The weekend is here, and it’s time to continue on your self-hosting journey! This weekend, we’re going to focus on getting some self-hosted cloud storage and media servers running in your homelab.
Run your own cloud storage
Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
One of the best parts of a homelab is owning your files and the storage where those files are stored. So, if you’re ready to ditch Google Drive or Dropbox, then hosting your own cloud storage server is a fantastic project to get up and running this weekend. I personally keep a Nextcloud instance running on my Unraid server (I set it up there a long time ago and just have never moved it), but you can run Nextcloud on just about anything. There are official images for Docker and virtual machines, as well as web installers, NextcloudPi, a Snap package, and more.
Really, Nextcloud (or other services like Seafile) can run on basically any hardware you have lying around. With Nextcloud specifically, you’ll get a very Google Drive or Dropbox-like experience, with support for multiple users, web collaboration, sharing, and much more.
Nextcloud not only runs on your local hardware but also utilizes your own local storage. This means that you won’t have to pay $20 per month for 2TB of Google Drive storage and, instead, can use your own storage server. If I didn’t use my server for media, that would give me 60TB of cloud storage space.
Now, if you’re keeping files locally at home, the RAID you have set up on your storage server is a great start for redundancy, but it’s not true backup. You’ll want to make sure that you have an off-site copy of your data somewhere. I’d normally recommend something like BackBlaze B2 storage, which costs $6 per terabyte per month to store.
However, if you want to keep your files completely out of the public cloud, then I’d recommend setting up a secondary storage server at a friend’s house—ideally on the other side of the country if possible. Having this second server to back up to will ensure data integrity in case of a natural disaster or catastrophic events. The further away from your main server it is, the better, as the likelihood of it getting damaged at the same time as your primary system is minimal.
Setting up Nextcloud can range from pretty simple if you go with Nextcloud AIO to pretty difficult if trying to spin up the services individually (in my experience). So, this project could definitely fill the weekend, but at the end of it, you’ll be able to say goodbye to cloud storage providers and take full control of your files (and wallet).
Credit: Nextcloud
Cost
Free
Operating Platforms
Docker, Linux, Windows, macOS
Nextcloud is a self-hosted cloud storage provider that utilizes your own hardware and storage space. It offers full-featured cloud collaboration on files, documents, and more, giving you an enterprise experience without the cost.
Credit: Corbin Davenport / Plex
The great part about self-hosting and building out a homelab is just how versatile your hardware becomes. The same system that runs your file server and other services can also host your personal media files.
Over a decade ago, I turned on my first Plex media server and I have had one running in my home ever since. I used to have a huge physical media library. Every time a new 4K Blu-ray dropped, I’d buy it. I would pre-order the latest releases so that way I could get the steel books, too.
However, I hated pulling out each disc to put into a Blu-ray player. I felt like it could get damaged, and these are collectors’ items to me. So, I bought a nice 4K-capable Blu-ray drive for my desktop and started ripping the movies to my computer so I could watch them from anywhere without grabbing the physical disc.
Yes, those Blu-rays did (and still do) come with codes for adding the movies to a digital library, like iTunes or Amazon Video. However, those online copies are far lower quality than the version that comes on the disc, so ripping to my hard drive and streaming from there gave me a much higher-quality experience.
To this day, I use Plex for my media consumption. I have added many of my favorite old TV shows to my Plex server over the years so I can re-watch classics like Home Improvement, Monk, Psych, and many others without having to find the DVD that’s somewhere in a box in the attic at this point.
Setting up a Plex (or Jellyfin, Emby, or Kodi) server is pretty straightforward and only takes a few minutes. The long part is digitizing your physical media collection, which could take a few minutes for small libraries and days for larger ones.
However, once you have everything digitized, you can stream your own content to any TV in your house without paying a single dime to anyone else. It’s a very liberating feeling that I think every homelabber should experience.
Brand
Plex
Free trial
Free version available
With Plex, you can keep a single, unified Watchlist for any movie or TV show you hear about, on any service—even theater releases! You can finally stop hopping between watchlists on all your other streaming services, and add it all on Plex instead.
Credit: Artem Samokhvalov / Shutterstock
If you’re tired of curating and algorithm-based feeds, then RSS is perfect for you. Designed many years ago, RSS is an algorithm-free way to consume your favorite content. Just about every mainstream website or blog offers an RSS feed of their articles for you to browse and read from.
FreshRSS is a modern RSS reader that you can self-host, avoiding some of the more modern clients like Feedly, which does apply an algorithm and other AI-based features to simple RSS reading. With FreshRSS, you’re in full control of the experience.
Simply deploy the FreshRSS Docker container, input the RSS feeds you want to monitor, and start enjoying algorithm-free content.
Credit: FreshRSS
Supported Desktop Browsers
All
Brand
FreshRSS
FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS reader and aggregator to help you consume the content you want. Designed to be lightweight and run on your own hardware, that old Raspberry Pi sitting in your closet is the perfect candidate to run your new RSS reader.
Setting up a homelab environment is such a fun experience that I think all tinkerers should play with it. These are just a handful of things that you can do in your homelab. Not sure what’s in a homelab? Really, if you have one computer at home and run your own services on it, you have a homelab—you don’t need a full data center in your office.
After you get these services running, here are several more Docker containers that I think all homelabbers should run to give you a well-rounded self-hosting experience.
