Self-hosting everything — where do YOU draw the line?

I finally did it. After six years of self-hosting everything under the sun, I broke down and started paying for email.

Not my personal email, mind you. That's still running on my mailcow docker compose stack behind traefik on a 4GB KVM at OVHcloud. But my family's email? My parents kept calling because their phone "couldn't find the server" every time I rotated certificates. The reverse proxy was fine. It was always fine. They just have a gift for timing.

So I pay for email now. One external account. It feels like betrayal. Why pay for something you can self-host with a simple docker compose and a reverse proxy? I know the answer. I just don't like it.

Where do you all draw the line? What is the one thing you absolutely refuse to run in your basement, on a NAT VPS, or behind your beloved reverse proxy?

Oh Sam, I feel this in my bones

For me it's photos. All 3TB of them. Self-hosted immich, photoprism, you name it, I tried it. But the 3-2-1 rule gets *expensive* when your offsite copy is another dedicated server. Did you test your restore? I did. Took 14 hours. Family was not impressed.

My line:

• Banking: absolutely not, they have better security teams than my cron jobs
• Photos: cloud with encrypted backup at home
• Everything else: self-hosted with proper backups

Checklist for anyone on the fence:

• Calculate your time at $20/hr
• Add hardware cost
• Add backup hardware cost
• Compare to service price
• Did you test your restore?

Sometimes paying is the rational choice. Sometimes.

Banking lol

Idk why I do this but I actually self-host my *accounting* software on a NAT box from RackNerd. $12/year. It works. Anyway I draw the line at anything that could get me sued or visited by men in suits. So banking stays at actual banks. Also anything requiring a phone number that humans call, because I am not explaining SIP trunking to my mother at 3am.

My photos are on a cobbled together raid1 of two usb drives in a closet. No offsite.

Anyone else run their budget spreadsheet on a 128MB NAT VPS or is that just me

services:
  actual:
    image: actualbudget/actual-server
    ports:
      - "5006:5006"
    restart: unless-stopped
    # yes this is my entire compose. yes it's on a 128MB box.

IMO the line moves over time. YMMV, take it with a grain of salt.

Five years ago I self-hosted DNS. Now I pay Vultr for it — https://www.vultr.com. The reliability just isn't worth my Sunday afternoons anymore. I still run my own authoritative for a few domains, but recursive resolution? Let someone else handle the DDoS stress.

Email I never even tried. Too many horror stories about IP reputation.

What I *do* self-host: RSS, bookmarks, notes, git. The quiet stuff that doesn't ring at odd hours. The stuff where "down for an hour" means "I read a book instead" not "my mother can't reach me."

One vps. One plant. Simple is better

The plant needs less maintenance

DNS was my white whale for years

Fun little project: ran my own anycast setup across three NAT VPS boxes. It actually works! For about $8/month total. But then Contabo had a routing hiccup and my domain was unreachable from half of Europe for six hours. Wife noticed before I did. That was the line.

Now I self-host everything *except* DNS and email. The unholy duo. Everything else is fair game. Currently tinkering with a 2GB Ryzen box from InterServer running:

# docker-compose.yml snippet
services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    # hardware transcode via /dev/dri
  paperless:
    image: paperlessngx/paperless-ngx
  # plus six more, because why not

Yabs on that box: disk 890 MB/s, network 650 Mbit up/down. Geekbench 6 single 2100. Not bad for €7/month.

14 hour restore and family wasn't impressed, yikes