Stop Giving Away Your Data. Self Host Instead.

A practical walkthrough of building a self-hosted home cloud from scratch using an old or low-cost mini PC. Covers setting up Docker containers, deploying a self-hosted URL shortener (Shlink), configuring Caddy as a reverse proxy with automatic SSL, port forwarding for public access, and using Twingate for secure private tunneling. Also demonstrates running a local LLM with Ollama and Open Web UI. Includes a cost comparison showing that self-hosting hardware pays for itself in roughly 10 months versus renting equivalent cloud VPS capacity.