There is a machine at home doing the work that four or five subscriptions would otherwise do. People ask what it costs, and I always answer with the electricity, which is the wrong answer.
What is actually here
A box with the storage in it, another machine that serves the media, and a small pile of helper applications that fetch, rename, tag and file everything so that I do not have to. Books, audiobooks, magazines. A dashboard so I can tell at a glance whether any of it is awake.
None of it is clever. Every single piece is something thousands of other people also run, and that is the main reason it works at all. The moment you invent your own thing, you are the only person who can fix it.
The thing I gave up on
Magazines. I tried three separate readers, all of them nicer looking than what I ended up with, and every one of them failed in the same specific way: each issue landed as its own series instead of one series containing three hundred issues. Beautiful software, useless shelf.
So I went back to Calibre, which is old, looks like 2009, and does the job exactly. I also built a conversion pipeline to turn the files into a tidier format, got it working properly, and then deleted the whole thing, because it doubled the storage for no benefit that any human being would notice.
That is the pattern, and it is not limited to my own hardware. I have tried to make Trello work for years. I keep going back. I keep failing. Somewhere there is a list of the lists I have abandoned, and it is also abandoned.
The evening I lost
Drive letters. On Windows a mapped drive letter belongs to the user who mapped it, so anything running as a different account, or inside a container, looks at that same letter and sees nothing at all. I spent an entire evening certain the storage had died, when in fact the path simply did not exist for the thing asking about it. The fix is to write the full network path everywhere and never use a letter again. There are still a couple of stragglers pointing at a letter only I can see, and I will find them at the worst possible moment.
The other confession: I have no backups. Not one. The array has parity, which people mistake for a backup, including me when I am feeling relaxed about it. Parity protects you from a disk dying. It does not protect you from you, because a deletion propagates immediately and cheerfully to the redundancy as well.
Where the line is
Email. Absolutely not, not ever. If my email goes down I cannot reset the password on the thing that would tell me my email is down, and I am not interested in explaining to anyone why their message bounced for three days.
The other side of the line is anything the household depends on while I am not in the country. A media server that falls over on a Tuesday is a mild irritation. A media server that falls over on a Tuesday while I am in a hotel in another timezone is a phone call, and the phone call is the real cost.
So: self-hosting is not cheaper. It is paid in attention rather than money, in irregular instalments, usually late in the evening, and the bill arrives without warning. I would still not go back.
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