There is no cloud, but a server in a closet

This spring I got an old motherboard from a colleague. "Build your own server," was the challenge. Half a year later it's running at home in a closet and has replaced several cloud services I previously used.

"There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer." But now that computer is actually mine. Instead of opening a document in Notion and trusting a server somewhere on the internet, I now open the same document in Outline, working on a hard drive in the closet behind me.

"Via internet" vs "part of the internet" #

Daily life is filled with cloud services provided by others. They can be divided into two categories: Those accessed via the internet and those that are part of the internet.

In the former category, I think of services like Google Docs and Google Sheets, Notion and similar – tools I use either alone or with a limited number of people I explicitly invite.

In the latter category – what I call part of the internet – fall Instagram, Facebook and similar, but also blogs, newsletters, etc. Services where the whole point is reaching many people.

Let’s focus on the tools.

In my social media feeds, blogs, and even Kickstarter crowdsourcing campaigns, "self-hosting" and "home servers" have been bubbling topics for years.

The theory is simple: Instead of tools residing on an anonymous server somewhere on the internet, they live on a server you control.

Practice is considerably more challenging: The Wikipedia page for self-hosting lists several challenges, not least the technical knowledge needed to install and maintain a server.

That's something I've definitely lacked, so I've set these thoughts aside every time they surfaced.

But when discussions about "digital sovereignty" gained momentum in the EU and Sweden a few years ago, I discovered that the landscape for "private digital sovereignty" had changed significantly. Ready-made "server packages" like Cloudron and Yunohost combine Linux variants with “app stores” for services. The result, it was claimed, is that managing your own server has become easy.

So I decided to give it a go. Rented an internet-connected server from a German company, got a Cloudron license, and began experimenting with NextCloud for office programs, FreshRSS for news feeds, and n8n for creating automated routine workflows.

I was surprised how well everything worked. But realized after a while that the "services via internet" category can be divided into two subcategories: Services without sensitive data and services with sensitive data.

Having my RSS reader and certain automated flows running on a rented server in Germany is unproblematic. But for Nextcloud and other n8n automations, it's different. While it was easy to install and get things working on the server, did I really want to use them there? I didn't trust my own ability or the built-in security solutions in Cloudron and the VPS company enough.

A donated motherboard opened the next door #

This spring I ended up in a lunch discussion with colleagues about this, which ended with me taking home an unused motherboard. "Buy the missing parts and build your own server," was the challenge.

Said and done. Since mid-June I've had my own server running at home, with TrueNAS as the operating system after first testing Unraid.

Like with Cloudron some years ago, I've been impressed by how much more user-friendly the home server ecosystem has become. Both in terms of how much easier (but definitely not always "easy") it is to manage the server, and the incredibly good services available. Currently I'm running Outline as an alternative to Notion, Readeck as an alternative to Readwise, OpenWebUI as an interface for large language models, Ollama for running small models locally, and n8n for building automations with sensitive data.

Tailscale solves the "via internet" aspect #

But one crucial piece is needed for all this work to result in something truly useful. I can access home server services when connected to my home network. But I want to use most of them wherever I am.

One option is opening ports in the firewall, making it accessible via internet. But neither TrueNAS nor Unraid are built for that. The recommendation not to do this is clear. A hole in the firewall would also remove the main difference compared to the German VPS: I trust the firewall connecting home network to internet to protect all other computers at home, so adding a server behind it with documents instead of on the computer's hard drive makes little difference.

Instead of opening the firewall, the solution is Tailscale - a VPN service that's incredibly easy to install and ensures encrypted traffic can pass to and from TrueNAS, through the firewall, to my phone or computer regardless of network.

Is it worth the effort? #

That lunch conversation actually started discussing backups and how I'd begun looking for a network-attached storage for simple local backups of family computers. The possibilities of running other services by choosing a server instead of NAS came up naturally.

So only after backups were running as planned did I install the first "apps" to experiment. It hasn't been straightforward, cost several thousand kronor more than a hard drive would have, and without help from other users and considerable back-and-forth with ChatGPT and Claude, I would have given up. So it's not truly user-friendly yet, though it's become much easier to get started.

For me it's worth the work – I've learned much that's relevant to my work, and it gives a nice feeling knowing exactly where in the world and on which hard drive a document I'm working on actually exists.

For someone wanting a more private alternative to major cloud services without time or desire to wrestle with technology and learn along the way, it's not quite time to start this journey yet.

But give it a few years, and I think there will be solutions several notches more consumer-adapted. But if you're considering a backup solution, think about letting that hardware do a bigger job.