Self-hosting tutorials all stop at the wrong moment
Every self-hosting guide ends at "and now it's running." Which is the easy part. The docker compose up is maybe 5% of what actually owning a service costs you.
The other 95% shows up later and nobody writes it down: the update that changes a config key and silently breaks your reverse proxy, the cert that quietly stops renewing, the disk that fills because logs rotated wrong, the CVE that means the upgrade you were putting off isn't optional anymore, the backup you never tested until the day you needed it. None of it is hard, exactly. It's just permanent. The service doesn't care that you're busy this month.
So the real question before self-hosting something isn't "can I install this" — installs are a solved problem, the guides are genuinely good. It's "am I willing to be this thing's sysadmin for the next two years, including the weekend it breaks while I'm away." For a password manager or a photo library, where the alternative is renting from a company that might get acquired and shut down, often yes. For anything where a managed version is cheap and the data isn't sensitive, the honest answer is usually no — and that's fine, that's not failure, that's triage.
What's the one thing you self-host that's been genuinely zero-maintenance, and the one that turned out to be a part-time job you didn't sign up for?
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