden

I think that it was a bit lost on me at the time the sheer scale of trying to transition away from a product that you’ve use for over ten years at that point. Making the change to Proton, like I was saying in the prior section, I started with some of my smaller Google accounts. But I was quick to try and centralise as much as I could, at the very least importing all my old email into Proton. As I interacted with services, I tried to either update my email address or register with my custom domain address. While still relying on the forwarding from Gmail.

I also embraced ProtonVPN to try and increase my privacy online. I think VPNs were advertised to me for years, looking at you YouTube sponsorships, and I always ignored them. I think the concept of them enabling you to look at region-locked content on streaming platforms, seemed like false marketing to me. Sure enough at the time anyway, Netflix et al, noticed the VPN usage and didn’t exactly yield to it. I also just used servers in Ireland in general, as versus going to some other country to route traffic. At the time at least, I wasn’t that concerned with a website knowing I was in Ireland. Lots of them these days especially, rely on that to at least serve a relevant page. Important for stores anyway, I want to make sure I’m getting the euro price haha

Overall Proton at this time was fine, but it was clear some sacrifices were being made. If you just needed basic email features, it was fine. But when you’re used to the interconnected ecosystem of Google, losing those extra features proved challenging. I was living a dual life of some services on Google still, others elsewhere. Calendar was something that stuck for quite a while as while Proton did come out with a beta version of their Calendar product in 2019, it was very early doors and at the time anyway, did not have feature parity with big tech.

One of my more odd moves at the time, least it’s odd to me now with the ability to look back on my prior choices, was a decision to move some services to Microsoft. To at the very least, remove more of my dependency on Google. At this stage I guess I didn’t think all of big tech was bad (what hubris) but just Google, predominately due to the model of them using my data to advertise to me. And I guess to even use some of Microsoft’s products, you have to pay money, so in my mind at least based on my logic of these transactions being made, paying money == less incentive to monetize my data.

Poor logic of course for a big tech interaction. I am not really sure how long I used Microsoft services. In terms of services it was the office suite and OneDrive. While still using Proton for email and a bit of Google sprinkled in. I actually also introduced Apple to my world, by changing from Android to iOS. Again the thought process was, well Apple’s transaction is I buy an expensive device. That is generally, their main objective. Sell you an expensive thing, they in theory are not as incentivised to sell your data as others.

This all really continues my there is always a transaction argument. Ultimately I can’t ever really fully divorce myself from big tech. Well, I COULD. But at that point what I am paying is likely a cost too great for me in terms of predominately communication and being social. I’ve already paid a high price on this front in my offshoot war on social media. Deleting Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, lead to moments of simply losing out on contact with others or knowing what was going on. One can argue that well, if they cared enough, they would have found a way. Which is true I suppose. But I mean speaking from experience, it’s really hard to maintain even a handful of connections. At least in one way, social media can surface key events that might encourage a reach out. Even things like my phone, I could get a dumb phone. Or swap back to Android and install a custom OS. Though as of November 2025, that seems to be getting made harder by Google, least anecdotally it seems. If I did go that route, I would lose out on potentially other things, for example, banking access.

And how can I trust Proton? Sure I’m paying them money, therefore in theory they should have no interest in my data. But, maybe something could change? I think it’s unlikely, a funny story I will share later in the post also highlights how I’m truly aware of how their encryption works…

Ultimately I think really you just have to make decisions / sacrifices. A lot of which will likely be rooted in convenience for you. Decide is it convenient for you to store your photos with Google, or is it better to store them locally with Immich. Decide is it a sacrifice for you to deploy Ring cameras in your home for the sake of security, while Amazon could access the data being sent to the cloud. Or is it better to deploy a self hosted camera solution, where all the footage lives on your own hard drives inside your own home.

Going a step further thanks to a colleague and a podcast

Late 2019 going into 2020, my general situation was that I had migrated some services to Proton and some services to Microsoft. A weird situation, I do admit. Going into 2020 though I started watching more videos around storage server deployments. Namely, Linus Tech Tips of course. I always found their server videos interesting and a fun watch, even though I knew I never needed that scale. The configuration challenge of everything was also not lost on me, so really I felt starting that data sovereignty journey was always going to be out of reach. But then I saw another video around Synology and how really it was just buy some hard drives and stick it inside one of their servers. To me anyway, it seemed like a great idea!

Of course now we’re starting to move into mid 2020 and as everyone is aware, free time became rather copious during this year. So I started really digging deeper into trying to run services at home. At the time in my career too, I had an amazing colleague who was already well and truly down this path. So, I could bounce various ideas off of them to get their advice. Most of the advice, revolved around truly DIYing the solution. With the power of hindsight? 100% should have gone that route. But my logic at the time, which still holds true to me today, is that I needed a bit of handholding. Something like a Synology could give me that handholding.

So, the saving started to happen for my purchases! I do admit I forget what I bought first, as the scope creep around all of this happened quickly. But I did buy my Synology DS920+ along with four, 6TB Seagate IronWolf hard drives. Which gave me a total of 24TB of raw storage, after my RAID configuration, about 12TB usable space. I even bought some overkill networking gear from Ubiquiti, which included a Dream Machine Pro and one of their Pro 24 port switches. I also repurposed an old computer of mine into a little server for hosting things. It was quite a hodgepodge of devices, all just plonked on top of an IKEA table. But it was a start and in terms of my data, it all started moving towards my Synology server being the primary space for my data.

By the time mid 2021 rolls around, I change jobs for greener pastures. As part of my new commute, I elected to try and listen to podcasts. Which, I find one, to be quite honest I forget how I did find it. But, it was fully focused on self hosting, in fact the name of it is just, Self-Hosted. Which was created by Jupiter Broadcasting. With a huge backlog for me to listen through, it became the joy of my commute. Especially just to hear from others, who think like me. Around this time too was when I blogged a bit more about what I was up to on the self hosting front. So, I won’t re-hash everything here. Generally though, it became a really nice time for me trying out new things and going overboard on a LOT of stuff.

That unfortunately lead to situations of some screw-ups. And when you screw-up on something that you’re the only one responsible for, it can be really bad. Not that things went wrong on a regular basis, but it was a case of realisation that there was a lot more consequences for my actions. And if I did not put in the effort, so, be lazy, it can lead to worse situations, such as data loss. At which point, you start to wonder are you even cut out for all of this.

Hesitations

I think any person who does self hosting, has this moment of wondering is it all worth it. Usually right after something goes wrong, often in a catastrophic way. I’ve had, many of these moments, often documented on this website. One of my catastrophe’s, involved ProtonMail. So one day I wanted to replace the battery in my iPhone 11. I must have had my new iPhone, cause I feel like I did have a device to use still but anyway. At the store which was the official repair spot for Apple, they were like “we’ll need the passcode to the device to run our diagnostics to make sure the replacement worked”. To which I was like, “aight fair enough”. So I did that and got back to work, chatting to colleagues. One of whom used to work in Apple Support and was like “they wouldn’t ever need that to do diagnostics, that’s a red flag”.

So I started to panic and at least rationally, knew the main things to try and disconnect remotely was password manager, email and banking. Banking was straightforward, thanks Revolut. Proton was also straight forward enough. Password manager wasn’t like, not straightforward. But it lead to a rather serious oopsie, when updating Proton. I’ve a very ELI5 understanding of Proton encryption but basically, it’s your account password that is in effect the key that decrypts your data. If you’re normally changing your password, you also need to update the encryption to use that password now instead. This flow is fine if you’re all logged in and stuff, which at the time I was. I used my password manager to auto generate passwords for my account.

Now at the time, the browser extension for this password manager could be finicky. It wasn’t as adept at say, autosave and recognising where one was on the web like other password managers could. So I had put in my current password into Proton, entered my new password value in that I had from the clipboard, updated Proton, all good! I then went to update my entry in my password manager with the new password to save it, when I accidentally clicked the “copy password” field on the item. Therefore, losing my new password.

The realisation hit like a train. The only way that I could in theory regain access to my account, is to do a full account recovery process. Which gives you your account back, but since your password is reset and no longer matches what encrypted your emails before, all your old email is just in effect, lost forever. I can confirm, Proton do not lie when they say they encrypt all your emails!!

I did manage to recover everything, I am a small bit hazy on the details now as this was years ago and you know, try to forget trauma. But I think in the end I was still logged in in some private window somewhere, or all my encryption keys were still able to be used. So I was able to swap back to the original encryption, then I think I must have downloaded a key file so I could decrypt the data, after another password swap. But, got all my data back!

Sufficed to say, this was a bit of a scare. For email anyway, I ended up moving back towards big tech, namely Apple. It feels weird to write that, like I admitted a shame? In a moment of failure it’s often hard to pick one self back up. And I think some aspects of this are quite hard in of themselves. Like I could just not do these things at all, and life would arguably be pretty simple, just use all the various big tech managed services. I think ultimately though, it’s important to me and it’s important to show that one can take back control. And doubly important, to show that it’s a hard journey, which I think my blog does quite nicely!

Formalising the principles I try to maintain

I’ve suffered many failures on this journey and I will suffer more. But, I know that I will always enjoy tinkering and maintaining my own services. I can’t be lazy in the pursuit though, I think I can chalk up most of my data loss and other failures, to laziness. I continue to get excited when I think of new, mildly eccentric ideas to solve a problem, it all just needs a bit of effort to do it right the first time. Followed up with maintenance to keep things working in a healthy state.

What I think would help, is to document what it is I aim for in my self hosting. Having a list of principles can help to guide what decisions to take next and also justify some decisions that may not make sense to others. Such as, self hosting in general!

If it makes sense, try to self host it locally

Pretty straight forward. I self host things that I feel actually make sense to do / trust myself to do. I’m pretty happy to self host software for my photos. I’m less happy to try and self host email for example. This extends to a few other things, like VCS and say DNS. But that might change over time. Having local services that use open source or source available software, means that generally anyway, you can be immune to some of the various rug pulls managed services can pull.

If you don’t test backups, don’t trust with your data

This has been learned time and time again by me, hopefully writing it down will help it go into my brain a bit more. A regular backup making and testing routine is required to ensure one can be confident that things like precious memories won’t disappear into the ether. Regular testing should lead to regular increases in confidence in the system and therefore, more room for crazy ideas!

Data sovereignty, with standard file formats

I have to own my own data, so implementing systems that let me do that is a must. It cannot be something that does keep my data local, but then obfuscates it or uses some proprietary format that locks me into that application. Sometimes this can be unavoidable based on some decisions i’ve taken, for example, UniFi Protect. But I know I could download the recordings made from any cameras. And I vastly prefer knowing with confidence that said recordings are on hard drives that I own, within my four walls.

Prioritise European service providers

If I’m looking for a provider or a service, I should try to prioritise a provider based in Europe. The emphasis is on prioritise. If I can’t find a European provider, or there’s some other barrier, like significant costs involved, then at least find a provider who could satisfy the previous requirement, with infrastructure based in Europe.

Privacy First

I should have a reasonable expectation that the services I use will maintain my privacy and not simply siphon off all my data to sell to advertisers or profile me. This can be unavoidable, for example I heavily use YouTube for my media. But where I can, I try to use services that mean I’m the customer, as versus the product.

Minimise usage of big tech where possible

In extension to the above, I try to minimise what big tech services I use, but I acknowledge that I cannot fully escape, unless I wanted to become a true hermit crab and likely sacrifice some creature comforts. I’m sure Discord harvests lots of my data and it’s where I do a lot of communicating, in theory I should be getting rid of it. But if I did get rid of it, I likely end up losing a lot of social connectivity, and that trade off is just not worth it to me. I use an iPhone, I use YouTube, I’ve used single sign on services with Google and Microsoft. I’m not perfect, but the best I can do is just to try and use as little as I can.

Conclusion

This was very much just written for me and I feel much better for it. It’s nice to look back on the journey really and understand why I do what I do. Way back in 2018/19, I don’t think this seemed as important. But now, to me anyway, it’s pretty clear that the alarm bells have been ringing and the canary in the coal mine has been dead in the cage for a bit. For me now, my plan is to start building a proper backup and restore procedure that I test extensively. I recently completed some tests of my storage server and I was quite pleased that things restored successfully. I just need to test the restore via another method to be truly confident. Following that, I will move the testing to the apps that I self host while also exploring more routes around configuration as code for some tools.

I think in a weird way, self hosting is like the technology version of a DIY hobby. Skills around doing things yourself are certainly dying out. If you can work with wood, build your own furniture, create your own clothes, you’re creating things that have a good chance of lasting a life time. Even greater chance, of fixing any issue with those things yourself if it arrises. Being able to DIY a solution in the tech world, is becoming a more important skill over time. We shouldn’t have to rely on a few centralised providers, in a connected world that was originally built in a decentralised manner.

I shall continue to discuss my crazy, rather eccentric self hosting journey on my blog. If you actually read all of this, fair play! Feel free to reach out directly if you want to discuss some of the finer points :)

Thank you!

You could of consumed content on any website, but you went ahead and consumed my content, so I'm very grateful! If you liked this, then you might like this other piece of content I worked on.

My most recent plan, before first contact with the enemy!

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