I've started self-hosting quite some services over the years, stopped with a couple as well. There is something special about doing things yourself, and running your own software and not giving away your data is one part in that. I even enjoy finding new services ready to be self-hosted on pages like awesome self-hosted. There is software for everything these days and at some point I was wondering if it was the best solution.
This year I got a Pimoroni Enviro Grow for my birthday. As a person who is structured enough to almost never forget to water the plants, my plants tend to live quite long and happy. Although, the problem is almost... I love the fact of gathering data with all kinds of sensors and apps, and most of it I throw out of the door at some point, but not this, I say to myself. Because this is useful.
I've been using Pi-hole for blocking ads for a long time. Well not only ads, but also other stuff I don't want on my network like phishing, malware and tracking. I had Pi-hole running on my NAS and with all the updates to several services running on it (including Pi-hole), the NAS was not keeping up. Monitoring would notify me on failed DNS attempts during backups. I was looking to move services away from the NAS, but then other stuff would also need improving.
While starting my blog in early 2024, I read posts from other bloggers about AI scraping traffic. I decided back then that I wanted indexing from search engines but no traffic from AI scrapers.
I wanted to use Immich for a long time, but for a long time my Homelab was powered by a Raspberry Pi 3b, and that was already struggling with the 15 services I was running on it. I am already storing all my photos on my NAS, but finding any memories is very difficult. So now that I moved from docker on a Raspberry Pie to a 8GB RP5 kubernetes cluster, I do have some capacity left, although not much.