Think of it like the difference between renting and owning something. When you rent a home, you do not own it. You don’t get to choose. Want a nicer water heater? Not your choice. The owner takes 100% of the responsibility, but often isn’t penalized for misbehavior. So they can for instance, decide that they don’t like you, and you no longer can use their servers. Or perhaps they dislike other companies, and strip features from the rental agreement. Even worse, all your valuable data, along with everyone else’s, is all stored in a single valuable location, becoming a prime target for thieves. I half expect some of the “data breaches” we see are inside jobs, where the company leaves a loophole open, tells the “thieves” about it for a small sum of cash.

I personally like self hosting. Once you get into it, and understand how to reverse proxy, and set up a domain, you can essentially self host anything ridiculously easily. Like, for me, setting up a container, and funneling it into my reverse proxy maybe takes like 30-60 minutes, ironing out bugs and stuff? Sometimes if it’s particularly easy, it takes like 5 minutes lol.

Currently yes. But in the future, no.

Uh… You described next cloud. Not sure what exactly you dislike about it.

A few reasons.

1. Privacy, you control your data. It doesn’t go to someone else’s server to sit.

2. Security. It’s on your server. Password managers are primarily targets for hackers, i don’t want to name names, cause I’m not 100% sure of the name. But, one pw manager was hacked like 3x in the past year or something. It’s on your server, you are less likely to be targeted for a huge data breach, and you get to manage your data. Not someone else who fucks up.

3. You can’t be banned, or have the provider suddenly change access to the server, thus losing your data. I will name names here. MyQ garage door opener by Chamberlain suddenly removed the smart home integration, since the whole system ran on their servers. Removing the functionality users paid for. But they don’t own it, so they just got fucked. Your data/service on someone else’s server, is actually their data/service, you are just a visitor.

Direct playback doesn’t require much compute power. Just run Ubuntu server on the pi, spin up the containers, and get a fairly large HDD. An external HDD should be fine.

Any transcoding will be a issue tho. Like, if you use Jellyfin, and it wants to transcode your subtitles (even tho it shouldn’t), you won’t be able to stream anything 😂. I had this exact issue, and it was kinda pathetic that couldn’t get subtitles to stop transcoding. It isn’t transcoding now, but I also have a way more powerful server.

If you want to go more powerful. I’d recommend the build on Wolfgang’s channel, with a N5105 NAS board, the N5105 is strong enough for 4k transcoding. It has 2x nvme, 6x sata, and up to 64gb of ram. Throw it in a decent case. I’d run Proxmox and Ubuntu server on Proxmox, this just makes it easy to backup your VM, in case something breaks and you want to rollback. At which point you can just throw HDDs in, or make them a ZFS pool, or a raid pool. Up to you.

First, I try not to have it owned by root. But some containers have special privileges that need to be followed.

So rsync -O will copy the directory retaining permissions and ownership of all files.

Media server.