Path to Self-Hosting

Whilst self-hosting may be all the rage today, the fact is I have been doing a chunk of it for a while.

This is the first in a series of posts about my journey to self-hosting. Will I totally move off of all SaaS (Software as a Service) apps provided by the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc? No, for the simple reason that not everyone I enter-act with does. Can I get my core stuff self-hosted? Yes.

There is a concept I ran across a while back called ‘Local-First’ which basically says that any software you use, it should store its data locally first, and then remotely as an option. Things like email. Your email client should cache your recent emails locally, so you can access them even if you do not have a network connection, but when you do have a connection, it syncs with some server.

Now, one of the other things I am going to be looking at on my journey is phone-based apps as well as my computer based apps.

My goals is to remove as much dependency on third-party providers as much as a I can for both computer and phone, for me, and for as much of the family as I can convert.

Broad area of things I will be looking at:

• Email, both storage and web-access
• Document storage
• Media (Music and Videos)
• Source control (git).
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Password management

Some of these areas I am already well down the self-hosted route, some I have done in the past but are not doing it now, and some I have not even started. I hope to over the next year or so make serious efforts in moving to more self-reliance for my hosting needs.

• SA