The SelfHostIndex blog
Field guides to self-hosting, programmatic SEO, and building with AI — written from running a 3,530-app directory. No fluff, answers up front.
Self-Hosting RustDesk: Your Own Remote Desktop Server
Self-host a RustDesk server in 30 minutes: the two-container compose setup, the key that locks out strangers, port rules, and relay bandwidth math.
Latest posts
Archive →Your Own Spotify: Navidrome and the Subsonic Ecosystem
Turn a tagged music folder into your own streaming service with Navidrome — Picard tagging, the best Subsonic clients per platform, smart playlists, scrobbling.
SEO & GrowthXML Sitemaps Past 50,000 URLs: Sharding Without Tears
Sitemap limits are 50,000 URLs and 50MB per file. How to shard by template, keep lastmod honest, and turn sitemaps into an indexation dashboard.
Homelab & InfrastructureWho Pays for Open Source? Sustainability Behind Your Stack
Who funds the open source behind your homelab: five funding models, the unforgiving maintainer math, and where your money or time actually helps.
AI OptimisationVRAM Math: What Actually Fits on Your GPU
Weights plus KV cache plus overhead — the arithmetic that predicts what fits on your GPU, with worked examples from 8GB laptops to 24GB cards.
AI OptimisationvLLM vs llama.cpp: Pick by Workload, Not by Hype
vLLM wins concurrent throughput, llama.cpp wins on modest hardware and single streams. Where the crossover sits, plus a benchmark method you can rerun.
Self-Hosting GuidesSelf-Hosting Your Passwords With Vaultwarden
Self-host your passwords with Vaultwarden — the honest threat model, a hardened Docker setup, nightly SQLite backups, and emergency access planning.
Homelab & InfrastructureOff-Lease Enterprise Hardware: A Buyer's Field Guide
A field guide to buying off-lease enterprise hardware: where it comes from, CPU generation sweet spots, and the loud power-hungry gear to avoid.
Homelab & InfrastructureTLS Everywhere: Let's Encrypt Done Right
Let's Encrypt done right at home: DNS-01 wildcard certs for internal hosts, renewal monitoring that works, and the cert pinning myths to skip.
Homelab & InfrastructureThreat Modelling for Normal People
How to threat model a home server without paranoia: the adversaries you actually face, the assets that matter, and six controls that cover it all.
SEO & GrowthThin Content at Scale: Why Google Ignores 40,000 of Your Pages
Partial indexing on template sites is a pattern-level verdict, not a page bug. How to diagnose it in Search Console and the levers that fix it.
AI DevelopmentSynthetic Data That Doesn't Collapse Your Model
How to generate synthetic training data without model collapse — diversity seeding, MinHash dedup, judge calibration, and the real-data anchor ratio.
AI DevelopmentStructured Output From LLMs: Schemas, Grammars, Retries
Reliable JSON from LLMs is a solved problem: native structured outputs, grammar-constrained decoding for local models, and validation-retry loops.
Self-Hosting GuidesSelf-Hosted Status Pages That Calm People Down
Uptime Kuma vs Gatus for self-hosted status pages, why the page must live off your own infrastructure, and incident notes that stop the messages.
Homelab & InfrastructureThe State of Self-Hosting in 2026
Where self-hosting stands in 2026: growth numbers, category winners, licence drama as a genre, and predictions grounded in the visible trends.
Self-Hosting GuidesSSO for Your Homelab: Authentik vs Authelia
Authelia vs Authentik for homelab SSO — forward-auth vs OIDC, RAM footprints, passkey support, and the recovery planning that prevents total lockout.
SEO & GrowthSite Migrations Without Losing Rankings: A Field Checklist
A field checklist for site migrations — build the redirect map from traffic and links, stage the cutover, and watch the right reports for 90 days.
AI DevelopmentShipping AI Features Behind Flags
Ship AI features behind four controls — kill switches with defined fallbacks, shadow mode, cost circuit breakers, and pinned versions you can roll back.
SEO & GrowthSEO Split-Testing on a Static Site
How to run SEO split tests on a static site: page buckets at build time, difference-in-differences on Search Console clicks, and real sample sizes.
Homelab & InfrastructureSelf-Hosted vs SaaS: Honest Total-Cost-of-Ownership Math
Honest TCO math for self-hosted vs SaaS: pricing your hours, fixed vs marginal costs, a failure budget, and the cases where SaaS genuinely wins.
Self-Hosting GuidesSelf-Hosting 101: Your First Server, Start to Finish
The complete beginner path — what hardware to buy, which OS to install, your first three apps in Docker, and the backup habit that saves you later.
SEO & GrowthMeasuring SEO With Self-Hosted Analytics
Measuring SEO with self-hosted analytics — Plausible, Umami, or Matomo paired with Search Console, and the events worth tracking on content sites.
Self-Hosting GuidesSelf-Hosted Git: Gitea, Forgejo, or GitLab?
Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab compared for self-hosting — RAM footprints, Actions-compatible CI, GitHub migration paths, and a clear default pick.
Self-Hosting GuidesSelf-Hosted Email: An Honest Assessment
Self-hosted email honestly assessed — why receiving is easy, sending is brutal, and how a mailcow-plus-relay hybrid keeps control without lost mail.
Self-Hosting GuidesA Complete Self-Hosted AI Stack: Ollama, Open WebUI, Whisper
Ollama, Open WebUI, and faster-whisper in one compose file — GPU passthrough, model sizing per VRAM tier, and speech-to-text that never leaves your LAN.