What is your personal online "tech stack"? How do you like it?
I thought it would be fun to explore what people on Tildes use for things like email, file synchronisation, webhosting, backups, streaming, password management, etc.
Are you using a common big tech service? Are you self hosting? Something in between? If you are self hosting what does it look like? Are you running bare metal, using containers, a complete proxmox setup with a legion of VMs? And of course, what software are using on top of it all?
I am also curious to see how satisfied you are with your current setup.
To be extra clear, this is not about the OS you are running on your personal computer, we've had plenty of discussion like that already ;).
And also to be extra clear, this isn't just about self hosting.
Posted in ~tech because I want a broad discussion, not just the ~comp folks.
I'll start
I have been trying to move away from a lot of the big tech services for a few years now. For me it isn't an absolute where I don't want any Google or Microsoft in my life, I just don't want to be reliant on them for what I see as critical parts of my personal infrastructure.
Running servers and maintaining them including infrastructure on top like reverse proxies, docker, Kubernetes, etc is something I am fairly familiar with. But it isn't something I quite enjoy or trust myself to do for a lot of important stuff. Specifically when it comes down to security and making sure backups are in order. This means that for a lot of things I have opted to use other services. But in a way that allows me to move away to a different one quite easily.
File storage & synchronization
For years I made use of Google drive, but after running into various sync issues and the lack of Linux clients (even though I am now back on Windows) it was the first service I moved away from big tech.
For this I make use of a hosted Nextcloud instance on Hetzener's "storage share" plan. Honestly, no big complaints here about the core functionality. Files get synchronized just fine and Hetzner takes care of updates and backups.
For email I make use of my own domain in combination with mailbox.org mail hosting.
Media streaming
I still have quite some music, movies and series on my hard drive. For this I use Jellyfin, which works quite well. Though the native apps have some issues where it will start transcoding things that don't need transcoding at all. This isn't an issue with third party apps. On android, I use findroid. On the ipad of my SO I had to compromise a little bit, the best app there seems to be Infuse which isn't open and requires a subscription for some advanced features. Though for Jellyfin playback the free version seems to work fine so far.
Jellyfin itself is just running on my desktop PC. I have been thinking about a NAS of sorts, but decided to hold off on it for now as my computer is effectively always on whenever one of us wants to watch something.
Password management
In the past I have used KeePassXC which with the browser extension works quite well on my desktop. But keeping it synced to my phone as well was sometimes a bit finicky. So last year I decided to switch to Bitwarden with the idea that I can always switch to vaultwarden if I decide to.
Edit: DeaconBlue's setup reminded me that I also use Aegis which backs up encrypted to nextcloud.
Backup
For backups I make use of Hetzner's storage box plans. In order to create the backups I make use of restic, but to make things a bit easier I have opted to use the Backrest front-end for it which basically takes care of scheduling.
VPS for various random scripts and experiments
I am also running a Ubuntu server VPS, also on Hetzner infrastructure, which I use to run a variety of scripts, experiment with stuff I might want to self host, etc. The scripts it runs are mostly related to discord moderation and one I maintain for the /r/history team (even though I am no longer active on reddit).
Webhosting & Domains
While I have a VPS, for simple hosting and since I need to buy my domains somewhere I am making use of a hosting provider in the Netherlands called mijn.host. They are quite affordable and customer oriented.
If you have ever see me share images on Tildes this is also where I have my own image hosting thing running. Which is basically ShareX configured to upload images to a simple PHP endpoint I created that resizes images, strips their exif data and renames them.
Honourable mention: PikaPods
PikaPods basically provides you with docker hosting of a wide variety of open source apps in a very user friendly way. I have experimented a bit with it and while I don't have a current use for it I do think that it is a neat service other people might enjoy.
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I use FastMail for my personal domain email -- the feature that got me in the door was their integration with BitWarden for masked email addresses. If that interests you : )
One of the factors for going with mailbox.org is that they are EU based and it was also slightly cheaper.
For what fastmail calls "masked email addresses" I just use the good old-fashioned catch all functionality for mail and domains. So whenever I need one I just type one in (that ends with my custom domain) and it will just work.
Fastmail says that using your own domain for that is less anonymous, which is true, but using their domain would lock me into their ecosystem. Which is something I explicitly am trying to avoid in my choice for services.
Anyway, in the spirit of this topic. What is the rest of your setup like? ;)
Sure, I have a catch all as well. But it's nice that when I create a new login with BitWarden, just by clicking the "Generate Username" button, it will:
Minor things, but well worth it for me.
Since you asked..
I have a VPS, codename Bucket, I've been renting from Linode since the early/mid 2010's. It's a small machine (2 vCPU's, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe storage), but on a network backbone I could only dream of having at my house (Roughly 2.5 GB/s symmetrical, last time I speedtested it). And hard static addresses. I also use Linode as my DNS manager. I use the VPS for my of my "public facing" infrastructure:
In my house, I'm served by AT&T Fiber, I've set my gateway to IP passover mode and use a UDM-Pro, codename Woodhouse, as my router. I've done two notably custom things on Woodhouse:
beat into submissionforce all devices on my network to use my PiHole's for DNS.My home server, codename Vergil, if my mega-host. It's a repurposed SuperMicro 4U server I bought used off eBay and slapped a X9DR3-LN4F+ motherboard, two Intel E5-2670's, and 24 sticks of 4 GB RAM in to. I flashed a BIOS file I modified with NVMe storage drivers so that I could run Debian off an NVMe drive on the old hardware. I've also loaded by backplane with 12x 14 TB disks, and 6x 16 TB disks, for 18 of my 24 bays in use. The disks are broken up in to three raidz2 pools for a total of 160 TB of writable storage on spinning disks. Vergil hosts for me:
My daily driver devices are my desktop, codename River, sporting an i7-13700k, RTX 4080 Super Founders, and 64 GB RAM. My laptop, codename Cortana, as XPS-15 with respectable but less powerful i9-11900H, RTX 3050 Ti, and 32 GB RAM. I also walk around with a Google Pixel 9 Pro in my pocket, but no codename there.
There's a handful of SBC's across my network as well -- A raspi4 serving as my primary DNS server, codename GLaDOS, accompanied by another rapsi4 serving as my secondary DNS server, codename Wheatley. An old rapsi2B, codename Wash, which runs Fermentrack (in Docker, of course) and maintains temperature control for my home brewery. And finally, an odroid-hc2, codename Guilty Spark, that lives inside a 1/4 ton safe bolted down to the concrete foundation of my house with power and ethernet passthrough built in to it. With an 8 TB spinning drive, this is my onsite backup of the backups stored on Vergil. I have a friend with a home server on the other side of the country who lets me use some storage as my offsite backup destination.
Wow, that's some serious ware! I'm curious if you've had to replace many drives in your raid array, and what the rebuilds were like.
Only one, so far! I keep fairly meticulous drive records, so I can answer with some accuracy.
The 14 TB drives are SATA drives, shucked from WD external enclosures I picked up from Best Buy on Black Friday sales. I purchased the first six in Nov. of 2020, and the second six in Nov. of 2021. They've been spinning essentially since I shucked them, the first batch is at 40740 hours, the second batch is at 32738 hours. I had one drive from the second batch die at 24873 hours, having given me 2 years, 305 days, and 21 hours of life. None of the others from that batch have died. When I decided to switch to 16 TB drives for my third raidz2 pool, I opted to switch to Seagate Exos SAS drives. I've been happy with their performance and cost per TB, I have a cold spare on hand and I plan to replace any future failed drives with 16 TB drives.
The rebuild couldn't have been easier, I can't sing the praises of zfs enough. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it or not, but the important parts here are that I use six disk 'raidz2' vdevs. The 'raidz2' configuration is essentially the same concept as a raid6 -- two drive parity. You can combine vdev's into an overall storage pool. My setup currently is two vdev's made up of six 14 TB disks, and a third vdev made up of six 16 TB disks, all vdev's in the raidz2 configuration. My storage pool that all these vdev's combine into is named
Ark.zfs watcher informed me there was a fault in my zpool. SSH'ed into the machine and
zpool statusreported that my pool was degraded due to a failed disk in one of my my raidz2 vdev's, specifically identifyingwwn-0x5000cca290ce5697as the faulted disk.A quick check of the SMART data on the drive showed an unrecoverable error, and I knew I'd have to swap the drive for the cold spare I keep on the shelf.
I pulled the dead drive and popped in the cold spare. Then I issued the command:
I waited the ~30 hours it took zfs to resilver the new drive (rebuild the vdev). The zpool continued to function while resilvering happened. This isn't best practice, but I didn't want to offline my services.
Once the resilver was complete, I bought a new cold spare and continued on with life. Overall it was extremely easy, I've been very happy with zfs as my filesystem for my large storage needs.
I used to use ZFS as part of my days as a Solaris admin. It was okay but I always considered it too restrictive for home use, in the way that pools can't (couldn't?) be made bigger organically. Maybe that's changed now, I think it might have.
I do remember using Linux md to do this though:
I did all of that hot, with no data loss or downtime on the original solo disk. Was honestly quite surprised that did actually work, lol
I did have an offline backup of the data as well, of course :)
Yeah, that's the only complaint about zfs I've heard that I though was valid. It hasn't been an issue for me. But yes, you have to grow your pool an entire vdev at a time. Can't just trickle drives in or out.
It sounds like a really neat system. My baby 2 drive RAID 0 NAS is jealous :)
Do you mean that the best practice is to take the vdev offline (make it unavailable) during resilvering? It makes sense to me that they'd want to cut load during resilvering to reduce the chance of a cascading faults (and maybe resilver faster because of not getting live writes?). Does that imply that for high availability, they want you to have mirrored to a second vdev? Or something else?
Sorry for all the questions, feel fee to ignore if you want. I have a dependability background, so I'm always curious about the details of solutions like this.
The questions don't bother me at all!
You can't really offline a single vdev in a pool. You can offline specific disks, up to the point where the vdev's still have enough minimum disks to function (so you could offline 2 disks in a raidz2 vdev). But once you go above your fault tolerance, the data just isn't there to be read, the whole zpool goes offline.
My comment was referencing your inference, it's best practice to leave a dataset alone while it's resilvering. So that doesn't mean offline the zpool, rather, offline every service that interacts with the zpool to minimize reads/writes/extraneous activity on the zpool. But I chose not to, and it was fine, my resilver still completed without issue.
Fair enough, I don't create accounts often enough that I had considered it. But I would be lying if I haven't gone for similar optimizations elsewhere.
Now that is a piece of software I haven't seen in a long time. Back in the day I used a WeeChat front-end called GlowingBear even did contribute a little.
Later I landed on the lounge, also ended up contributing there. Eventually, the channels I was in slowly started to loose activity in favor of Discord. Initially I wrote a Discord bridge acting as an IRC server but eventually gave in and just switched to discord since that is all I was using IRC for. I still had my lounge client running until two years ago though, eventually shut it down when I reinstalled my VPS.
I used
irssifor a long, long time. But after hearing so many people say they enjoyed the switch from irssi to weechat, I decided to give it a try, and haven't looked back. The Android relay app was the hard sell for me. I don't use IRC nearly as much as I used to, I used to be very active on a number of networks, but now I mostly only ever hang out in #Atlanta on SnooNet. Discord has mostly replaced IRC for me as well. But it's nice to still have it around, my nicks have some pretty old registration dates I'm not ready to give up yet.You can try using an aliasing service like SimpleLogin, which also integrates with Bitwarden. For $30/year it allows you to create unlimited email addresses under their domain, which are completely anonymous. I have a separate email address for each service I use + throwaway addresses for one-time things. It does lock you into using SimpleLogin, but the mailbox it actually forwards all the mail to can be changed any time. You can also add your own domain and create aliases with it, I use it for services like Bitwarden which I want to be able to reliably access even in case something happens to SimpleLogin or my email provider (also Fastmail).
But then I would be tied to SimpleLogin ;) And with my own domain and catch all I effectively have enough unlimed email addresses. Granted, not entirely anonymous and not as convenient as having Bitwarden generate it for me, but I don't create accounts that often that having to type 20 or so characters is that much of a hassle to me.
How do you handle replying to emails or sending email from a specific address when using a catch all?
That rarely happens, if I do end up needing to reply I'll make an alias. So far that has happened once or twice maybe in a few years.
I've managed to extricate myself from the clutches of Google quite a number of years ago, at this point (with the only real holdout being that my current Android device still uses the stock ROM (that is, until I figure out bringing up a new device for LineageOS!)). As a result, most services I use are either privacy focused, or self-hosted.
Email
Starting with email, I've been using Tutanota (now just Tuta?) for five or more years, and I've been generally satisfied. Searching emails in the inbox can be a bit of a drawn-out pain, and the organisation appears to be falling slowly into the "enforce an entire ecosystem" trap that Google invented- but I don't have to argue with third-party email bouncers and recipients over whether or not my IP address is trustworthy. Despite this, I still semi-regularly considering self-hosting.
Domains
I use, despite my reservations, an American-run solution for domains- Porkbun. They've actually been great. No notes. I've been with them for a while, after switching away from one-or-other of the numerous shitty big domain registrars (GoDaddy, or Namecheap?).
Password Management
2FA using the Aegis app, backed-up on-change to an encrypted file that is synced between all of my non-server devices running Syncthing. I used AndOTP until I was discontinued, and Aegis feels like a pretty solid drop-in replacement.
Selfhosted
I also quite enjoy running mine own server device, and as a result I own a 12U rack chassis, which contains a second-hand Eaton UPS, some Unifi hardware, and my server machine. I run baremetal. I enjoy the likes of Docker and Kubernetes very little- it feels like a severe over-complication for my use-case. As long as everything is reasonably well documented, and services aren't overly-reliant on unusually specific versions of common libs, I see no issue with hosting a collection of things on the same device baremetal. That said, if-and-when SR-IOV becomes a viable option on the Intel Battlemage series under Linux, I may consider splitting some services into Proxmox VMs. As it is, too many services rely on GPU access.
Server device description inside.
I will note that hardware is all second-hand where reasonable- most of the drives are re-certified, and some of which I got for free due to FedEx messing up the shipping.
Smart Home
The smart home uses as little third-party software as possible- HomeAssistant is a bloated mess with particularly poorly handled dependencies. I have a Pi running Zigbee2MQTT with a Sonoff Zigbee stick, and this feeds into the MQTT server running on the main hosting device. This is then handled by some custom smart home software I call Hab. It's largely reactionary, though it does have some scheduling capability. It mostly handles potentially conflicting inputs (switches, remotes, presence sensors, temperature-humidity sensors), and attempts to produce a coherent state for all controllable devices in the apartment. The scheduling is used to toggle particular devices depending on time of day, as well as to colour/temperature balance the lighting (and implement sleep-modes which don't blind). At some point I wish to set up voice control, potentially recreating Paul Bettany's Jarvis voice. Most smart home hardware is Sonoff and IKEA, as they're relatively cheap, mostly trustworthy, and purely Zigbee enabled. I will never run any smart home hardware which requires a third party cloud, or can call home.
Backup
Currently, my backup solution is.. lacking. I'm relying almost entirely on the resilience of the ~84TB ZFS array, and given that between 2-3 HDDs have to fail before the array requires attention, or 1 hot-spare SSD before the special block is in danger (and I have more cold-spares on hand), I'm not massively worried. At some point we wish to set up a remote file storage at my partner's parents' place, which will allow for offsite backups.
Conclusion
That said, it does strike me that I've put in a lot of effort largely to avoid big corporate platforms in a world in which it is becoming less and less easy to do. I'm not providing for anybody but myself (and my partner), and potentially a few friends when it comes to media sharing on Jellyfin. I've been trying to contribute to third-party projects more recently, which I've never much felt comfortable doing. Massive codebases terrify me.
I believe that I take a very pragmatic approach to my online tech stack, and don't add complexity for complexity's sake. I work in tech, but tech is not my hobby (at least not "why isn't this basic thing working?" tech).
My website
My blog
Jellyfin
Password Manager
Storage
Email
All in all, I try to keep my stuff simple. I want my grandparents to be able to use safe passwords instead of using the same one everywhere. I want them to be able to watch their shows without being tricked into buying $300/month cable bundles. I want my family to be able to use their devices to do things that they want with just some mild irritation about not having Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon involved more than I can help. There are times when something annoys me about the current state of my setup, and I will dedicate some single digit number of hours into willingness to deal with it. If I can't fix whatever it is in the time I pre-allocated, I just accept it.
Oh right, Aegis is something I also use, it backs up to Nextcloud :) I agree the rest seems pragmatic to me. Your reasoning for NAS choice is actually why I don't have one myself yet. Not only do I not want to be sys admin in my own home for others, I try to limit that sort of stuff for myself as well. As much as I love tinkering with technology, the things I rely on need to be... well ... reliable and ideally low maintenance.
I did consider a Synology NAS, but realized that for 99% of my reasoning I can just use my own PC and backups are done offsite anyway.
Minor heads up blog link borked
This is why I should not be allowed near computers. Fixed.
With regards to Proton, there's a good article about Andy Yen and proton and how so many people seem to have misinterpreted or misunderstood it.
I'm also fairly skeptical of the whole cloud thing. It's a great way to start getting unexpected and head-scratching invoices. There are definitely some benefits but cloud is largely designed to extract value from companies. Even if your costs are continue to be low they are able to see how to copy your business via the API calls that you use--the more cloud native, the easier it is for them to do so.
I mostly write/use CLI tools because they are easy to schedule and 100% automate once you have something that works. I'm currently sitting on around 325 TiB and looking to downscale just because I realized I'm spending less time doing things I like and more time tending the "Japanese rock garden" (balancing free space semi-manually) and using more electricity than I would like. Recently, I bought one of these: 20-Bay hard drive storage box. I'm excited to experience de-growth.
File storage & synchronization
I've tried a few different things over the years like mdadm, mergerfs, etc. But more recently I've just been using individual drives without RAID or backups. If I cared less about electricity and storage costs I would probably move to Unraid.
To keep things cheap I use a lot of cheap disks. I recently bought six 4TB SAS drives for $36. That's $1.5/TB. I use small disks like these similar to how people use LTO tape.
I use syncthing and have many copies of data that is important to me. A couple offline copies too. I should probably use a fancy backup rotation scheme but I don't. My most important data rarely changes though so it is probably fine.
Email
I've self-hosted email before but it's really a pain to properly maintain. Nowadays I mostly use Proton and Gmail.
Media streaming
Despite having a few servers in my house I rarely stream from one to another unless you count rsync. I guess I do use sshfs every so often but mostly I, instead, catalogue everything with plocate and, my own program, library.
I move files as needed and swap out my music folder every week.
I use the same program, library, to queue up mpv. It helps me sort and filter media by duration, title, and other media metadata. I use library to play music and videos (sometimes at the same time! AMV Hell style). I use library on desktop, laptop, and phone. I have Tasker/Termux integration set up so that when I push
nexton my car's steering wheel it deletes the song permanently on my phone.But it's also kind of a tar pit (emergent complexity). mpv on its own is also very capable.
I prefer using the CLI instead of something like XBMC or Subsonic (you can tell how dated my experience is, no?) because I suffer from acute judge-a-book-by-its-cover-itis. I've found it more pleasurable to just be surprised by the content of media. I rarely look up movie reviews or look at album covers before watching something.
sigh
Fine, I'll bite. What exactly is in "tax_sounds.db"?
There's so much interesting stuff in this thread, but your post in particular is going to take a while on it's own to parse. I still don't quite understand what exactly you are doing with music and it fills me with a vague sense of dread lol.
LOL
Well... there are a lot of NSFW ASMR subreddits. It's just that I prefer to keep that in its own database rather than pollute the world
Woah, that sounds fairly complex. How much time do you reckon you spend on maintaining and updating all of this on weekly or monthly basis? And how long did it take to get into what you consider a workable state? I had quick peek at your library repo and saw that there are 2,381 comits since what looks like 2021?
May I also ask what sort of data you are juggling around? Is it mostly media or also other stuff? 325TiB is something I can't even imagine filling ever up.
Edit:
One more question, because I rarely come across such a holistic bespoke system like yours. You mentioned the Japanese rock garden as an analogy, does managing your storage also give a certain peace of mind or satisfaction as managing such a garden is supposed to do?
Most of the big time sinks are consequences of my being cheap, experimenting, and/or running out of free space. Eg. buying HM-SMR drives, moving from mdadm to raid10 btrfs, moving from raid10 btrfs to mergerfs, etc.
The HM-SMR drives are rearing their ugly heads (pun?) again. They've been in read-only mode the past couple weeks... (edit: actually writing this out helped me to think to reuse this script I wrote earlier for a different Btrfs problem--now I only have one read-only drive! woo-hoo!)
With zoned devices like HM-SMR you have three options: Btrfs, f2fs, or writing your own low-level application instead of using a file system. If you can help it, don't buy HM-SMR. I bought it accidentally--but it was really cheap.
Btrfs has been a blessing but also a big time sink of my life. I'm using more ext4 now for data that can be easily checked/re-downloaded. Silent data corruption is very real, and it happens more frequently than total failure, but for video files a bit rot or two doesn't matter that much.
Maintaining the library code doesn't take very long. If I get an idea then I'll spend a couple hours on it. Ideally, writing the code takes less time than doing manually what the code would be doing--that is usually the case. I'm great at early exiting (giving up early) or trying a different strategy completely if things don't seem like they will work. I use git to synchronize between computers so that is a big reason why I don't wait long before pushing up changes.
It started out slowly--it looks completely different today than it did 4 years ago! I think the initial version took only 5 or 6 hours on a weekend before I had something working that I could iterate on in my free time. I never set out to make "99+ utilities" from the get-go. It just built up incrementally over time.
Before I created the repo, I wasn't really satisfied with existing audio players. I wanted something that could play music and not be distracting. That is really the proto-inspiration for making it. I just got creative with it and had fun writing down ideas as they came to me for how it could be better.
Mostly it is video, audio. A lot of it is from YouTube. When I encounter an interesting video and try to download it--increasingly often it's already downloaded. yt-dlp's --download-archive prevents me from downloading it again. Then I just use plocate to see which computer it is on and rsync it over. The reason why it's already downloaded is because I basically downloaded all of reddit (anything with +7 upvotes for the subreddits that I cared about) and hackernews external content.
edit:
hmm... I would say the programming aspect certainly does. Programming can be very relaxing and therapeutic. That part does give me satisfaction.
There have been times when it felt like nothing is working and everything is broken--though that doesn't happen often now--I think writing all the integration tests definitely helped.
When I wrote "Japanese rock garden" I was mostly referring to the big time sink of managing so many disks. But I guess from the peace of mind perspective the programming part fits better. I never liked monotonous work though... so maybe the managing of a rock garden analogy still fits the 37 hard drives aspect.
Interesting, why download it though? Or rather, why keep it rather than streaming it directly or downloading it, watching it and then removing it. Is it for archiving reasons? Other than "because I can" (valid in itself), is there a broader underlying philosophy behind it?
One of the big reasons is that videos are taken down: channels are deleted. On reddit, about half of the videos no longer exist. On hackernews, about 30%. Sure, some of them are spam, but with over 7 upvotes that is not very likely.
On the other hand, I regret downloading over 1TiB of TNG Warp Core sounds. Thanks whoever uploaded a full channel of the same sound... Still, this was relatively easy to discover and delete.
The other motivating factor is because I want to "escape the [YouTube] algorithm". Having everything locally means that you can easily filter/play 50 videos with a specific duration, or other metadata that YouTube doesn't make searchable, and limit the distractions (to not see other channels that you don't trust). Some of this can be fixed with BlockTube but having full control of how videos are sorted is a big motivating factor for me.
Finally, there is this hacker notion of broadcatching which is very attractive to me. Like, having your own Library of Alexandria. You're no longer just a user; you're the architect of your own information universe. To capture and own just a little bit of the long tail: the high-pressure fire hose of data.
I'll keep mine brief, but I'll happily answer any questions.
File storage & synchronization
Email
Media streaming
Password management
VPS for various random scripts and experiments
Domains
LAN OMV Server for NAS, Jellyfin, &c.
LAN Librecomputer instances for utility services like internal DNS.
OVH Kubernetes instances for internet facing dynamic services
AWS S3 + Cloudfront for internet facing static sites
AWS Route53 for DNS registration/management excl one domain on a TLD they don't support
Gmail w/ legacy free google workspace accounts on custom domains (on my 'TODO someday' list to move this)
Email: Runbox, on personal domain with catch all
I wanted a european hoster, as part of my move away from reliance on big tech services. I back my emails up to another imap server hosted locally.
Storage: Nextcloud
Self-built on a VPS in Hetzner. Backed up 4 ways
Backups are tested for validity regularly.
I operate a cloud first strategy for my documents and files. Everything goes on the Nextcloud, be it from phone, laptop, desktop, etc. In this way, all my documents, photos, files, etc. benefit from the backup strategy.
Media Streaming: Plex from that NAS
I got a "lifetime" plex. For whatever and however long that means.
Domain Hosting: FastHosts
some people I know don't like them but I have a few registered domains there, and subdomains and MX records and wotnot, so I'm hesitant to move
Desktop: Mac Mini M4
Recently moved from Linux (Arch KDE Plasma) to Mac OS due to reasons.
Laptop: Macbook Air M1
Recently moved from an Acer (Arch KDE Plasma) to Mac OS due to same reasons
Phone: iPhone 14 Pro Max
Recently moved from Pixel 9 Pro XL (Graphene OS) due to same [ or at least adjacent ] reasons.
Passwords: KeePass
Mac OS KeePass client of choice is Strongbox - it works as a first class vault for passwords and passkeys on Mac OS. Opening up the world of Passkeys to me that I was hesitant about before, because support for them on Linux is terrible.
Music: Spotify
Video Streaming:
Eh. Some. One. The Other, or None depending what's on.
Smart Home:
Mostly z-wave (zigbee) devices hanging off a Hue hub. I like zigbee. Also a smattering of Echo speakers for whole house audio.
I'd say I've completed my de-Googling about 3 years ago now. Still got my account because I'm terrified that some login somewhere still has it as the registered email, but I never use it now
Oh, and
Search - Kagi
I nearly left due to their continued support for Yandex. I still might, in which case it'd be back to Duck Duck Go.
Do you use anything programmatic to control these? Or just the Alexa app?
I don't make enough use of them to be fancy.
They're linked to my Hue and Hive systems.
Basically I ask them to play music and turn lights on and off and adjust the heating. I didn't really need to roll my own webhooks for those.
Once I've set them up, I barely use the Alexa app at all. I either give them voice commands, or I use the individual Hue and Hive apps.
I did have Home Assistant set up for a bit, but it was too much work to maintain it vs. the utility I was getting from it.
I think I’m the only weirdo left on this planet that does all my backups by hand. I really don’t backup anything automatically at all. I sit down a couple times a year and backup everything Ive downloaded since the last time, I even do it this way for pictures on my phone.
To me it kinda feels like cleaning my room, going through the mail pile, cleaning leftovers out of the fridge…. All tasks that help ground me, I enjoy them. I do it about as often as anyone does, but when I’m doing it, I don’t mind.
And then gmail for email cause some email services started straight up blocking my emails from my personal server like 15 years ago as a shortcut to help with spam emails so… gmail.
I like the idea of getting a small-form-factor box to self-host stuff, just to learn how even, but being responsible for all the network security when I know fuck-all about networking seems like a really bad idea.
It's that sort of considerations, even though I do know a fair amount about networking, why I mostly go for service providers that offer something is open (ideally open source) to the point that can I easily pick up and move elsewhere. See the list in my start post ;) This topic isn't just for self hosting.
I use Google for a lot because of their market share, tools, and syncing. I have tried before to switch off to have some resemblance of privacy but my life is tied into it especially since work uses google work space.
I do use brave browser for my browser and Signal for messaging most of the people that I talk to outside of work.
However, my alt services are mainly with proton. I have their membership that gives me all of their services and love the password manager, cloud back up, and email. I would host myself on one of my domains, but I want stability and who knows if I will have the same domains in a year? I do not know exactly What happened in January as somebody had mentioned though.
I have used Spotify since I was in Highschool so I still use that.
I always use Namecheap for domains and HostGator and hostinger for hosting.
I would like to switch off of google completely in the future and move off of windows to Linux (I typically use Fedora when I'm on Linux), but life's a bit crazy right now to change everything.
HostGator! Now that's a name I haven't heard for a long time--makes me remember TigerDirect. I used HostGator 10+ years ago; moved to DigitalOcean around 2012.
My CompSci professor in college used it and I used it ever since haha.
I have a VPS with Hetzner running my static websites and my FreshRSS instance. Among some other minor things. This works quite well and generally satisfied with Hetzner's products and prices.
For email I use Runbox with my own domain. It is basic email and not much else, which is all I need. However, I have lately becoming somewhat dissatisfied with their spam filtering. They have recently removed the option for training with dspam, and now it only flags 1 in 10 spam emails. Their support have promised me they will have a replacement soon, so currently hoping it will improve in the near future.
Bitwarden for passwords. It just works, and I like having the emergency login option as a fallback.
I don't really do much of backup to be honest. I do have stuff in iCloud, including photos, and some other minor things, but most of my stuff is just on external harddrives. Don't really have much stuff I can't live without, but I am considering buying one of the storage solutions with Hetzner as you can get quite a bit of storage for cheap and it would be a chance to move some things out of my free Dropbox account.
For context, i'm a technologist by day, well, a former dev and sysadmin that for the last few decade or so am a pointy-headed boss of technologists. :-)
But, by nights/weekends, for many years, i play with all manner of self-hosted stuff - both on my LAN and on VPS providers, budget hosters, etc.
File storage & synchronization
I have a MS Onedrive paid plan for the family from the days when my family were simply meh satisfied with windows...which is very soon going to be decommissioned. ;-)
But, generally, I have run Nextcloud (and before that owncloud) for years on either homelab servers or VPS providers. Unfortunately, during a recent move, my home nextcloud machine got its hardrive busted...so instead of rebuilding nextcloud, I lazily opted for the 30-second setup of Syncthing...(what can i say, moving between residences creates too many life ToDos such that i have lacked bandwidth to re-setup my nextcloud properly)...So, i have been using Syncthing for months now, and have been content. Although in parallel, i wanted to see how things would work out if i paid someone else to manage the infrastructure for my nextcloud - a managed netxcloud service...and for couple of months have been testing Hetzner's paid nextcloud offering....and so far, its been quite nice. My biggest fear was that since i live in the U.S., but the servers that host nextcloud are based in Europe, the lag and latency might be annoying...but so far any latency issues are either very minor or not a problem...so far. I like to test things for quite a while...but the likely conclusion is either i will go back to self-hosting nextcloud instance, or maybe pivot to this Hetzner paid nextcloud plan for good.
Email
Decades ago, i tried self-hosting email, and it is still possible, and at least infra stuff is easier than it has ever been! But, consistent delivery is too much of a pain (thanks to the nefarious big providers like google, Microsoft, etc.) So, i just have a paid Zoho mail plan for myself and my family.
While i have not heard about Zoho (the company) being lumped in with the Googles or Microsofts of the world as it pertains to baddie behavior...nor have i heard of any evil privacy invasion being done by Zoho...i'm under no illusions, and if they ever become baddies, I'd likely switch to another paid provider like posteo, or mailbox.org, or Fastmail, etc...knowing that my costs might likely double if i move away from Zoho, i think email is so essential, that it is worth paying even double. I'm taking advantage of Zoho's extreme low pricing, but i know in my heart that prices that more expensive paid providers like fastmail provide are probably more fair, and still quite reaonsalbe in the grand scheme of things. But, hey, while i can save a penny, I'll do it. ;-)
Media streaming
The family and i still use a few of the typical streaming services...but am slowly building up my movie and music library...So, have been using Jellyfin (successfully!) pointed at a server on my home LAN which nicely streams music and my movies. Since the server is only used by me and small family, its been really great! I used to point a public domain name to the jellyfin instance, but after i recently moved my current ISP sucks, so have been testing tailscale, and its been pretty great. As long as any client/device has the tailscale app, its pretty easy to reach the jellyfin server. Jellyfin is still in what i would consider early life, and maybe a little bloated in tiny areas, but actually not bad at all for the value that my family and i derive from it.
Password management
My family and i have been using a shared keepass db/file...though we sync it via desktops. I have used keepass via mobile years ago only for myself...but have not shared it with family via mobile. When i shared it for myself among my devices, mobile was less than stable. So, now that my family and i want to share it across mobile devices, we are not filled with faith that keepass is the right direction. So, i have started a test to see if Bitwarden can replace password for the family - across desktops and mobile devices. For now, am testing only using the free service...but if it works out and we end up pivoting to bitwarden, i might go up to the paid plan, which doesn't seem that expensive considering what they offer. But, much like my paid nextcloud test, we'll see.
Backup
For backups, i rsync stuff to a local, central server on my LAN, and then rsync that stuff to one of those USB external harddrives...in addition, i also rsync, well, rclone, stuff to OneDrive. The Onedrive destination is merely to have stuff offsite. However, as noted above, when i decommission the onedrive paid plan, i will need to seek out an alternative destination that is located elsewhere from my home/home LAN.
I have been interested in playing a little with ZFS (for its supposed legendary stability, replication features, etc.)...and if things work out, then i might consider a paid backup provider like rsync.net. More testing to be done here.
If i don't go the route of rsync.net, i might head towards Hetzner's storage box...Both for low cost and ease of implementation (they support common connection protocols like sftp, rsync, webDav, etc.)...Of course, this assumes my other parallel tests of Hetzner prove successful.
VPS
For many years i have used Digital Ocean to host a myriad of different small scale VPS instances. I really can't complain about digital ocean, other than a very minor complaint of their pricing. So, several months ago, i established a small VPS instance on Hetzner to see how their infra. performs. (Because Hetzner pricing is so much better than digital Ocean.) So far, there was one unexplained outage/hiccup, but otherwise Hetzner VPS hosting has been pretty solid! I usually use VPS servers mainly for 2 things, my blog (or basic, single web page as web presence); and tech experiments (such as small scripts, or testing/hosting of full blown apps and software suites, like netxcloud, etc.). I think all of my websites or scripts/apps can easily be moved to many or any alternative VPS providers...so really, i seek out stability and low cost in a provider, and am not stuck on any brand or marketing. The fact that i have been on digital ocean for as long as i have been is mere inertia (even though they have been pretty solid), and not any brand loyalty.
Webhosting & Domains
Web hosting is handled on the VPS servers that i reference above. (I stopped using budget web host providers decades ago, and never used github for web hosting, etc.)
As far as domains, i have used NameCheap for over a little over decade now...and i have never had a problem. I have tried to cut down on the number of domains, since i used to get click happy buying too many domain names (for app/service experiements, etc.)...though i try to keep things nowadays under 2 dozen or so domains...and am trying to trim down even further.
Although, i have not had any issues with Namecheap, their pricing has gone up over the years - and in some areas not so trivially. I think their pricing is still in the "reasonable" range, but its close too getting a bit high - at least for some top-level domains....but here too, i have conducted some testing...By, registering a few new domains via Porkbun. While porkbun's UI seems simplistic, i actually like it. Also, their pricing is far more compelling than Namecheap. Again, i'm only testing porkbun, so we'll see how things work out. I think i was referred to porkbun both via some podcatss that i listened too, as well as, unsolicited positive comments from other tech folks on forums, etc.
Post-script
Does it seem like i'm in the middle of testing a several things at the same time? Well, yes, i am running multiple tests in parallel...because when i test a thing (either for pivoting to different tech or changing paid providers)....i test thoroughly and to an exhaustive extent. By both people who love me as well as professional colleagues, I've been referred to as anal retentive obsessive person when it comes to testing, especially tech...but, then those same folks who tease me never are disappointed by my recommendations. ;-)
Since you've named the two big ones that were compelling to me... I've also used Namecheap for a long time and was thinking about Porkbun but did a little more research and decided to switch to Cloudflare Registrar. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Porkbun but I don't hear Cloudflare named often as an alternative, and it has a great UI for managing DNS (as well as good integration with free Cloudflare DDoS prevention, etc), so I wanted to mention it
Good point about Cloudflare!
I do use Cloudflare as name servers and front-end CDN (and i guess also front-end security and tls/ssl certs.). So, basically, whether i register a domain via namecheap or porkbun, unless there is rare reason, i typically opt to have Cloudflare manage name servers and all underlying DNS records for my domain names. I've been using Cloudflare for years, and (knock on wood) have never had an issue (and have been on their free tier this whole time).
As far as using cloudflare as a domain name registrar, I do recall some time ago when they first announced this. I have NO reason to believe that they will do a bad job or become baddies, considering how good they have behaved for other services that i use from them. I guess maybe a small part of it might be wanting a tiny bit of separation of concerns possibly? I suppose its not fair of me to have this fear, since i do consolidate things elsehwere, but something about it hasn't compelled me to race to migrate all my domains to cloudflare...again, maybe its unfair of me to think that since i have no evidence to fear them i guess.
Separately, i have been curious to use some of Cloudflare's other offerings like Workers, durable storage, etc...because the more that Microsoft, AWs, Google have as far as competition in such services, i think the better! But just have not had the chance yet to play with these cloudflare services.
That makes sense. I guess for me I see the registrar aspect as largely an administrative service: bureaucratic paperwork. As long as they have a good relationship with ICANN it doesn't matter much especially when you are already using a different service to manage the DNS records.
If I was more concerned about privacy I might opt for something like Njalla. Compared to something like that, where there is more legal separation, I don't see many differences between registrar offerings. But I guess from a security perspective it would help in the situation that someone had access to your Cloudflare account but not Porkbun. I can see that
Fastmail for main mail account (with addresses @ my own domains so I can move email services with minimal interruption and am not tied to one specific service). Multiple secondary email accounts (Tuta, Mailbox.org, etc) for other purposes.
Filen.io for E2EE cloud backups/syncing (between iOS, Linux, Mac)
Bearblog.dev for blog hosting. Free netlify (or similar), neocities, etc when I need to host a simple static page.
For local streaming I use an Unraid server running Jellyfin (for minimal video only like standup, concert videos, and a few select other things) and Navidrome (for music). For local syncing I use Syncthing to mirror a copy of my music/video collection on my PC onto the server.
For online, for video content I mostly watch YT/Twitch as I don't really watch any movies or TV. Twitch Turbo to get rid of ads on all channels and same thing with YT Premium. I never really use Youtube Music but I have it included in the premium plan if I'm in a pinch where it comes in handy. I'm over time becoming quite anti-streaming-service for music actually, so I'm trying to avoid using them at all. When I can afford it, I buy music on Bandcamp/Ampwall/etc or where it's available, or used physical media, otherwise, I have my ways of acquiring it.
For password management, I use Bitwarden ($10/yr plan)
For domains, always Porkbun, never anything else. Enjoy it way more than I did Hover or Namecheap when I've used those.
If I ever set up a VPS or stuff again, probably Hetzner or similar.
Search: Kagi. I don't like that they have tentacles into AI that I am subsidizing, but most AI stuff is opt-in and easily ignore-able and doesn't pollute search results. I have the $10 plan. I've tried moving back to free search, but so far it's so far and above the rest in quality that I'm keeping it for now. I wish I could "block access to the AI stuff" for a discount tbh
Sublime Text (paid) as my text editor because it's lightning fast and native. No electron, no bloat, small binary, etc.
Oh yes, I have Sublime too. Must admit though it’s relegated to little more than a scratchpad these days, and the coding happens in vs codium mostly.
I use Doom Emacs for all my "serious" writing, which is tracked on GitHub. I have my personal website on bearblog.dev, for which I pay to use a custom domain and for image hosting. I get a good discount for being in Brazil. My domain is registered on Porkbun for many years in advance. I use Stremio with Torrentio and Real-Debrid for watching everything except YouTube.
Browser
Firefox first and foremost. I keep Chrome or Vivaldi around for testing purposes (I'm a frontend web dev), plus it's genuinely useful to have multiple browser.
Notetaking
Obsidian because years of reddit and GitHub have left me preferring markdown wherever possible. I do also sometimes use Notepad or TextEdit, depending on which OS I'm on.
Webhosting & Domains
I don't fully trust my own devops skills to run anything in a public-facing VPS, so I've opted for a cheap reseller account on iWebFusion because it's pretty easy to just spin up a cPanel instance and get whatever I want running. I don't really even have anything important hosted on it at the moment. But it's so cheap (a few bucks a month) that I keep it around just in case I get the itch to spin up something.
Passwords
BitWarden. I used to use KeePass along with NextCloud, but setting things up on a new device was time-consuming (Need to know the NextCloud login, then the KeePass password, plus pass along the .key file somehow). It's just substantially easier to use a 3rd party hosted service.
Fun Home Stuff
IDE / Code Editor
Lately it's Cursor because I'm AI-using trash, but I do also dabble in VSCode and Zed. For everything else there's SublimeText.
Domain
Cloudflare. They do a lot of bad things, but they're as cheap as it gets. I also use Cloudflare pages for a very simple static site.
Email
PurelyMail. I've have had no complaints for the few years I've been paying. However, the company just changed hands, and it's still just one person running the thing, so I'm always on the lookout for alternatives.
Passwords
BitWarden. Easy and free, no complaints at all.
2FA
Ente Auth. Free and seemingly secure. I could switch to a Yubikey or something, but it works for me for now.
Backup
Backblaze. I can't speak to their service since I've never actually needed it. I back up my Macbook, which has backups of my phone. I don't care about any of my other data.
Cloud Storage & Sync
Nothing. I haven't had the need yet (everything I do fits on my Macbook so far) and I really dislike the idea of cloud storage from a privacy and reliability standpoint.
Search
Kagi. 100% reccomend for the site ranking system alone.
Film & TV
Stremio, plus one very specific addon and it's requisite service. Highly recommended.
Music
iTunes, synced to my iPod. This is technically the "music" app, but I don't pay for Apple music. I buy music on Bandcamp, Beatport or iTunes (in that order).
Minecraft
Pebblehost. This is so I can play my singleplayer world on my steam deck and laptop with no issues, but also because I lost my last world when I reset my computer and forgot to back it up. It's running 1.4.7 because it's resource efficient and I'm running the cheapest tier with servers in my country.
Video
Sonarr + Radarr on my Synology NAS. It's outgrowing it's size so I got a new device to migrate to but I haven't bought hard drives yet. I also plan to add ytdl-sub once I upgrade; before I used yt-dlp to grab my subscriptions but have recently upgraded my TV to a smart one with a custom app that doesn't show adds and integrates with Sponsorblock.
Music
Self hosted Gonic. This is on the same NAS as above. It works amazing, the one thing I've not been able to do perfectly is volume normalisation. I'm using rsgain which works well for 80~90% of my music.
Video Playback
I'm using Kodi, unfortunately this is working as an app on the TV which makes it so there are audio sync issues sometimes (Super annoying. I discovered that the pc I used for playback before upgrading my tv cannot handle 4k at 60FPS so neither option is good and I don't want to invest in something else at the moment.
Password management
I was just looking at this yesterday and finally made the move from Keeweb/Keepass to 1Password. I was very tempted by ProtonPass but could not justify the price (1Password is free because of work).
Ooh, fun question.
File storage: I'm in the Apple ecosystem, so iCloud is a given. I also use Jottacloud which I really like as a European alternative.
Email: iCloud Mail with a custom domain. I intend to move to Proton Mail at some point, just haven't bothered with it up until now. I use Thunderbird as email client, which I don't necessarily love on a Mac, but it gets the job done.
Media streaming: Nebula for videos, Soundcloud for audio.
Passwords/2FA: Proton Authenticator + Proton Pass.
Search: Kagi, and loving it so far. They're a bit too bullish on AI for my taste, but you can simply turn it off to have it removed from your results.
Browser: Firefox. I've considered Vivaldi, but since it's Chromium-based, I'm giving that a pass.
Domains: My former employer, who shall remain anonymous, lets me keep a few domains with them free of charge.
Note taking: Bear. I like it for grocery lists but also long form stuff.
Ah, can some remove the accidental small tag from the title?
Done!