I've been self-hosting for more than 15 years now, and despite my best efforts, my friends and family just don't care about all the cool things on the network.As it turns out, Grafana dashboards are only interesting to me.There are a handful of applications that see a ton of use, however.
If you want to self-host services that people will actually use, I'd recommend starting with these 5.Jellyfin The free media server Close Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server that you can use to host movies, TV shows, music, and photos, though it is best used for TV and movies.It has native applications available for most smart TV operating systems, all the common PC operating systems, phones, and it also runs in any browser.
So long as you have content on the server, it is accessible to anyone on your home network.You can even make it accessible outside your home network if you want; I'd recommend using WireGuard for that to minimize the security risks.There aren't any ads, monthly subscription fees, or exorbitantly expensive lifetime subscription fees.
The only slight snag is that some clients can't play back all media formats, which forces the server to transcode them before they're sent to the playback device.If you can, use Jellyfin on a server with Intel Quick Sync or a dedicated GPU for the best performance.Navidrome A lightweight music server that turned my CD collection into a streaming service I've been collecting CDs forever, and for the most part, they sit in their cases unused and unappreciated.
Navidrome—a self-hosted music server—allowed me to solve that problem.I digitized my CD collection, stored it at the highest possible quality, and then transferred it to the Navidrome server.Now anyone on my home network to connect to Navidrome's browser-based player and listen to my entire collection.
Additionally, Navidrome is compatible with the Subsonic API, which means that it can interface with dozens of different media player apps.If you want to use Symfonium for its Android Auto compatibility, you can; if you want to vibe-code your own subsonic-compatible media player, you can do that too.Despite being "outdated" technology, CDs often have some of the best quality versions of songs available.
Related Please stop buying vinyl when CDs exist Vinyl records have a long, storied history for music lovers—unfortunately, they're also inferior.Posts 166 By Nick Lewis Pi-hole The invisible service that everyone forgets about A Pi-hole provides network-wide DNS filtering.In effect, you can block ads, trackers, and malicious domains for on your network with one program.
Because the Pi-hole blocks ads before they ever load, it can help performance if you're on a very slow internet connection or save you data if you're on a metered connection.When I first fired up my Pi-hole, everyone immediately noticed that something had changed, but they couldn't specify what other than "everything looks different." If you want, you can also use a Pi-hole to restrict certain types of content on specific devices, which is handy if you have kids in your home.The only downside is that a traditional Pi-hole setup creates a single point of failure.
If the Pi-hole crashes or gets unplugged, you'll lose access to the internet.If you can, I'd recommend setting up a backup Pi-hole to prevent that issue.Since a Pi-hole can run on a Pi Zero 2 W without much trouble, full redundancy won't cost more than $20 and a bit of time setting up blocklist synchronization.
Nextcloud Storage, calendar, and an Office Suite in one app Nextcloud is designed to be a self-hosted alternative to OneDrive or Google Drive.At its most basic, it can be used to automatically back up photos from your phone or store files and folders.However, it also has a full office suite that is comparable to Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.
Nextcloud only gets used once or twice a week, but it still beats paying for Microsoft Office.It also has a fairly robust set of optional extensions that add extra features to the app.Some even add local AI capabilities if your server PC is powerful enough to run them.
Paperless-ngx Ditch the pile of paper for a digital archive Paperless-ngx is designed to make managing important documents easier by digitizing them.I can scan or email a PDF (or JPG) into the system, and Paperless uses optical character recognition (OCR) to make the document searchable.That means things like receipts, tax records, medical bills, or anything else in the system can be found by searching for a specific keyword or phrase that occurs in the document.
Where applicable, it can also make your documents sortable by date range, which makes it easy to find last year's tax filings or everything from a vacation.Recent versions have also incorporated support for local AI models that can classify and tag your documents for you.The only downside is the initial load of scanning at the beginning.
If you have a bin full of important paperwork, digitizing the entire thing can take hours.The big day-to-day problems make self-hosting popular As much as I might love dashboards and niche utilities, they don't solve an everyday problem that everyone has.My most enduringly popular applications are the ones that solve common issues, like "What should I do to entertain myself?" and "Where in the world did I put that copy of the 1040 I submitted?" If you're just starting out, I'd recommend the Pi-hole.
It is easy, runs on $20 hardware, and everyone will appreciate it.From there, a media server—either Jellyfin or Navidrome—is a good option.
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