My Self-hosted App Favorites from 2024

For a few years, I have gotten more and more into self-hosting apps for myself for various reasons, and now I want to show you my favorite ones on this list. Besides these services, I host a lot of other apps as well. The apps I show in this list are more likely to be daily drivers or very useful for me.

Why should I self-host apps?

Self-hosting is for those people who have more advanced care of privacy or want to have more control over the applications themselves. With Self-hosting, you can use your own hardware at home and the data never leaves your own network or you could get a cheap VPS for services that need a better connection or need to be accessible from everywhere. With both options, you have full control over your data and privacy and the only person you can blame for data loss is yourself and nobody else.

Fenrus

Bookmarks are a thing we all use. Me personally, I overuse them a lot and end up with some big lists of bookmarks, so I never find anything important anymore. In this, Fenrus helped me to create a nice small dashboard to keep my most important services organized to have them always accessible pretty fast. I also set my Fenrus dashboard as my browser's homepage so it always opens with the browser directly. That created a much better workflow for me, since I don't have to find the correct bookmark anymore in the void of thousands.

Mailcow

Mail hosting is not an easy topic. I already hosted my own very badly configured mail server before, but about two years ago I decided to get deeper into that topic and found Mailcow. Mailserver configurations are still not easy, but with Mailcow it is made much simpler. Mailcow comes with everything you need for mail hosting and the configuration of it is much simpler since they have great guides which explain nearly everything, so you can set up it with a breeze. Besides that, you can get a greater mailserver setup than big providers like Google or Microsoft, at least the mail server checks I made showed that.

AdGuard Home

Nobody likes ads and trackers and because of that I want to block every single one of them. Of course, I also got an adblocker in my browser, but with AdGuard I have a block level at DNS level. That can block things before they even have the chance of appearing on your device. Just to make clear what that means, here are some of the current statistics on my home network. I made over 1.3 million DNS requests in the last 30 days and in that time AdGuard blocked over 600 thousand requests for various reasons, like ads or tracking services. That is a block rate of about 47% and a lot less ads or tracking for me.

Paperless-NGX

Since in Germany there is a lot of bureaucracy and therefore more paper than you can store anywhere, it is great to keep all of that in an organized way. With Paperless, it's much simpler to organize and also to find something again. Because of the fulltext search and tag system, I can find my documents I search for in seconds instead of hours. And if you are like me, and you love to automate things, the mail integration makes it simpler to just scan your documents and send them from your scanner directly to Paperless where it is automatically categorized and the only thing you have to do is check if everything is correct from time to time. It saved me at least a lot of hassle and time and probably will save even more time in the future.

NextCloud

Everyone knows Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox, but all of these services want you to pay a lot of money when you have a lot of data. Since I have a NAS with about 30TB of space currently, I decided to host my own cloud storage solutions with NextCloud. With that, I got full control of my data and everything in one place. NextCloud holds a lot of different data for me. From general document templates over some useless data I probably never need anymore, until all of my photos from my phones, everything is collected there. And the best part is it will automatically sync my data all the time. I take a new photo with my phone? The upload of that has already been done!

Home Assistant

Here we come to some more advanced automations and more. For a long time, I was very skeptical about smart homes and things like that, but then I thought that I should give it a try at least. When you start with smart home you probably think about getting devices of one brand since they are very simple to connect to. But it's probably more expensive to only buy one brand and sometimes comes with drawbacks because the devices are not the best for that purpose. At this point, Home Assistant comes into place. It is the central control of my home network now. Every device in my home that can be connected to Home Assistant is connected to it and every automation is configured in Home Assistant itself. Since everything is inside of Home Assistant, I don't have to make a double configuration if I want to use Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa at the same time, which in fact I do. Besides that, Home Assistant holds a lot of data for statistics and many more things so that you can analyze your own life a bit more. It can be scary, but since the data is stored on my own NAS, it is much more secure than if I would use an external service. And with the Home Assistant Community Store integration, you can find a integration for nearly every smart device on this earth, or you can code your own.

Plex

As a movie and series lover, I have a collection of DVDs and Blu-rays for a lot of them, but when it comes to deciding what to watch, it is always a burden to stand in front of the shelves and decide which one to watch. With Plex, I digitalized all of that. I still have my shelf of DVDs and so on, but everything is now directly in my Pley media library. That gives me a nice Netflix-like interface where I can scroll through my whole library, read the captions again or watch the trailers of these movies without having to switch out any disks on my Blu-ray player anymore. It makes it much simpler to decide what to watch and, with additional services like Tautulli, I got some great insights when I watched the most or other nice small statistics. For every movie or series enthusiast, this is what you need when you already have a NAS with a lot of space in your home network.

Conclusion

These 7 services that I self-host are my favorite ones of this year. These are probably the most used, or at least, most useful ones for myself. But self-hosting things can be different for everyone. Your needs might be different from mine, so you might need other services. No matter what your needs are, there is probably a self-hostable and maybe also open-source solution to it that you can use. It gives you a great additional view of how things work and also new skills that might be useful in the future for you. Since I prefer to host everything with the power of Docker, all the mentioned services above have the option to host it with Docker, which makes it much simpler to host. If you have any questions about the services I mentioned, or you want to know which services I host besides those mentioned ones, do not hesitate to contact me. I am always happy to talk to people that are interested in the same topics as me.