Why I Self-Host Everything (An Unhinged Manifesto)

Every "free" cloud service is free until it isn't — until the price hike, the feature paywall, or the day they decide your account violated a policy you never read. Self-hosting is slower, harder, and occasionally 2am-emergency-inducing. I'd still choose it every time.

This isn't a call for everyone to run their own mail server (please don't, learn from my mistakes). It's a case for understanding what you depend on. Even hosting one small thing yourself changes how you think about the rest.

Start small: a Pi-hole, a photo backup, a note-taking app. You'll break it. You'll fix it. You'll understand your own stack better than most IT departments understand theirs.