Self Hosting Setup - 2025
It’s been two years since the last self-hosting setup post. The setup largely remained pretty much the same with the following changes:
- piHole and dnscrypt-proxy has been replaced with Adguard Home since it does both.
- photoprism - self-hosted alternative to google photos and iCloud photos. I have bought a new iPhone with iCloud plans for my family, but I’m still backing up all the photos here just in case. I am planning to explore immich in the next year when I get some time.
- loki, prometheus, grafana, blackbox-exporter and alertmanager - for observability.
- jellyfin - currently testing as an alternative to plex.
- uptime-kuma - for uptime monitoring.
- Actual Budget - helps me to keep track of my finances. Earlier, I was using MyExpenses in android which is open-source with some paid features and since I’m not carrying my android phone daily, I moved to actual and it’s been great so far.
I added two servers in late 2023 in addition to the raspberry pi and they’ve been running for 2 years without any problems:
blr- server from DigitalOcean in Bangalore region. Takes care of latency sensitive and critical services.hydra- server from Hetzner in Germany. The arm64 shared servers are good in terms of price-to-performance ratio. I use this server for all the resource heavy services.pi- a raspberry pi 4B connected to my home network and runs a DNS server alone for now.
All the services are deployed as docker containers via ansible and terraform. I talk to all these servers via tailscale SSH.