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- 24.01.2026
Why Self-Hosting Still Matters in 2026
Why Pay Someone Else to Run Your Stuff?
Every service you self-host is a service that cannot send you a price increase email, change its terms of service, or get acquired by a company you do not trust. That is the baseline argument. But there is something deeper going on here.
The Vibe of Ownership
There is a specific feeling when you SSH into your own server, check on your own containers, and know that the whole thing runs because you made it run. It is not efficiency. It is not even practicality. It is vibes.
My current stack on the Docker host at 192.168.1.210:
- Grafana + Prometheus – Dashboards for watching numbers go up and down
- ELK stack – Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana – because logs should go somewhere fancy
- Trilium – Notes that stay on my network
- Smokeping – Watching my ISP disappoint me in graph form
- This blog – WordPress in Docker, proxied through nginx, using wildcard certs for lan.jvslabs.com
The Proxmox Situation
Five nodes in the “deerchase” cluster. Is it overkill? Obviously. Does each node serve a purpose I can articulate? Mostly. The point is not optimization – the point is having infrastructure to experiment with.
When you vibe code, you need a place to deploy the vibes. A homelab is that place.
The Honest Downsides
Self-hosting is not free:
- Electricity costs money (but less than cloud bills)
- Things break at 2am sometimes
- You become your own IT department
- Family members will ask why the internet is slow (it is always DNS)
But the tradeoff is worth it if you value learning, control, and the satisfaction of watching your Grafana dashboards at midnight for no particular reason.
Getting Started
You do not need five Proxmox nodes. You need one machine and docker compose up -d. Start there. The rabbit hole will find you.
