I'm a Selfish Selfhoster, are you too?

I’ve started my selfhosting somewhere between 2005 and 2007 (I don’t exactly remember…), a long, long time ago! I have a lengthy and unfinished draft to talk more about that story, but I read a blog post from Valère (in French) a couple of months ago that sparks this particular post in the meantime.

I’m not going to talk about the basics of “why selfhosting”, the usual things around privacy, owning your data, freedom, etc… One reason I’ve been so into selfhosting on top of those is simple: I enjoy it. I like managing my small private set of services for my own usage. As others call it: “my own internet” or “my own cloud”. While sometime it can be frustrating (eg: when a piece of hardware fails or something goes down), I enjoy it most of the time :). I still do even after “the incident” of last year.

One thing I’ve always been afraid of though is selfhosting services shared with others. I don’t like that added pressure… For me, selfhosting stay enjoyable because I do whatever I want with it. I want to remove a service? I can. I want to switch from one tool to another, easy. I want to make it only usable on home network without external access? Let’s do it!

Once you start sharing your services with other, this is where it can become painful and a burden. Having other users, while really nice to help others stop using big tech solution, puts a lot of pressure on your shoulders (at least on mine). Specially if you do this just for fun and your own pleasure. Of course you can always explain your friends and family that because you provide a service hosted in a closet in your house, this service might fail. Most will understand that but some won’t. And even for the people who understands that, I would still feel more pressure to restore services used by others than the one I’m using on my own. I would be even more stressed if someone else would use a service I host for their job…

To be fair, I don’t want that additional stress. I don’t do this as my day job, it is a nerdy hobby. But people think because I work in IT, I’m an expert at everything computer related (I’m sure lots of people can relate to that one). So they expect the same level of expertise than any big tech provider (sorry, I don’t have a billion dollar company^^).

This is why I also give money to framasoft, they help lots of people by hosting quality services for many people! That’s why I don’t feel bad when I say to people “go use [put any service managed by framasoft], it is managed by framasoft and they do it better than myself”. I trust them not to use users’ data and do crazy big tech shit. When I explain to my entourage why I push them to use these services instead of using mine, most will understand, some might be a bit annoyed that “[they] can not do like [me]”. Well… Sorry but not sorry…

That being said, I’ve never refused to help someone who wanted to learn how to do it on its own. Granted it didn’t happen often, but I help a friend managed its own mail server (for the time he did it) and someone else his website hosting. But at least the pressure is not on my homelab management. And I don’t feel bad when my internet connection fails.

There are a limited number of exceptions though.

The first exception I did (and still do) was (is) for emails. I have been selfhosting my email for a long time now (±15 years) and some time ago I decided to do it also for my brother and my parents. Well, it makes sense because we share a family name, so if they want an email like me (firstname@lastname.{fr,org}), they have to ask me because I own the domain. And sharing my email with them or in front of them made them ask multiple time to get one.

I always try to be careful with my email server anyway, not because of them but because it is an important service even for me. But I remember last time I switch from one server to another, switching the tool at the same time, I had to make sure no data was lost. Took me a lot more time than if I was alone on that server. For my own usage I may have simply created an archive and started from scratch, but was not good enough for others. So here I was, spending more time on this migration than what I would have prefer.

For a long time, that was the only service I shared with other. And that was fine. I recently also installed AudioBookShelf to listen to audio books on the move (mainly when I walk my dog). My partner was very found of the idea for when she has to drive long distance for work (once a week) so she asked if she could use it too. I did give her access and installed the android app on her phone. Now my mother heard about it and wants it too. Well, the iOS (she has an iphone) app is not usable yet, so I had to say no without giving a fake excuse, but I’m not that comfortable doing so anyway… I might have done it anyway though if the iOS app was available, so maybe at somepoint.

Anyway, I may sound like a jerk not wanted to help others, but that’s only half way true. I did installed some pihole and other stuff for others who were willing to learn. But I (almost) don’t want my homelab to have more rules than being enjoyable and useful for me… Am I a bad person? Maybe… But at the same time I kept my brain sanity (more or less at least :)) and keep my stress level low, so that’s still a win.

What about you, do you manage services for others? If yes, do you do it for a very limited number of people or are they fully open? How is your stress level when something goes wrong?