Homelab Journey Part 1: Why I Started Self-Hosting

I started self-hosting after I found out photos of people I loved, who are no longer here, were not where I thought they were.

The physical copies were gone. I thought the backups were in Google Drive. When I needed them, they were not there.

That changed things for me. I stopped trusting convenience by itself. A slick app does not matter if the files are gone when you need them.

I have a big photo library, and Google Photos kept getting more expensive. That was one issue. The bigger one was paying more to keep my photos in a system I no longer trusted. So I moved everything to Immich.

Then I ran into the same kind of problem somewhere else. Our electricity bills were too high and no one could tell me why. Guessing was useless. I started monitoring power locally with Home Assistant and found the issue. The immersion heater was misconfigured. Without that data, I would have kept paying for it every month and had no idea what was actually wrong.

That is how I ended up self-hosting. Not for the hobby side. Not to collect services. Just to keep important things in systems I can check for myself.