My self-hosted setup in 2026

I am always interested in what and how people self-host stuff and enjoy reading their setups so I decided to write down my setup for you 🙂

My self-hosted setup consists of an Unraid server at home and a root server rented from netcup as well as a Raspberry.

Unraid#

I run an Unraid server since end of November 2021 and I am very happy how easy and powerful Unraid is. I also wrote a blog post about my reasons for Unraid and my hardware considerations.

The majority of services run as Docker container with their own share but I also rely on some crucial plugins.

Calibre and Calibre-Web#

If you have to deal with E-books you should have come across Calibre, THE E-book management software. No surprise, I use it to manage my E-books that I usually buy from Thalia.de (DRM-free!). Calibre-Web is a light frontend for Calibre which is more suitable for browsing my collection on various devices.

Prometheus and Grafana#

Prometheus and Grafana are both tools for monitoring. Metrics are exposed by the Prometheus Node Exporter plugin and scraped by Prometheus.

Heimdall#

Heimdall is a customisable application dashboard containing links to all my important services and bookmarks.

Jellyfin#

Jellyfin is my media center for streaming music, movies, and shows.

Metabase#

Metabase is probably an overkill for my use case but hey, it works! I use it to visualise my spendings. See my accounting post for details.

MySpeed#

With MySpeed I am measuring my internet bandwidth (upload, download, and ping) each night.

Photoprism#

Photoprism is my picture library for my raw images shoot from my mirrorless cameras.

Syncthing#

Syncthing is the backbone of my file synchronisation for years (maybe a decade?).

Appdata Backup#

Appdata Backup is a plugin that regularly creates backups from my appdata folder (located on my cache) and stores the backup on my array.

Tailscale#

Tailscale is a plugin to connect to a Tailscale network. I use it to connect to my headscale instance on my root server.

Unassigned Devices#

Unassigned Devices is a plugin to manages disks not part of the Unraid array. I used it to mount a USB drive to perform backups. See Backups.

User Scripts#

User Scripts is a plugin to perform arbitrary scripts time-based, think of cronjobs. This plugin is a crucial part of my backup strategy.

Root Server#

Syncthing#

Of course, Syncthing is also installed on my root server.

Nextcloud#

Nextcloud is a powerful “cloud alternative”. It can replace many SaaS services like file-storage, PIM, chat, notes, video-conferencing and more. I just use it as file-storage for accessing files on the go and for sharing with my family. Folders are “mounted” as external storage so I can use Syncthing and the file system for synchronisation.

Calibre-Web#

Calibre-Web to view my E-book library on the go.

Forgejo#

Forgejo is a GitHub/Gitlab alternative for my private repositories. What amazes me is the simple deployment. Just one binary and that’s it.

Nginx#

Nginx as reverse proxy is my door to my services that also does SSL termination with Let’s Encrypt¹ certificates automatically renewed by certbot. If I were to start from scratch, I would probably consider Caddy instead of Nginx.

Supernote private cloud#

Supernote private cloud is the self-hosted cloud for my Supernote E-Ink tablets. See my post on my notes how to set up the service using Docker.

If you are interested in E-Ink tablets I wrote a post comparing Remarkable 2, PP, PPM, Supernote Nomad, Manta, and Onyx Boox Note Air 3 C.

Donetick#

Donetick is my task manager of choice. I like it’s simplicity yet good feature set and the native iOS app.

Karakeep#

Karakeep is my bucket for everything. When there is an interesting article or tool or image or note that has no place in my knowledge management system, I just drop it in Karakeep. It is automatically tagged and a offline copy is stored.

FreshRSS#

FreshRSS is my RSS (am I old?) aggregator of choice and replaced TinyTinyRSS which I used for years.

Atuin#

Atuin is a tool to store and sync your shell history across devices via self-hosted sync-server.

Headscale#

Headscale is a self-hosted alternative of Tailscale. And the best part: It works with official Tailscale clients!

Copyparty#

Copyparty is an all in one file server where I still try to figure out if I need it when I have Nextcloud.

Raspberry#

A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B runs Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking. Initially, I was running Pi-hole on my Unraid but I recogized that this was not a good idea for such a crucial networking component. Since then, I had no issues and it is rock stable on my Pi.

Backups#

All my data is synced to my Unraid server. From there, I have several backup methods in place:

1. My data is backuped every night at 03:00 to Backblaze up via user script using Restic with snapshots and encrypted.
2. Media is backuped weekly to pCloud via user script using Rclone.
3. Monthly I plug in a SSD and perform a manual backup of all my data via user script using Restic with snapshots and encrypted.

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