My self-hosting setup
Thomas Sanlis
Not sponsored, not affiliated. I just really like this thing.
A good part of my digital life doesn't live in someone else's data center anymore. It lives in my apartment in Nantes, on a small box sitting in my hallway 😄!
My photos, my movies, my TV shows, Uneed’s analytics, some automations… Even the daemon I use to code from my phone.
All of it runs on Umbrel, a product I discovered earlier this year and fell in love with. And honestly? I don't understand why it isn't more popular.
What Umbrel actually is
Umbrel is three things at once:
- An operating system. umbrelOS is based on Linux, its source code is on GitHub, and it's free for personal use.
- An App Store. More than 300 self-hosted apps you can install in one click (no need to access the terminal and spend hours configuring things 😓)
- Hardware. If you don't want to bring your own machine, you can buy an Umbrel server, plug it in at home, and you're done. I did that and bought the Umbrel Pro, with extra storage.
You don't need their hardware though. You can flash umbrelOS on a mini PC, an old computer, or a Raspberry Pi. That’s actually how I decided to bought it: I installed umbrelOS on my Raspberry Pi to try it, and I fell in love with it!!
The whole pitch I guess is: self-hosting without the weekend project. Once it's running, you open umbrel.local in your browser and everything happens from there. No SSH, no docker-compose files, no reverse proxy config etc.
I say this as someone who has spent an evening configuring nginx as an SSL reverse proxy for a Transmission instance. I do not miss it 😂.
What runs on it
🍿 A seedbox for the whole family
I won’t go over the details here (you can google the word seedbox), but it’s extremely powerful, saves me lots of money, and can be shared with my family!
🚫 Pi-hole: no ads, on every device
Pi-hole blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level. Instead of installing an ad blocker in each browser, you block them for the whole network.
The trick that makes it really powerful: I use it as the DNS server for my Tailscale network. So every device connected to Tailscale gets ad blocking, including my phone on 5G, and including apps, not just the browser.
Once you've lived with it for a few weeks, using someone else's phone feels like a nightmare ahah!
🔁 Tailscale: the glue that makes everything work
Tailscale creates a private network between all my devices. My server is reachable from anywhere, without opening a single port to the internet.
Without it, most of this article wouldn't work outside my apartment. With it, my server feels like it's always next to me.
Umbrel's own iPhone and Mac apps even switch to Tailscale automatically when you leave home, so you don't have to think about it.
🤖 Paseo: coding from anywhere, all the time
I spend my days running coding agents like Claude Code and Codex. Paseo is a self-hosted daemon that lets me drive those sessions from my phone, my laptop, or anything else.
My codebases live on the Umbrel, the daemon runs there too, and I can launch a task from my iPhone while I'm out, then check the result later. I liked it so much I forked it to add a sound notification when a task finishes.
Full transparency: this is the only app in this list that isn't in the Umbrel store. I run it in Docker myself. It still took a few minutes only (thank you Claude)!
🔥 n8n for automations
n8n is a self-hosted automation tool, like Zapier but yours.
The most important thing running on it: part of the moderation pipeline for Uneed. New product submissions get batched, sent to an AI for a first review, and the verdicts are written back to the database. A decent chunk of my business logic runs on a box at home, and it's been doing just fine.
🏠 Home Assistant
The classic. TODO: what you automate with it
📈 OpenPanel for my analytics
I self-host the analytics for Uneed with OpenPanel.
This one is a good example of how I decide what goes on the home server. I ask myself one question: if this goes down for a few hours, is it the end of the world?
For analytics, no. I'd lose a few hours of data, that's it. For anything that customers depend on directly, the answer is different, and that belongs on proper infrastructure (I have a few VPS on hetzner).
🖼️ My photo library
You know the cycle. Your iCloud storage is full, you upgrade to the next tier, and six months later it's full again.
I'm out of that loop now 😎!!
There's a native Photos app, and the Umbrel iPhone app backs up the entire camera roll automatically in the background. The library is organized by years, months and days, with albums, favorites and Live Photos.
My family also has their own space, and I choose what I share with them. Pretty handy!
🗃️ Backups, because self-hosting without backups is just a slower way to lose your data
My entire server is backed up to an external disk every hour. My laptop gets backed up once a day.
If you take one thing from this article: owning your data also means owning the responsibility of not losing it. Set up backups on day one.
Should you try it?
If you're paying for two or three cloud subscriptions (storage, photos, streaming...) and you have even a little curiosity for tech, yes.
And you don't have to buy anything to find out. Grab an old laptop or a mini PC, flash umbrelOS on it for free, and install your first app. If you're like me, you'll have ten apps running by the end of the week lol.
If you do try it, please let me know how it goes!
Thomas
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