I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?


The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol
I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.
I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem
Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.
Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:
All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.
Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.
HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.
Out of all services I run, my wife has as registered user on 3 of them, which are Immich, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. She basically uses only Immich cause it fucking rocks and she loves it!