Spring 2025: Self-Hosted Update

My last self-hosted updated was Summer 2024, what’s new?

The Mini-ITX Proxmox server I built has been rock-solid. No downtime, no hardware hiccups, though I never bothered to use graphics PCI passthrough. My Raspberry Pi 5 is unplugged 😔 just no use for it. It started randomly dropping off the LAN so I yanked the power. My Pi 4 runs a backup DNS server. I’ve given a few other Pis away.

My “smart home” has gotten progressively dumber. I’ve lost all interest in that area. I could get away with removing Home Assistant entirely soon.

Website Deployment

My Git Granary large file storage (LFS server) has been battle tested. It stores my blog images. I configured a GitHub Action with Tailscale for website deployment. I still haven’t had time to learn Forgejo Actions for an entirely self-hosted deploy.

The problem with using GitHub is that due to punching holes in NAT & firewalls, Tailscale cannot make a direct connection. The relays are slow. Well, slow-ish; deployment takes a couple of minutes rather than seconds (I want it now!)

I tentatively considered self-hosting my entire web server. Given the recent “AI” denial of service attacks now is not a good time.

Tailscale Decline

There’s been talk of Tailscale “enshittification” following their latest $160M funding round. From my experience that process was well underway. I asked in September is the magic fading? Yes it is. The iOS bug I reported is not fixed with no signs of progress. It’s clearly not priority. Tailscale no longer “just works” to put it simply.

My options are:

Continue and pray Tailscale doesn’t get worse 🙏
Host my own Headscale control server (doesn’t solve all the issues)
Find a pre-enshittified competitor (lol)
Go back to manual WireGuard configuration (ugh)

I did actually pay periodically for Tailscale so I have some right to complain.

Build it Myself

I’ve been on a mission to reduce my general spending. That includes almost all Software as a Service subscriptions. I estimate I’m living 0–50% cheaper! With rise in costs and inflation, I’m no better off in reality.

Like all self-hosting addicts I have an extensive multimedia collection. I use Jellyfin with Infuse apps to stream my favourite Linux ISOs. I pay for Infuse Pro but at £0.79/month it’s affordable. I maintain my own sauroPod web app to sync and play audiobooks and podcasts. The database needs a major refactor at some point. I made a bad bet on Deno KV. It shouldn’t be too painful to migrate to SQLite.

I built my own accounting software too to escape FreeAgent. Once my tax return calculations matched I cut the cord and sent a data deletion request.

Time is money as they say. Is it worth building my own solutions? The reason I can justify spending time over money because:

Coding and programming is my job
It’s also my hobby

I learn, I improve, I have fun (mostly). I would not have survived as a self-employed developer without honing my skills on self-hosted stuff. I started learning Zig and built a custom ZSH prompt that I run inside my VMs.

Todo List

My self-hosted projects for this year may be limited to:

Improve remote and automated backups
Replace Home Assistant with custom scripts
Website deployment with Forgejo

I don’t foresee any hardware changes unless I spill tea where I shouldn’t! I’m inundated with paid client work until Summer so these are weekend plans.