The SelfHostIndex blog
Field guides to self-hosting, programmatic SEO, and building with AI — written from running a 3,550-app directory. No fluff, answers up front.
12 Self-Hosting Mistakes Everyone Makes Once
Twelve self-hosting mistakes everyone makes once — untested backups, exposed dashboards, DNS single points of failure — and the cheap fix for each one.
Latest posts
Archive →E-E-A-T for Niche Directories: Signals You Can Ship
E-E-A-T signals a niche directory can actually ship: verifiable data with timestamps, a methodology page, editorial policy, and honest authorship.
AI DevelopmentSurviving LLM API Failures: Timeouts, Fallbacks, Queues
LLM APIs fail for hours each quarter. Timeout budgets, retry rules that honour Retry-After, provider fallbacks, and queues that keep your app standing.
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.
AI OptimisationBenchmarking Local LLMs Without Fooling Yourself
Contamination, quant variance, and template bugs move scores more than model choice. Build a 100-item harness from your own data and run it tonight.
Self-Hosting GuidesUpdating Containers Without Starting Fires
A container update strategy that survives contact — version pinning, Renovate PRs, what Watchtower can safely auto-update, and rollback plans that work.
SEO & GrowthGetting 50,000 Pages Crawled: Crawl Budget in Practice
What it takes to get 50,000 pages crawled: log-file analysis, the discovered-not-indexed funnel, and why pruning weak pages speeds up the rest.
AI DevelopmentA Realistic AI Pair-Programming Workflow
A realistic AI pair-programming workflow — decompose to verifiable tasks, verify like a reviewer, and the three signals to take the keyboard back.
Self-Hosting GuidesPostgres for Everything: One Database to Back Your Homelab
Why one shared Postgres beats five app-bundled containers, when per-app instances still win, and the backup and upgrade routines that actually restore.
Homelab & InfrastructureDNS for Self-Hosters: Records, TTLs, and Split-Horizon
DNS for self-hosters done right: local zones on a real domain, split-horizon with your reverse proxy, sane TTLs, and the classic resolution bugs.
AI OptimisationLocal AI and Privacy: What Actually Stays on Your Machine
A packet-capture audit of Ollama and Open WebUI — prompts stay local, update checks don't. How to verify egress yourself and run truly offline.
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.
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.
AI DevelopmentOpen-Weight Models in 2026: What's Actually Usable
Which open-weight models are production-usable in 2026, task by task, plus licence gotchas and the maths for when they beat APIs on cost and privacy.
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.
Homelab & InfrastructureIPv6 in the Homelab: Finally Worth It?
Whether IPv6 is worth enabling in your homelab: prefix delegation, firewall defaults, dual-stack gotchas, and who actually gains from it in 2026.
AI OptimisationBatch vs Real-Time Inference: Two Different Systems
Batch APIs cost half of real-time and finish within hours. What belongs in each system, the queue architecture batch needs, and hybrid designs.
SEO & GrowthDuplicate Content: Diagnosis Before Medicine
There is no duplicate content penalty. How to diagnose exact, near, and cross-domain duplication with hashes and Search Console before prescribing fixes.
AI DevelopmentChoosing a Vector Database: pgvector Until It Hurts
Start with pgvector and move only when one of four numbers turns red. The decision ladder to Qdrant, plus the benchmarks that matter and those that lie.
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.
Self-Hosting GuidesNextcloud vs Syncthing: Different Tools, Same Anxiety
Syncthing replicates, Nextcloud serves. How each handles conflicts, what they cost in RAM and maintenance, and the two-tool setup that ends file anxiety.
SEO & GrowthLink Building for Developer Tools: What Works in 2026
Guest posts are dead for developer tools. What still earns links in 2026: free engineering utilities, data studies, and open-source presence.
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.
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.
AI OptimisationDistillation: 80% of the Quality at 5% of the Cost
A small model trained on filtered frontier outputs can hit 90% of teacher quality on narrow tasks. The pipeline, the licensing traps, break-even math.