I have about twenty containers up and I honestly use four of them. Before I add another thing off a list somewhere I would rather hear what survives contact with real life, and specifically what people wish they had never bothered self hosting at all. Anything that has to be up while I am away seems to be where it goes wrong for me.
The classic do not is email. People will tell you it is possible and they are right, and they will not tell you about the afternoon you spend working out why a large provider has quietly started binning your mail, or the reputation of the IP block your host handed you. It is a genuinely interesting thing to learn and a genuinely bad thing to depend on. If you want the learning, run a receive only setup for a domain you do not care about and leave your real mail where it is.
Monitoring and backups first, everything else after. They are the two nobody installs first and the two that decide whether the rest is a hobby or a liability.
Survivors after four years, in order of how much I would miss them: network wide ad blocking, because everyone in the house notices within minutes when it stops; the media library, because it is the thing anyone actually opens; photos, once the mobile app was good enough that nobody complained; and backups, which nobody thinks about until they do. Casualties: a self hosted password manager, which I moved back to a paid service because being locked out while travelling is unacceptable and I could not honestly promise myself it would never happen; a dashboard I spent two weekends making beautiful and then never looked at; and about six things I installed because they appeared on a list.
The dashboard nobody looks at is a genuinely universal experience and I do not know why we all do it.
Because it is the only part of the hobby that is visual. It is the equivalent of tidying your desk instead of working.
The rule that predicts it better than anything else: if a family member has an app on their phone that talks to it, it survives, and if it needs a browser and a bookmark, it dies. Everything that lived on my server for more than a year is something with a decent mobile client that just works. Everything that required someone to remember a URL and a login is gone, no matter how good the software was. That also tells you what to check before installing something, which is not the feature list, it is whether the phone app is any good.
That rule also explains why the beautiful dashboards die. Nobody bookmarks anything anymore.
@sdcard_sid · last mo.
Cut from about twenty to six last spring and the thing that improved was not resources, it was my willingness to touch the machine. When twenty things are running, every update is a risk and you put it off, and then you have a machine that is months behind and you are scared of it. Six things means I update on a Sunday morning in ten minutes without thinking. Fewer services made it more reliable in a way that has nothing to do with hardware.
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