The Self-Hosting Spark: How Ditching Google Reignited My Tech Obsession

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I’ve been talking about a project that I’ve been working on for several months now, which has kept me pretty busy. It’s time I fill you in that it’s been all about self-hosting (I’ll explain that soon).

What was not expected was how this project sparked a renewed interest in technology for me. The feeling of fun I’ve had with this stuff hasn’t been there since the early days of my IT career, which started back in 1999. Yeah, I’m that old!

I know not everyone loves technology – in fact, I know a lot of you probably despise it. And that’s fair, I’m not here to judge. But for me, I’ve always appreciated some of the amazing things it’s brought to the table (even aside from the problems it usually presents, too).

In December 2024, I wrote a post called Privacy and Security: The Essential Guide to Reclaiming Your Digital Life. In it, I talked about how I’m working on moving my family away from some of the privacy concerns that many of the behemoths like Google have slowly woven into our lives.

This is my next phase of that – self-hosting various services at home that can replace some of the privacy nightmares that Google has brought upon us.

I honestly don’t expect a lot of you to go down this same path unless you’re a real tech nerd like me. But I thought I’d explain what I’ve been doing and why it’s rejuvenated my love for tech again.

Our family has had a stupid amount of fun since I early retired at the end of 2018. Between crazy amounts of traveling and different adventures, I wouldn’t trade any of it. We’ve already built up a ton of memories (with many more to come!).

But a 15-year-old daughter doesn’t want to spend all her time with her mom and dad forever. And you and I both know that Lisa won’t want to spend all that extra time we gain with me! So, as the months progress, I’m naturally going to have more free time in my life.

Don’t me wrong – I already don’t have enough hours in the day. I know a lot of retirees say this, but it’s true. I still get stressed from having too much to do most days. The difference is that it’s mostly stuff I want to do as opposed to a boss telling me what I need to do.

Hobbies are where it’s at, though. I don’t want to be bored, and that’s only happened to me on one single day since I retired almost 7 years ago. Crazy, right?

I think it’s important to keep finding new experiences and learning new things. It’s definitely good for the brain, but it also helps you discover facets of life you might not have expected to enjoy. On the flip side, you soon find out that some of those things that sounded good in your mind might not be up your alley (that would be gardening for me!).

Which brings us to this post… my mission to DeGoogle became an experimental self-hosting project that I’m having a blast with. It’s new to me and that’s led to some stumbling and headaches along the way, but it’s also been a lot of fun. Plus, seeing the results of it all coming together is really cool.

What is DeGoogling?

If you haven’t heard the term “DeGoogling” before, I’m sure you’re not alone. As people have started to become more concerned about the ever-growing intrusion of privacy from the big companies, they’re starting to take more control and looking to take action. With Google being one of the largest companies that’s so deeply rooted in people’s lives and that profits off your information, a DeGoogle movement has continued to grow bigger and bigger.

The idea is exactly what you’d think it is – it’s essentially trying to remove Google completely from your life, or at least as much as you can (or want to).

Sounds easy if you’re on board with that idea, but you might be surprised by just how ingrained Google is in most of our lives. Between Google Search, Chrome, Android phones, Google Photos, Google Nest speakers, Google Docs, Google Keep, YouTube, and a ridiculous number of other services, it’s actually a tough leap for most folks to make to abandon ship.

Here’s the weird thing – I’m not anti-Google. I think they make amazing software and services. When I would buy individual stocks (versus the low-cost index funds I buy today), Google stock was a big win for me over the years. I even dreamed of working at Google at one point early in my career. Heck, I just bought my first Google phone last month: the Google Pixel 10 Pro… and I absolutely love it!

So I’m not against Google, but we all have a line that we’re comfortable with when it comes to convenience versus privacy. And while I was comfortable for years knowing that Google was making money off me for targeted ad data, I finally hit my limit as artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded into our daily lives.

I love AI, but I don’t like the idea of Google (or any other company) using my data to train its AI. I also don’t like that there’s the potential for Google engineers to lay their eyes on this data while refining things. I’m not hiding anything, but that’s my line – we’ve all got one.

Luckily, I can do something about it… so I did.

You can read about all the changes I made in my post, Privacy and Security: The Essential Guide to Reclaiming Your Digital Life. These are changes anyone can incorporate into their lives and absolutely should be doing the majority of them!

But after changing my search engine, browser, and several other things, I made a much bigger change… I moved me, my wife, and our daughter from Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar to Fastmail. There are a ton of different options to choose from (some even more privacy-focused than Fastmail), but after trying out several, Fastmail was the right solution for us. It’s fast, reliable, looks good, and does everything we need (and more) that we were doing in Google’s ecosystem.

However, I still wanted to try to do more. And that’s when I decided to start self-hosting. That’s become my rabbit hole of fun for the past 6+ months now… and I’m loving it.

As a side note, this isn’t just about Google. Almost all the big tech companies are after your data – I’m looking at you Meta! I’m happy to report that on my new Pixel 10 phone, I didn’t bring over a single social media app. I’m weeding them out of my life slowly but surely!

What is self-hosting?

Here’s the deal – some things you can do easily on your own to increase your digital privacy. Here are two easy ones:

• Change your default search engine from Google to something like DuckDuckGo (my favorite).
• Change your browser from Chrome to Firefox (that’s what I use).

And, of course, you can switch some services for similar services with different companies that are more privacy-centric. Here are some great lists of alternatives:

• Privacy Tools
• Awesome-Selfhosted
• DeGoogle Subreddit

Then there are some things you don’t want to handle on your own. Email is a big one. I spent a lot of my engineering days focused on setting up, migrating, and troubleshooting email servers and email connectivity. I can tell you that getting on a block list can ruin your fun trying to do that yourself and put you in a bad spot. Stick to guys like Fastmail that know what they’re doing and handle all that for you.

But then there are some services that have some gray area to them. For example, you could just switch from Google Photos to something like Microsoft’s OneDrive or Amazon Photos. After all, they’ve got the capacity and know-how to do this stuff pretty well. It might cost you something or it might not, but it would be a pretty reliable service and would probably be a fairly easy switch. It’s not perfect, but it’s probably a little better on the digital privacy side of things than Google gives you.

However, there’s another option… self-hosting. Self-hosting means that you run the service yourself, usually out of your house or by renting cloud computing services off-site somewhere, if you’re really fancy.

Come on, Jim… seriously?? You think I’m going to spend thousands of dollars to buy a server and figure out how to write a program to do what the giants like Google and Microsoft do?

Nope, not all. It’s not like that. Here’s the cool thing – you can run things like photo hosting on a simple desktop computer if you want. I’m using a 3-year-old standard PC that we already had in place as our media PC. I know that some folks even just put stuff like this on a Raspberry Pi device, which is dirt cheap. Here’s an entire Raspberry Pi kit for around $150.

The point is that you don’t need heavy hardware.

Yeah, but what about the software? It’s got to be expensive, clunky, or something I need a developer to create.

Even cooler than the hardware is that there are so many cool open-source packages that can do everything you need them to do… and, in most cases, they’re free (though a lot do accept donations)!!

I’m now self-hosting a Google Photos clone that blows me away with how impressive it is. And this is very actively being worked on by so many developers doing this either full-time or in their free time, mostly just because they love the cause. I’ll tell you more about that shortly.

You can also set up your self-hosting solutions to be accessible from the internet just like everything else you do with the big guys. The most secure way would be through a VPN, but some folks handle that themselves with what’s called a reverse proxy. I went down a different path where I have a middleman (Cloudflare) that handles all the incoming traffic for me and forwards things to my PC on my home network.

If you’re not very technical, I’m not expecting you to do this or even understand a lot of this. In fact, it would likely be more trouble than it’s worth for you to go down this road at all.

But my point is that self-hosting can provide you with an alternative to the mega-corporation choices out there. You house the data, and that data is yours and only yours.

I have my own domain name and we can go to https://p.example.com (obviously not my actual domain) to see and share our photos just as you would go to https://photos.google.com to access yours. We also have an app on our phones that looks and acts just like Google Photos, except it’s connecting to my PC here instead of Google. Cool, right?

What am I now self-hosting?

Ok, so onto the fun stuff! What am I actually self-hosting here on my PC that we can now access anywhere in the world?

Immich (our Google Photos replacement)

This is what started it all. Google Photos is a stellar product. It works smoothly, backs up your photos automatically, has great built-in editing tools, and has amazing search skills. It just works.

And it used to be completely free for all your photos. Over time, that got replaced with limited storage, so eventually most folks end up on their subscription plan. Between me, Lisa, and Faith, we currently have over 52,000 photos and around 5,000 home videos! Yeah, that’s a lot. But we’ve also done a lot of cool #$%^, so it’s nice to see all this stuff and reminisce.

Most folks take photos and then rarely see them again. They sit on their phone or get backed up, and then they might pull them up once in a blue moon. For us, we have them show up on our TV all the time, and it’s fantastic to see the memories from all the years pop up throughout the day.

Anyhoo, I stumbled onto Immich a while back. It’s essentially a Google Photos clone, except it’s open source and completely free (though donations are welcome!). It’s only been around for a few years, but it’s grown tremendously and has a lot of active work going into it.

This software was not hard to set up for self-hosting and works tremendously well. It’s also hard to tell the difference between Immich and Google Photos a lot of the time.

There’s also an excellent app (I can only speak for the Android side of the equation)…

Pretty slick, right?

And what surprised me the most was just how good the search is on Immich. I assumed that since Google has all the money, manpower, and resources, Google Photos would be leaps and bounds ahead of Immich, but that’s truly not the case. Both allow you to search by places, file names, etc. And both use AI to let you search for “things” like “beach” or “sunset.” And they both let you search by people through facial recognition as well.

Google Photos still does a better job with the facial recognition, catching more faces than Immich does, but Immich is still extraordinary at it nonetheless. But with searches, Immich tends to come out further ahead than Google Photos. I’m currently running both side-by-side and there are many times when I can’t find what I’m looking for with Google Photos, but Immich finds it without a problem.

Right now, there are only primitive editing tools available in Immich, but that’s on their roadmap to remedy soon.

There’s no doubt that this sweet bit of awesomeness is what got me hooked on the whole idea of self-hosting.

ImmichFrame (my replacement screensaver on our Chromecast)

We haven’t had cable TV in at least 15 years. Over the past few years, we’ve been using a Chromecast with Google TV as our dashboard to streaming services and to access Plex (where we stream our own media collection). The Chromecast is similar to an Amazon Fire TV Stick or a Roku Streaming Stick, if you’re not familiar. As a side note, I’m pretty excited to replace the Chromecast with an onn 4K Pro Streaming Device as soon as that drops in price (probably on Black Friday).

Anyway, the Chromecast interface is what’s on our TV in the living room whenever the TV’s on. More importantly, after about 10 minutes, it kicks into Ambient Mode, and it would then display our recent photos from Google Photos as a screensaver. That’s super cool and a feature I was insistent we don’t lose before switching from Google Photos to Immich.

Sure enough, ImmichFrame does exactly what I needed it to do. When the screensaver kicks in, ImmichFrame is launched and talks to Immich, pulling our recent photos just like Google Photos did. Not only that, but I can customize it however I want. It works great!

Nextcloud (my Google Drive replacement)

Cloud storage is great. Being able to securely access your files from anywhere can be so convenient. And Google Drive has always been a good option. That said, it’s not cheap (assuming you need more than the free 15 GB of combined storage they provide). You could easily buy a hard drive with the same or more capacity than what you pay Google for storage per year.

The convenience factor is huge… and it just works. I was on the 200 GB plan ($29.99/year), and our daughter was on the 100 GB plan ($19.99/year). So nothing that’s going to break the bank and certainly not why I wanted to switch to self-hosting it.

As I’ve said, it comes down to privacy (and being able to have some fun with this project).

So I’ve moved us from Google Drive to self-hosting all our files with Nextcloud. Nexctloud is not just some rinky-dink piece of software that one guy works on in his basement for a few hours here and there. Nextcloud serves a significant paying customer base, especially enterprises, offering a dedicated Nextcloud Enterprise platform focused on large-scale, secure, compliant deployments that can scale to millions of users.

Here’s the cool part with open source software like this, though. It’s free to self-host this – you can pay if you want it to be a managed service like Google Drive is. And for most folks, that’s a great way to do it. But for me, self-hosting is easy enough for me to do, so free is for me!

So just like with Google Drive, we each have our own user account and we can get to it by going to https://d.example.com (not our actual domain) where we can preview, open, or upload/download files. Each of our phones also has the Nextcloud app so we can open that to get to our files on the go, too. We access everything right from the Files app on our Chromebooks, too, with offline access that syncs to Nextcloud when back online (I’m using FolderSync Pro for this).

A big difference is that there’s no storage limit for each of us. Technically, we’re limited by the capacity of the computer, but with the 14 TB WD Red Pro hard drive I’ve got in there for data storage, I think we’ll be alright for a while. As a side note, I paid $300 for this hard drive (which I just saw is around $270 now). Google is currently charging about $200 per year for 2 TB of storage (a fraction of the capacity this drive provides). Again, this isn’t about price, but it’s still kind of cool.

Not only that, but I have so much more flexibility. It’s easy to share files/folders within our family, but we can easily create public share links as well. And those links have options to set a password, set custom permissions (read-only, create, edit, delete), and more. We can also set an expiration date on the link, which is a bonus and can come in really handy if you only want to share something temporarily.

Another thing I did was set the Nextcloud apps on our phones to sync our photos to the main computer so they can be automatically added to Immich. Immich has that ability as well, except it would import them into its own database, which is something I didn’t want.

Collabora (my “sort of” Google Docs replacement)

One of the nice things Google has in place is the smooth integration of Google Docs (word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations, etc.) in Google Drive when working in your browser.

Nextcloud has a couple of options that integrate and work directly in the browser when self-hosting as well. I currently set it up to use Collabora CODE, which is based on the well-known office suite LibreOffice.

This is cool to have in place. If you’re working in Nextcloud in the browser and either create or open an office document, it opens right up in Collabora to view or edit.

I set this up just to have something in place, but I gotta be honest – this is an area I’m not blown away by. Collabora “does the job” but it’s far from being as powerful and smooth as Google Docs is. For quick views, straightforward edits, or just simple documents, Collabora will be fine for me. But for complicated spreadsheets, I’m not excited about this option.

So I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this. The other integration choice available for Nextcloud is OnlyOffice (also free). This is supposed to have better compatibility with Microsoft Office documents, faster response times, and just looks a lot prettier.

The concern floating around the internet, though, is OnlyOffice’s ties with Russia. Specifically, that under Russian law, the company could be compelled to provide access to user data or introduce backdoors into its software.

However, the software is open source so the codebase is out there for anyone to review. Not only that, but I wouldn’t be using OnlyOffice to have them host my documents; I would be self-hosting them here. That means OnlyOffice wouldn’t have my docs, and I could actually containerize everything to prevent anything bad (which is unlikely, but you never know).

So I may test that out and see how that works. For now, I still have my office docs in Google Drive (the only thing left in there!). I can convert them and bring them over to my self-hosting environment, and I’ll probably do that with most of them. However, I also have a lot of cool spreadsheets that I share with readers on my mailing list, which I’m not ready to move over to my small setup just yet.

Wait, you haven’t gotten on my email list to get these awesome free spreadsheets? You’re missing out on things like:

• Recurring Expenses Spreadsheet
  (discussed in This Bad-@#$ Expenses Spreadsheet is My Gift to You)
• Credit Card Rewards Tracker
  (discussed in Travel Rewards – 12 Free Flights Earned in 9 Months!)
• Portfolio Rebalancing Spreadsheet
  (discussed in Portfolio Rebalancing: Get Your Asset Allocation in Line)
• HSA Unreimbursed Expenses Tracking Spreadsheet
  (discussed in Using Your HSA for Retirement – How to Track It Easily and Efficiently)
• Roth IRA Conversion Ladder Calculator
  (discussed in The Roth IRA Conversion Ladder Dilemma)
• Alcohol Tracker
  (discussed in Alcohol Tracking – I Spent Hours Creating This Spreadsheet I Hope to Use Very Little)
• Next-Chapter Matrix / Bucket List
  (discussed in Creating Your Dream Life: The Ultimate Bucket List Blueprint)
• Upcoming Credit Card Bills Tracker
  (discussed in My Game-Changing Spreadsheet to Track Upcoming Credit Card Bills)
• Roth IRA Funds Available Now
  (discussed in Roth IRA Withdrawals for Early Retirees: Tracking What’s Accessible Now)

Stop wasting time and get on this list now!

Plex

I won’t go too much into this one since it’s not part of my recent projects, but I just looked it up and I’ve been using Plex since 2018 for self-hosting all our digital media (movies, TV shows, and music). This one works a lot differently than the others because I’ve always just had it installed directly on Windows as a regular software package. All the others I have running in Docker in an Ubuntu Server virtual machine on the PC.

If that sentence was foreign to you, don’t even worry about it – the point is that installing Plex didn’t involve as much technical know-how as all the others.

Anyway, Plex allowed us to create our own Netflix/Hulu-type streaming service. It acts as a Spotify-type streaming service for us as well. I used to love music CDs and at one point had about 800 of them. Years ago, I ripped them all to MP3 files, and Plex lets us listen to all of that on the fly. And the Plexamp music app is just superb.

It really is phenomenal, as you can guess, since it’s been our main content hub for over seven years (and I used Kodi for several years before Plex, too!).

My “simple” self-hosting diagram

This is an ever-changing document and needs to be updated somewhat already, but this is the gist of what I’ve put in place for our self-hosting setup. Click on it to open it in a new tab. It’s pretty big, so seeing it inline here won’t do you much good..

This was created with draw.io, a fantastic site. Such a great service and free for personal use – you don’t even need to create an account to use it!

Fun stuff, right? I really created this for myself, just so I could keep track of the flow of things.

Handling security and backups

There’s nothing more important than figuring out how to secure a self-hosting setup and how to back up all of your data. This needs to be done before you open it up for access from outside your home network or move your production data there. It’s 100% critical. If you mess this step up, you might as well throw in the towel now.

So before I did anything, I spent all my time learning and testing. To do this right, I needed to first learn Linux (specifically Ubuntu Server) and the Linux terminal. Then I needed to learn Docker and Docker Compose and how those worked. And then I needed to learn the different ways to allow access from the outside to everything that I planned on self-hosting.

There was a lot of learning, testing, failing, and starting over. Honestly, the far majority of these months I’ve been working on this project were spent in understanding how this all works with the underlying flow and the potential downsides to each method. Now that all that’s in place, spinning up a new Docker service is a breeze. I can start self-hosting a new piece of software with just a snap of my fingers.

After testing reverse proxies, opening ports in my router from the outside, trying things in Docker Desktop for Windows, and trying to keep everything secure with the Windows Firewall, I stepped back and rethought it all. I didn’t like the idea of having ports open from the outside directly into my home network. But at the same time, I wanted things to be seamless for my wife and daughter as regular users, so I didn’t want to use a VPN to complicate things. I also didn’t like a lot of the complications that Windows was throwing into the mix.

In the end, I scrapped everything I did and moved it all to an Ubuntu Server virtual machine on my PC running Docker. I then decided to use a Cloudflare Tunnel as the front line of defense for everything. This had two huge advantages:

1. The Cloudflare Tunnel handles the brunt of network security and attacks. All the DDOS attacks that happen and other issues are handled by Cloudflare. Nothing even gets to my home network until it gets through Cloudflare’s security.
2. This actually made things less complicated because now I have no ports open to the outside on my router. I also didn’t need to implement complicated services like multi-factor authentication in Ubuntu. This is all being handled on the Cloudflare side. They make it simple to lock things down how I want.

I’m extremely happy with this setup, and even though it means it’s not all on my self-hosting network, I prefer that. Security is a tough space to handle properly, and I like having this offloaded with Cloudflare. Oh, and it’s free to use, so that’s a big bonus. There are possible upgrades, but I don’t need them, at least for now.

I do have security measures set up on my network, but hopefully they’ll never need to be used since Cloudflare handles all incoming traffic first and does a great job knocking out the bad guys.

The other side of things I needed to get in place are backups, and I made sure to do this from the start and not as an afterthought.

The first part of my strategy was not to have files stuck in a database. For instance, I could have imported all our existing photos into Immich’s database. It can also automatically upload photos from your phone right into its database. But I didn’t want that. I want to be able to easily get to each individual file. So I have all our photos and videos stored as normal files on the Windows PC. The same goes for all our regular files for cloud hosting. Immich and Nextcloud access the files as external libraries so everybody’s happy.

That means less chance for corruption affecting everything, plus I can get to the individual files to see or work with if needed. More importantly, that means I can use backup software to back up and restore individual files (as opposed to an entire database) if necessary.

I’ve been using Backblaze to back up my files on Windows for years now, and this is no exception. For about $100/year, you can back up unlimited data for a personal computer – encrypted and stored offsite “in the cloud.” The backups are automatic and just happen seamlessly in the background. It also does versioning, which is such a necessity.

I’m sure I’m the exception to the rule, but I have a lot of data (no, I mean, a lot!) and I keep waiting for Backblaze to tell me enough’s enough, but thankfully, they haven’t. I’ve used it several times for testing restores and actually needing to do restores because of deleted data, and it handles the restores with no problems.

Like I said, I’ve been using this software for many years now. If you don’t have backup software in place, I urge you to check out Backblaze – such an awesome product!

Additionally, I have a script that runs nightly and copies all the necessary configuration files and databases from the Ubuntu Server and drops them into a folder on Windows (to be backed up by Backblaze).

And then, I have another nightly script that actually shuts down the entire Ubuntu Server virtual machine (VM) in VirtualBox, copies the actual VM files to another directory, and then starts the VM back up. Why do it that way? Because you never want to back up a virtual machine while it’s running – restoring it just leads to you crying in the end. It’s problematic.

With the way I’m doing this, the VM gets turned off and the files get copied elsewhere. Then the VM can be turned on and go about its business. In the meantime, I excluded the production VM folder from being backed up by Backblaze, but it does back up that perfect copy of VM that’s made every night. It’s a perfect solution for my needs.

And finally, every night, all files are copied from the PC (including the copy of my VM) to an external hard drive through an RSYNC script.

Life is good! You hope to never need to rely on your backups, but when you do, you want to have multiple methods in place to get operational again.

Is this for everyone?

Hell no. Absolutely not. If you’ve made it this far, your head’s got to be spinning or else you’re fairly technical-minded. If you’re in the latter group, you could consider self-hosting as long as you know that the juice isn’t necessarily worth the squeeze for most folks. There will be guaranteed headaches in figuring it all out and it’s not something that will likely save you money (though it could!).

But with all the time involved, including setup, maintenance (backups, security, updates/upgrades), and other administration chores, there’s a lot time involved. It’s really cool, but it’s also a lot of work.

Only you can decide if self-hosting is even worth starting down on that path.

What’s left?

As for me, I’ve been rejuvenated. There are definitely times when I’m pulling my hair out, but I’m still enjoying the challenge, making it all come together, and seeing the results. I’ve felt like a kid (albeit a very nerdy kid) having fun doing something I enjoy.

The next step I want to take is to get us off of Google Keep. Funny enough, that’s a tough one because of its simplicity. It’s so easy to use that we use it constantly… and it just works. It’s an amazing service… except for the Google part of things.

I spent way too much time exploring and testing different options. And, although there are some extremely popular services and apps, they weren’t for us. Obsidian is a great example – extremely popular and privacy-focused. But it wasn’t as easy to master from the user side of things. That means it would likely be doomed to failure with my family, so I gave it the boot.

With what makes sense for us to use, I’m down to three that make sense to test right now:

• Notesnook (free for self-hosting and open source)
• Joplin (free for self-hosting and open source)
• Microsoft OneNote (wait, what??!!!)

This will probably need to wait until we get back from our $3,200 38-night trip to Europe, since I don’t want to get started and then need to stop.

However, I’m leaning towards Notesnook now. I like it and it’s got enough similarities to Google Keep that I think the learning curve won’t be too much of a turn-off for my wife and daughter.

But if self-hosting Notesnook and Jolin don’t pan out, I might go down the Microsoft OneNote path. That might sound like a strange idea to move from one mega corporation to another, but there’s a huge difference… Microsoft’s primary business model isn’t to sell off your information to others, whereas Google’s is.

I’m no stranger to OneNote either. I love the power and flexibility it provides, and I actually moved a lot of what was done at my former IT company to this software. I can’t believe there aren’t a lot of copycats out there for this either. It’s different, but it works well.

So that’s the fallback. But I’ll implement and test the others first to see how it goes.

Also, once I’m done testing everything (hopefully by December), if everything looks good, I’ll delete all our old photos and videos from Google Photos to get them out of Google’s grasp (and hope they actually do delete them!).

I’ve already moved Lisa and Faith completely off of Google Drive, so I’ll delete their data from that by the end of the year. All I have in my Google Drive now are Google Docs files, so I’ll convert/move most of those out (with the exception of the public shared ones for Route to Retire). And then I can take a little breather and we can cancel our storage plans with Google to save a whopping $50/year.

Outside of that, I need to be careful. Once you start self-hosting, it’s easy to fall into the server sprawl trap. Since it’s a snap to roll out new Docker containers, you see something that looks cool and shiny, and think, “Ooh, I’ll add that into the mix!” Before you know it, you’re self-hosting 75 apps and services.

I was looking at AdventureLog recently and that seemed super fun. I guess we’ll see what happens! 🙂

And now you know what’s been keeping me busy for the past year!

Plan well, take action, and live your best life!

Thanks for reading!!

— Jim