Self-Hosted

Sometimes you don’t need a full monitoring stack. You don’t need Prometheus, Grafana, or even Uptime Kuma. You just want to SSH into your server and see if everything’s okay in two seconds. That’s exactly what this script does. One file, zero dependencies, instant health report. What It Checks Check What You See 🖥 System Uptime and CPU load average 🧠 Memory Usage percentage with warnings 💾 Disk All mounted filesystems 🐳 Docker Every container — running or dead 🔌 Ports What’s listening and which process owns it 🔒 SSL Certificate expiry for your domains Everything is color-coded: green means good, yellow means warning, red means fix it now. ...

Sometimes you just need a simple way to browse and manage files on your server through a web browser. No complex sync engine, no collaboration features, no bloat — just a clean file manager that works. That’s exactly what Filebrowser delivers. Filebrowser gives you a web-based file manager with upload, download, rename, delete, and sharing capabilities. It’s a single binary (or Docker container), uses almost no resources, and takes about two minutes to set up. ...

One of the hidden maintenance costs of self-hosting is keeping everything updated. When you’re running 10, 20, or 50 Docker containers, manually pulling new images and recreating containers gets old fast. Miss an update and you might be running a version with known security vulnerabilities. Watchtower solves this by automatically monitoring your running containers, pulling new images when they’re available, and gracefully restarting containers with the same configuration. Set it up once, and your homelab stays current without you lifting a finger. ...

If you’ve ever used Pocket or Instapaper to save articles for later, you know the value of a good read-it-later service. But those services track your reading habits, inject ads, and can shut down features at any time. Wallabag gives you the same experience — save articles with one click, read them distraction-free, sync across devices — entirely on your own server. In this guide, we’ll set up Wallabag with Docker, configure it with PostgreSQL for reliable storage, and connect browser extensions and mobile apps for a seamless reading workflow. ...

You’re already using OpenAI’s API for chat, embeddings, or image generation. But every request costs money, sends your data to a third party, and depends on their uptime. What if you could run the same API — same endpoints, same format — on your own hardware? That’s exactly what LocalAI does. What Is LocalAI? LocalAI is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI API. It runs entirely on your server and supports: ...

Discord is everywhere — gaming communities, dev teams, study groups. But it comes with baggage: data harvesting, Nitro upsells, and zero control over your data. If you’re already self-hosting, why not host your chat too? Here are the 5 best self-hosted Discord alternatives you can deploy today, ranked by feature completeness, ease of setup, and community size. 1. Revolt — The Closest Discord Clone Best for: Communities that want a Discord-like experience without the surveillance. ...

Choosing the right VPS is the most important decision you’ll make for your homelab-in-the-cloud. Get it wrong and you’re overpaying, underperforming, or dealing with support nightmares. I’ve tested all the major providers. Here’s what actually matters. TL;DR — Best VPS Picks Use Case Best Pick Why Starting Price Best Overall Hetzner Unbeatable price/performance €3.79/mo Best US-Based Vultr 32 locations, hourly billing $5/mo Best Managed DigitalOcean Easiest UI, great docs $4/mo Best Free Tier Oracle Cloud 4 ARM cores + 24GB RAM free forever Free Best for Europe Hetzner German datacenters, GDPR-native €3.79/mo Best High-Performance Vultr Bare Metal Dedicated hardware $120/mo 1. Hetzner — Best Price-to-Performance Hetzner is the open secret of the self-hosting community. German company, incredible pricing, solid hardware. ...

You’ve got Ollama running. You’re pulling models, chatting through curl commands in your terminal. It works, but let’s be honest — typing JSON into a terminal isn’t exactly the ChatGPT experience. Open WebUI (formerly Ollama WebUI) gives you a polished, feature-rich chat interface for your local models. It looks and feels like ChatGPT, but everything runs on your hardware. Conversations stay private. Models run offline. And it’s packed with features that even OpenAI’s interface doesn’t have. ...

Managing Docker from the command line works fine — until you’re juggling 20+ containers across multiple stacks. That’s where Portainer comes in. It gives you a clean web UI to manage everything: containers, images, volumes, networks, and even Docker Compose stacks. Portainer CE (Community Edition) is free, open source, and takes about 2 minutes to set up. Here’s how to get it running on your server. What Is Portainer? Portainer is a lightweight management UI for Docker (and Kubernetes). Instead of remembering docker ps, docker logs, docker exec commands, you get a dashboard that shows everything at a glance. ...

Your self-hosted server is exposed to the internet. Bots, brute-forcers, and scanners hit it constantly. Fail2ban helps, but it only learns from your own logs. What if you could tap into threat intelligence from thousands of other servers? That’s CrowdSec. It’s like a community-powered immune system for your infrastructure. What Is CrowdSec? CrowdSec is an open-source security engine that: Parses your logs (Nginx, SSH, Traefik, WordPress, etc.) Detects attack patterns using behavioral scenarios Blocks attackers via bouncers (firewall rules, Nginx deny, Cloudflare API) Shares threat intel — when you block an IP, the community benefits and vice versa Think of it as Fail2ban + community blocklists + modern architecture. ...