I’ve always been conservative about what kind of services I host because it takes time to get them set up. For example, there’s no reason for me to set up music streaming when I only ever listen to music on my phone and all my music files are already on my phone. On the other hand, it’s a good learning opportunity to set stuff up and have to fix it when it breaks. What do you think?
I would rather waste a week setting something up to find I don’t like it, then paying some company to give me some ad riddled thing that phones home every few minutes and being stuck with it for a month, then the nonstop emails after I’ve cancelled and my information being sold to who knows who.
If something interests you, set it up. If you find you don’t need it, take it down.
That’s pretty much exactly what I have done. I’ve hosted Plex, and Matrix in the past. Plex I will host in the future but Matrix was too much for me to host on my own, but the experience of setting it up myself was definitely worth it.
Can I ask why the Matrix was too much? I’m thinking of setting up a Synapse docker container.
Well I don’t have a home server at the moment so I was renting out a server for about $40/month. Mostly because it was eating up a bunch of storage, and I was too lazy to swap from digital ocean.
Also I was using the ansible script and at some point I they changed something that required me to set it up again which I didn’t really have the time for.
I will say Ansible was a lifesaver. It made setting up and keeping the server up to date super easy.
I do recommend trying it out tho, just don’t use a domain name that is the same as your username or you will have issues with pings, especially if you share the instance with a friend. Learned that the hard way. Anytime they sent a message anywhere I was at, it pinged me, whether or not they intended to ping me.
I recommend checking out Jellyfin instead of Plex. Open source, fully self hosted.
I’m definitely keeping my eye on Jellyfin. Basically waiting for the mobile/tv apps to have more of the features that I personally want, especially on devices like my AppleTV. But it’s definitely a good project that I want to see improve.
i’d switch to jellyfin if plex wasn’t so polished. i ran into so many issues with jellyfin but plex just worked, even downloads haven’t been an issue for me. im sure jellyfin will improve, but I think it needs more time. Plex also has more client apps available.
i love the idea of more FOSS where i dont need to hit someone elses server to log in so here’s hoping!
I found jellyfin easier to setup then plex and the dashboard is much nicer. I also love the quick connect option when logging into new devices.
My usage varies from service to service, but unless I’ve either found a replacement or completely stopped using it, I keep all of them (including the ones I never really use) ready to go, maybe with the container stopped. So far I’ve only removed 2 services, both because there were better alternatives for me.
If I see something interesting, I’ll note it and try to get it up later. Sometimes the service keeps spitting out errors, in which case I’ll just attempt again later if I still find the service to be worthy.
I use the wide majority of what I setup, sometimes I end up taking it back down, but you’re right that it’s a good learning opportunity. Nothing wrong with throwing some stuff up just to check out.
Sometimes things may not be useful for you but may be useful for others as well, if you wanted to share, a music streaming setup could be nice to share with friends.
linkding was one for me. It sounded like a great idea at first, but, I never used it. Shut it down after a couple months.
It’s a well made tool, I just never used it. It turns out, I prefer a to-do list and a task for each thing I’m working on, then anything related to it (including links) goes on the task. It was just a tool i forgot existed all the time and never referenced. And as it goes with many of us, if it doesn’t come up in a search, it mine as well not exist, because I’ll never find it…haha
