At some point I looked at how much stuff I was running on other people's servers and decided that wasn't good enough. So now I self-host basically everything I can. It started small and kind of spiralled from there in the best possible way.
The NAS
The backbone of the whole setup is a UGreen NAS. It runs the media stack — qBittorrent, Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr — all in Docker, all feeding into Plex. If you know, you know. If you don't, just know that it means I never have to think about where to watch something.
The NAS also acts as my main storage and backup target. Everything important gets backed up there. It's basically my own personal Google Drive, except I actually own it and it doesn't scan my files to sell me things.
The network stack
On the home network side I run AdGuard Home in Docker for network-wide ad blocking. Everything hits AdGuard before it goes anywhere, which means ads are blocked at the DNS level across every device on the network — without having to install anything on any of them.
The VPS situation
Beyond the home setup I also run stuff on VPSes — Pterodactyl for game server hosting, various web services, all reverse proxied through nginx with proper SSL. It's a lot to keep track of, but at this point it's second nature.
Why bother?
Honestly, a mix of reasons. Part of it is the control — I know exactly what's running and where. Part of it is privacy. Part of it is that it's just genuinely interesting to set up and maintain. And part of it is that once everything's running it's just… better than the cloud alternatives in almost every way.
The obvious downside is that when something breaks, it's on you to fix it. And things do break. But that's also kind of the fun part.