Self-hosting in 2026. What still earns its keep on my own hardware.
The homelab crossed its fifth birthday this year, which is long enough for the “is self-hosting worth it” answer to have changed twice. The current answer: it depends entirely on which service. Here is the ledger, as of this autumn.
Still earns its keep
- Caddy as the front door. Certificates are automatic, config is twenty lines, and it has survived every update since. The control panel experiment from last month sits behind it happily.
- Vaultwarden. Passwords are the crown jewel; local latency, encrypted offsite backup, and a trust question resolved in one direction. Nothing else on the box gets migrated to a subscription.
- Immich. The app that justified the NAS upgrade. Face search on my own hardware, and no per-face subscription. Photo libraries are exactly the data self-hosting was invented for.
- Forgejo plus a runner. Private repos and CI for the stuff that is nobody else’s business. A git server is one binary and a disk.
- Jellyfin. The interface is rougher than the streaming giants and nobody in this house has ever mentioned it.
- Home Assistant. Local control of the house. It would not be allowed to leave even if it wanted to.
- Uptime Kuma and ntfy. Monitoring and push in ten minutes of setup, retired a paid service, never looked back.
Evicted, without regret
- Anything a customer can touch. Production runs on a platform with an on-call rotation that is not me. This line has saved more weekends than every other line combined.
- Email. Deliverability is a full-time job and the pay is nothing. One afternoon of mailbox archaeology a year ago was enough for a lifetime.
- Nextcloud, twice tried. Both times it came back with opinions. File sync moved to Syncthing between my own boxes plus object storage offsite, and the opinions stopped.
- Databases behind production apps. Backups I do not administer are a feature, not a surrender.
Came back
- Miniflux. The hosted readers keep dying or enshittifying on a schedule. A feed reader is a database and a cron; hosting it costs nothing and outlives whoever bought it this year.
- SearXNG. A meta-search front end, mostly for the no-ads result page. Small, quiet, stays.
The real math
The hardware amortizes to noise — a used mini PC draws about fifteen watts, call it thirty euros a year; the NAS is more and worth it. The actual cost is the pager you carry for your own hobby, and the rule that keeps it sane: self-host what only you — and people who can call you — depend on. Everything whose downtime costs money runs elsewhere.
There is also a board. Photos and media must work like appliances or the household votes to move them to a subscription, and the household holds the deciding vote. The board has never had to vote, but its existence disciplines the maintenance schedule like nothing else.
The honest trade-offs
- Data gravity is the point and the risk: the crown jewels live at home, which means the restore drills from last week’s post are not optional for them.
- Every service must survive “the box died” — config in git or a volume in a backup job. Anything that cannot is a pet, and pets get evicted at the next review.
- Exposure discipline: nothing faces the internet except through the proxy, and remote access rides Tailscale — the exit-node post from October explains why that beat a port forward a year ago.
- Updates are a calendar item, not an aspiration. The month they became one, the pager went quiet.
Where I landed
The ledger says seven in, four out, two back. At some point in year four the homelab stopped being a hobby project and became infrastructure with a budget, a backup policy and a quarterly drill — which is also, not coincidentally, when it stopped feeling like work. Worth it, on those terms, for exactly the seven things still on the box.