My cloud, at Home

Over the last decade, we’ve all witnessed the massive shift from in-house servers to the cloud. “It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it scales!”, at least that’s what the big tech marketing teams promised. And for enterprises, it’s hard to argue: the cloud removed operational friction, improved agility, and made deployments as easy as a git push.

But the narrative became so dominant that it quietly turned into dogma. Every startup deck, tutorial, and blog post echoed the same line: “We run on the cloud.”

Today, I want to talk about why I went the other way.

The Real Cost of “Small” Monthly Fees

One of the main reasons I decided to host my own server was financial - but not in the “save a few bucks a month” kind of way. It’s about understanding the long-term cost of subscription culture.

Let’s run a simple thought experiment. Suppose you’ll live another 50 years. You’ll probably still want to listen to music, host websites, run apps, and store files. All the basic digital needs.

Here’s what that adds up to:

• Apple Music – 24.99 zł × 12 × 50 = ~15,000 zł
• Ghost hosting – $9/month × 12 × 50 = $5400
• Render app hosting – $7/month × 12 × 50 = $4200
• AWS email – $5/month × 12 × 50 = $3000
• iCloud 50GB – 4.99 PLN/month × 12 × 50 = ~3000 zł

That’s around 68,000 zł assuming prices never rise. And we all know they do. Netflix, Xbox Live, Adobe, they’ve all quietly multiplied their prices over time. Sure, you might earn more in the future. But it’s worth asking: have you ever truly calculated how much money you spend just to rent access to your own data?

And here’s the most ironic part: when you stop paying, you lose everything. Your playlists vanish. Your blog goes offline. Your data disappears. You’ve paid faithfully for decades - yet you own nothing. Instead, imagine buying a CD every couple of months, or a few used ones from a record shop. After 50 years, you’d own around 300 albums. A physical music library you can gift, resell, or simply enjoy holding. That’s ownership, a concept that feels almost old-fashioned in the age of streaming. And if you rip those CDs, you can legally create your own private music streaming service. The artist’s already been paid; the rest is entirely yours.

Ownership gives permanence. Subscriptions give convenience... until they don’t.

Rediscovering the Joy of Building

There’s another reason I went back to self-hosting: I missed the hands-on fun of building something from the ground up.

I’ve used Docker thousands of times in production, but setting it up at home, on my own Raspberry Pi, is a completely different experience. It’s like rediscovering why I get into engineering in the first place. You learn about networking, Ubuntu configuration, container orchestration, monitoring, security, and hardware optimization - all in one small ecosystem. My stack includes Grafana with Prometheus for observability, remote access via Cloudflare tunnels, a reverse proxy, efficient file transfer between devices, SSH management, and persistent tmux sessions.

There’s this moment when you realize you’re streaming your own music from your Pi while abroad - and that little board sitting on your desk is serving content across the world. It’s surreal.

Good engineering should feel like magic. And for a moment, it really does.

The Aesthetics of Self-Hosting

My Raspberry Pi sits quietly on my desk, glowing with soft LEDs, the fan spinning just enough to remind me it’s alive. I can open Grafana anytime and see it breathe, CPU temperature, disk IO, bandwidth graphs. It feels like watching a tiny mechanical creature you’ve built, optimized, and taught to live on its own.

There’s a certain beauty in that. Not the beauty of sleek UI animations or glossy app icons, but the beauty of understanding. Knowing how each part connects, how data flows, how packets move. It’s satisfying in the same way maintaining an old analog watch or rebuilding a bike engine is satisfying.

What makes it even better is autonomy. This blog, the one you’re reading right now, runs on that very device. The analytics? Also local. Nobody but me knows how long you’ve stayed here or which post you clicked next. There are no hidden trackers or analytics scripts feeding third-party ad networks. It’s a small digital island, fully mine.

That simplicity feels liberating. In a world obsessed with “growth,” “engagement,” and “retention,” it’s refreshing to have something that just exists - serving content quietly, without optimizing for anything but curiosity.

And yes, the Pi is also beautiful in its own right. It’s compact, efficient, and hums with purpose. You can glance at Grafana dashboards like a pilot checking gauges - power draw, CPU spikes, memory pressure. It’s oddly meditative. When everything works, it feels like harmony between hardware, software, and human curiosity.

My Home Tech Stack

Here’s what currently runs on my setup:

• Home Assistant – the brain of my smart home. It controls lights, sensors, and automations, fully open-source and locally hosted. No data leaves my house.
• Grafana + Prometheus – my observability stack. Grafana handles visualization, Prometheus scrapes metrics.
• Pi-hole – my DNS sinkhole. It blocks ads, trackers, and telemetry across every device at home.
• Ghost – the blogging platform you’re reading now.
• Navidrome – my personal Spotify. It serves my ripped music collection with mobile apps anywhere in the world.
• Umami – a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. All analytics stay local, lightweight, and anonymous.
• Postgres & MySQL – databases for side projects, dashboards, and a few internal tools.
• Micro-SaaS apps – small tools I experiment with and sell.

Everything lives in a single docker-compose.yml. Docker makes it effortless to manage containers, ports, volumes, and updates. One command brings everything up, and everything persists across restarts . When something breaks, I know where to look, not because I Googled the issue, but because I understand my own system. That’s the biggest difference.

For remote access, I currently rely on Cloudflare Tunnels. Yes, I know - I just spent half this post talking about independence from big providers. But Cloudflare’s service is genuinely reliable and fast. Eventually, I plan to migrate to a static IP setup with my ISP, but for now, Cloudflare strikes a nice balance between simplicity and reachability.

Back to the Roots of the Internet

We need to talk about decentralization - real decentralization. Not the “multi-region” marketing buzzword cloud companies love, but decentralization of ownership.

The early Internet was built by people running servers in basements, universities, and garages. It was small, chaotic, and imperfect — but it was also theirs. Every page, every service, every experiment was personal. Today, we have more power than ever before, yet we rent everything from a handful of corporations.

My blog is hosted in Poland. My data stays here. I don’t have to send it across the Atlantic or pay foreign companies for the privilege of being tracked. And while this might sound symbolic, it’s a subtle act of digital independence. In a way, it’s even a form of quiet patriotism, a belief that not all infrastructure has to belong to Silicon Valley. Europe has its political and fiscal struggles, but it has world-class engineers and thinkers. There’s no reason we can’t run our own systems, our own clouds, and our own web. What’s missing isn’t capability - it’s the willingness to take back control.

Hosting your own services is a small rebellion against convenience. It’s saying: I can do this myself. I don't need to give all the data to the corporations.

What You Gain (and Why It Matters)

People often ask whether self-hosting is worth it. I think it depends on what you value.

If you want pure convenience, maybe not.

But if you care about understanding, control, and freedom, then yes - it’s absolutely worth it.

You’ll learn about networking, security, automation, data privacy, and scaling. You’ll start to see your computer not just as a tool, but as infrastructure. And you’ll rediscover what it feels like to own something digital again.

Because the truth is, we don’t really need to run everything in the cloud. Sometimes the simplest, most personal cloud is the one humming quietly on your desk.

Conformity is easier. But curiosity is more rewarding.

A Closing Reflection

Self-hosting isn’t just a nostalgic hobby or an act of digital rebellion. It’s a quiet reminder that we still can.

We don’t have to rent everything - our tools, our data, our voice.

We don’t have to depend on corporations for every layer of our digital lives.

We can own the things we build, understand the systems we run, and protect our privacy not through marketing promises, but through code we actually control.

The open-source world is proof that this balance is still possible.

Maybe the goal isn’t to escape the cloud, but to restore balance — to know when to depend on others and when to stand on our own. Because the moment you run your own server, however small, you remember:

the internet wasn’t built to be rented - it was built to be ours.