Are you a dedicated home lab enthusiast who instinctively self-hosts everything? While this approach is fantastic for learning and control, it’s crucial to recognize that not every service brings equal value when self-hosted. This article delves into the strategic shift from a ‘self-host everything’ mindset to a more balanced, hybrid approach. Discover which common services, from email to password managers, often thrive under managed solutions, freeing up your valuable time and enhancing your home lab’s reliability. Embrace smarter self-hosting strategies and optimize your home lab management for maximum enjoyment and efficiency.
The Self-Hosting Dilemma: When to Choose Managed Services
For many of us diving into the world of self-hosting services and building a home lab, the initial impulse is to host everything imaginable. This mindset is undeniably valuable, offering unparalleled learning opportunities across networking, storage, virtualization, firewalls, backups, and containerization. However, a critical realization often dawns: not everything needs to be, or even should be, self-hosted at home. This isn’t a rejection of self-hosting, but rather an understanding that some services don’t add sufficient value to your stack when maintained locally. Let’s explore which services often benefit from a move to cloud-hosted or managed solutions and why.
1. Email: The Deliverability Gauntlet
A decade or more ago, self-hosting email felt like a rite of passage, offering total control over your messaging. Fast forward to today, and the requirements for reliable email delivery have become incredibly complex.
Now, due to the prevalence of SPAM, you’re constantly battling with DKIM, SPF records, DMARC, reverse DNS, and IP reputation. Many internet service providers (ISPs) actively block port 25 traffic on residential connections, forcing a “business” grade circuit for any hope of direct sending. Furthermore, certain recipient domains might impose even stricter requirements.
Email isn’t just another service; it’s a constantly evolving beast. It can quietly break delivery without obvious errors, leading to missed critical communications. The sheer complexity and constant troubleshooting required to ensure emails actually land in inboxes, rather than being tarpitted or rejected, often outweigh the benefits of local control. For many, including the author, entrusting email to a managed provider that specializes solely in email delivery is a wise investment, liberating precious time from endless deliverability debugging.
- Unique Tip: Consider implementing DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) alongside SPF and DKIM for advanced email authentication and reporting, even if you eventually move to a managed provider. It’s a crucial layer in modern email security.
This is an oldie but still a goodie post I did a few years ago on how to install SMTP on your Windows IIS server and run an internal SMTP relay: Add SMTP Windows Server 2016.
2. Public DNS: The Cornerstone of External Access
Running your own DNS services is an awesome learning experience, and internal DNS remains fascinating and incredibly useful for home lab management. It allows for powerful local resolutions and custom configurations you can’t achieve otherwise. However, public DNS, which resolves your externally facing services, is a different story.
While you can technically run your own public DNS servers, this comes with its own set of challenges. Public DNS is the critical backbone for certificates, APIs, monitoring, and virtually every external interaction with your services. Even if your applications are healthy, if public DNS is down, they might as well be offline as external clients won’t be able to find them.
The author eventually moved public DNS to a managed provider like Cloudflare. This wasn’t due to an inability to run it oneself, but a pragmatic decision to safeguard against local power outages or ISP issues – common occurrences that can cripple public services. Managed providers offer high availability, global redundancy, and often additional security features.
My internal DNS for my home lab continues to be self-hosted. For internal clients, I use a split-horizon zone to resolve even public records for certain services locally instead of sending those queries to the public DNS zone. This allows me to have even more control over name resolution.
Check out my recent DNS related posts here on internal DNS solutions that are awesome:
3. Remote Access Gateways: Embracing Zero-Trust Security
Many of us, when first setting up a home lab, get excited about building our own remote access gateway solutions—WireGuard, OpenVPN, multiple entry points, custom firewall rules, and failover logic.
However, after experiencing security incidents with machines in a DMZ, the author realized that the security risks and vulnerabilities associated with exposing such services directly to the internet often outweigh the benefits of self-hosting. Today, the zero-trust landscape has matured significantly, offering superior solutions that render traditional gateway self-hosting largely obsolete for many use cases.
The benefits of a zero-trust approach are immense. These solutions typically require no inbound firewall ports to be opened, significantly shrinking your attack surface. You’re no longer punching holes in your network’s armor. Beyond security, the user experience with these solutions is often superior. Services like Twingate are highly regarded, and there are even self-hosted alternatives that operate on similar principles, offering robust zero-trust security for your home lab without the traditional headaches.
- Unique Tip: Explore open-source, self-hostable zero-trust alternatives like Headscale (a self-hosted control server for Tailscale clients) or OpenZiti. These can provide secure, port-less access to your lab resources while giving you granular control over identity and authorization.
Read my posts here:
4. Push Notifications: Reliability Over Control
Push notifications are another service that the author no longer attempts to self-host. Notifications are incredibly useful when they work reliably, but become a source of frustration when they’re fragile and frequently broken.
Self-hosting a push notification stack can be extraordinarily complex. It involves managing certificates, adapting to constantly changing mobile platform requirements, and dealing with gateways that can silently break. Apps can stop receiving messages without any obvious errors, leading to critical alerts being missed.
At a certain point, the author found themselves spending more time maintaining the notification system itself than focusing on the services it was supposed to monitor. This inversion of purpose highlighted the need for reliable, “it just works” notification services. Alerts need to arrive when expected, without requiring midnight debugging sessions.
I now use something called Mailrise along with pushing notifications to my Pushover client. Check out my full blog post on that here:
5. Password Managers: Security vs. Self-Hosting Risk
This particular point—self-hosted password managers—might spark some debate, and for good reason. There are fantastic open-source projects that enable effective self-hosting of password vaults. However, for the author, the risk involved was simply too great.
With a multitude of accounts spanning various services, apps, and resources, the possibility of losing all these critical entries due to a catastrophic home lab failure was an unacceptable risk. It’s next to impossible for a typical self-hoster to achieve the same level of resiliency, high availability, and geographical distribution that dedicated cloud password managers provide.
While solutions like Vaultwarden (a popular, lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server) are excellent, ensuring their continuous operation, robust backup, and disaster recovery plan on par with professional services adds significant operational overhead. A pragmatic approach involves using a cloud password manager for your most critical, non-lab specific credentials, and perhaps a separate, well-backed-up self-hosted solution for lab-specific or less critical entries. Just be mindful of the “chicken and egg” scenario where you need your password manager to bring your lab back online after an outage, but it’s hosted within the very lab that’s down.
- Unique Tip: If you absolutely want to self-host your password manager, ensure you have an off-site, immutable backup strategy (e.g., encrypted backup to cloud storage or an external drive) that is regularly tested. Don’t rely solely on backups within your home lab.
Stress and Time: Your Metrics for Self-Hosting Success
This might seem abstract, but for the author, if a service consistently consumes more time (troubleshooting, maintenance, unexpected breakage) than it provides in learning, enjoyment, or value to the home lab, it’s a strong signal that it might not be the best fit for self-hosting.
Furthermore, if a particular service makes you uneasy every time you leave town, or if you dread updating it because of potential hours of downtime, these are clear indicators. The goal of a home lab should be enjoyment and empowerment, not constant stress and servitude. The author stopped self-hosting anything that caused more stress than the value it brought. This line is different for everyone, but it remains the most telling metric when deciding whether a service is worth the ongoing commitment.
Services That Still Shine in the Home Lab
Despite letting go of the services mentioned above, the author remains deeply committed to self-hosting. In fact, more solutions are running in their home lab than ever before. Core infrastructure, storage, internal DNS, identity services, reverse proxies, logging, AI tooling, and DevOps platforms are still happily self-hosted. These are areas where the learning, control, and flexibility still far outweigh the operational and time costs, providing tangible benefits and continuous learning opportunities.
Strategic Self-Hosting for a Resilient Home Lab
The beauty of self-hosting, much like home labs themselves, is that it’s not a “one size fits all” endeavor. Your setup can be tailored precisely to your individual needs and comfort level. Knowing when not to use a tool in a self-hosted environment is just as important as knowing when to embrace a solution or app.
Strategically offloading control to cloud or SaaS solutions in a few key areas has made the author’s home lab more reliable, more enjoyable, and significantly less stressful over time. It has also freed up valuable time to focus on the truly exciting parts of the home lab, like experimenting with new projects and solutions. Ultimately, your home lab should work for you, not the other way around. Hopefully, this list of services the author stopped self-hosting provides food for thought as you refine your own self-hosting strategies. What about you? Have you recently stopped self-hosting a service? Which one? Please share your thoughts in the comments!