Self-Hosting

Self-Hosting Pingvin Share: WeTransfer Alternative with Docker You need to send a large file to someone. WeTransfer caps free transfers at 2 GB. Google Drive wants your firstborn child’s data. Dropbox links expire at inconvenient times. And you’re already running a home server — so why not host your own file sharing platform? Pingvin Share is a self-hosted, open-source file sharing platform that does exactly what WeTransfer does, but on your hardware, with your rules, and no file size limits beyond your disk space. ...

Setting Up Gluetun: VPN Container for All Your Docker Services You’ve got a media stack running — maybe Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent. Or you’re running a web scraper, a Tor relay, or just a browser that needs to look like it’s in another country. You want VPN protection, but you don’t want to tunnel your entire server through a VPN and lose access to everything else. Gluetun solves this elegantly. It’s a lightweight Docker container that runs a VPN client (WireGuard or OpenVPN), and any other container can use it as its network gateway. Only the containers you choose get routed through the VPN. Everything else stays on your normal network. ...

Backups are the most neglected part of any self-hosting setup — until the day you need one. Kopia is a modern, open-source backup tool that makes encrypted, deduplicated, incremental backups surprisingly painless. If you’ve looked at Restic and wondered whether there’s something with a GUI, Kopia is the answer. What is Kopia? Kopia is a cross-platform backup tool that stores encrypted snapshots in a repository. It handles deduplication at the block level, compresses data, and supports a wide range of storage backends — local disk, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and more. ...

Docker Networking Explained: Bridge, Host, and Macvlan Networking is the part of Docker that trips up most self-hosters. Your containers need to talk to each other, to the host, and to the outside world — and Docker gives you several ways to wire that up. The three modes you’ll actually use: bridge (the default), host (skip Docker’s network layer entirely), and macvlan (give containers their own IP on your LAN). Each has tradeoffs, and picking the wrong one leads to hours of debugging. ...

Complete Guide to Docker Healthchecks and Restart Policies Your Jellyfin container is running. Docker says it’s healthy. But the web UI returns a blank page and nobody can stream anything. Docker’s default “running” status only tells you the process hasn’t crashed — it says nothing about whether the service actually works. Docker healthchecks fix this. They let you define what “healthy” actually means for each container, and combined with restart policies, they create a self-healing setup where broken services recover automatically without you waking up at 3 AM. ...

Running Caddy Server: The Zero-Config HTTPS Reverse Proxy You’re running a dozen Docker containers. Each one listens on a different port. You’re tired of remembering 192.168.1.50:8096 for Jellyfin and :3000 for Gitea. You want jellyfin.yourdomain.com with HTTPS — and you don’t want to wrestle with Nginx config files or manually renew Let’s Encrypt certificates. Caddy does all of this automatically. Point a domain at it, tell it where your service lives, and it handles HTTPS certificates, renewal, and reverse proxying with almost zero configuration. ...

Self-Hosting Leantime: Open Source Project Management for Small Teams Most project management tools fall into two camps: either dead simple (Trello — a board and not much else) or enterprise-grade sprawl (Jira — where tickets go to die in a hierarchy of epics, stories, and sub-tasks nobody reads). If you’re running a small team, freelancing, or managing personal projects, neither extreme fits well. Leantime occupies the space between. It gives you kanban boards, Gantt charts, goal tracking, timesheets, wikis, and sprint management in a single self-hosted package. What makes it unusual is the design philosophy: built with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia in mind, it prioritizes reducing cognitive overload rather than adding more features behind more menus. ...

Self-Hosting Paperless-GPT: AI-Powered Document Classification You’ve scanned your documents into Paperless-ngx. Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands. Now comes the tedious part — naming them, tagging them, sorting them into the right categories. Every receipt, invoice, letter, and tax form needs a sensible title and the right tags, or your digital filing cabinet becomes a digital junk drawer. Paperless-GPT solves this by connecting your Paperless-ngx instance to a large language model. Drop a document in, and the AI generates a title, assigns tags, identifies the correspondent, and even extracts custom field data. It can also re-OCR your documents using LLM vision, catching text that traditional OCR engines miss on messy or low-quality scans. ...

If you’re leaving Google Photos (or Apple iCloud, or Amazon Photos), you’ve probably narrowed it down to two options: Photoprism and Immich. Both are excellent. Both are self-hosted. Both will keep your photos private. But they’re built for different people. Here’s the honest breakdown after running both in production throughout 2025 and into 2026. The Quick Answer Choose Immich if you want a Google Photos replacement with automatic mobile backups and you’re comfortable with a fast-moving project that occasionally has breaking changes. ...

Building a Home Lab on a Budget: $100 to $500 Tiers You don’t need a rack full of enterprise servers to start self-hosting. Some of the most useful home labs run on hardware that costs less than a month of cloud subscriptions. This guide breaks down exactly what you can build at three budget tiers — $100, $300, and $500 — with specific hardware recommendations, software stacks, and realistic expectations for each level. ...