I Surrender

I started selfhosting many years ago. Over the time I learned so much about networking, orchestrating, containerization,... A homeserver is a powerful tool to educate yourself in a wide range of IT fields. It is also great if you don't want to store your data in any big companies cloud. But you should always keep in mind how much effort it takes to have a reliable and secure environment. It's for sure a hobby that consumes a lot of time. Over the last years I started many private projects away from my homelab. Biking, car restoration, bodybuilding,... But I never wanted to drop my homelab. In the opposite I even started rebuilding my servers to make everything better with the knowledge I gathered of the last years. As a result I now have servers in an unfinished state, with half-setup services and a lot of headache while using them. It costs me a lot of mental energy to think about the workload I have to do for having the "perfect" homeserver as I want it. There are so many interesting selfhosted services I would love to try. Everything can be setup so fast with some lxc scripts, but hardening the service and get to know all the options and features they offer takes a lot of time again.

So I asked myself why am I even doing this. And the answers were: - learning new stuff for myself and future jobs - storing my data at home and not in the cloud - data protection - being able to say "Oh, I don't use Google Drive. I have my own cloud. Duh."

But in the meantime I learned more than I would ever need for jobs in the field I'm working in. I also realized, that I'm missing out on new technologies because of my conviction on not giving my data to big compainies. I'm in my 30s and feel like a grumpy grandpa who "hates" this AI stuff or VR goggles, because they are only made for collecting your data.

So I decided to surrender. I bought a Meta Quest 3 in december. I bought a Google Pixel this month. And I'm going to use all the convenient possibilities Google offers with Gemini, Drive,.... And I have to say it feels great not having this never ending project called homelab/selfhosting in my mind, next to all the other unfinished business everyone has in his life. I will keep my server running for playing minecraft with friends and probably using some other services. But I wont try anymore to have the best setup with terraform deployment, ansible automatios, multiple security layers, clustering multiple proxmox servers,...

This post is also to convince myself to do this step. Because right now I'm still half-comitted. But writing this essay feels good and I think I should drop this time consuming hobby for having more time available for other fun stuff in life.