Don't Self Host
Self hosting is all the rage in the privacy community. No matter what recommendation you look at, you’ll see self hosting as the primary tool you can use to make you a privacy master. What is not said is all of the downsides of self hosting, especially for technically savvy people. Even if you are technically proficient enough to run your own services, you probably don’t want to.
My Self Hosted Services
When I first got into digital privacy I experimented with simple self hosting. I generally take the approach of buying the cheapest item possible when experimenting. To that end, I purchased the Odroid HC1 and installed NextCloud PI. I slowly migrated over most of our cloud data to the device; files, calendar, and contacts. In general the device performed well and suited our needs.
The first issue came when the device would unexpectedly lock up and not respond except for a hard reboot. It seemed to occur at random without known cause. It was a few weeks later that I learned that viewing a folder with a lot of photos would trigger the hard crash. The issue was that NextCloud needs to generate the thumbnails for all the photos in the folder on the fly and that process caused the device to exceed memory limits. The OS available for the device, Armbian, only supported a 2GB pagefile size and the physical memory was 2GB.
After learning this, I went and bought computer components to build a robust server. In particular, I made sure to by 32GB of ECC memory and dual NVME and HDD drives to be setup in RAID 1 array in Btrfs. I also started using BackBlaze C2 as a remote backup of the data; encrypted before upload of course. At the time I also got a fiber connection to my house with a dedicated IP address so I could attach a domain name without using a dynamic domain name service. I was adding other services to my server and even looked into using it as a mail server with Docker Mailserver.
I might have continued to use this setup had we not moved. In the process of moving, I wanted to move my server ahead of our actual move so we weren’t without service during that time. So I set it up at my parent’s house a couple of months before the planned move. That’s when things really went wrong. My parent’s network suddenly stopped connecting to my server and I had to ask my brother to move it and connect it with a new cable. Additionally, their modem died in the interim which lead to further disruptions. At one point my wife and I couldn’t sync our calendars which caused a bit of confusion and coordincation trouble. I was enentually able to get services restored, but that was when I knew I needed to find a new solution.
The Replacements
Other People’s Experience