Best of self-hosting — March 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of dhhDavid Heinemeier Hansson·8w

    ONCE (Again)

    DHH reflects on the pivot of the ONCE product line from paid self-hostable web apps to open source with permissive licenses. The original model—selling apps like Campfire for a one-time fee—only broke even. Releasing Campfire, Writebook, and the new Fizzy as free open-source projects proved far more successful, driving adoption and community contributions. The ONCE platform now offers a terminal interface for tracking app metrics (RAM, CPU, visitor counts), zero-downtime upgrades, and scheduled backups, positioning itself as infrastructure for self-hosted apps including those built by AI agents.

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    Article
    Avatar of selfhstselfh.st·8w

    Self-Host Weekly (13 March 2026)

    Weekly self-hosting newsletter covering community drama around Booklore and ntfy's AI-assisted v2.18 release, TrueNAS closing its build system source, and the trend of 'claw'-named projects. Also spotlights Open DroneLog, a self-hosted drone flight log platform deployable via Docker, plus curated videos, a CLI tip for mkdir -p, and miscellaneous homelab news.

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    Video
    Avatar of devops-toolkitDevOps Toolkit·9w

    Why Self-Hosting AI Models Is a Bad Idea

    A cost analysis arguing against self-hosting large language models. Running frontier open-weight models like Kimi K2.5 requires 4-16 Nvidia H100 GPUs, costing $8,000-$35,000/month in cloud rentals or $150,000-$300,000+ in the first year for owned hardware. By contrast, API access to the same models costs $300-$800/month — 10 to 30 times cheaper. Even smaller models on consumer hardware take years to recoup API savings. The piece also warns that 'open weight' is not 'open source': licenses like Llama's have real restrictions and can change at any time. The recommendation is to use cheap vendor APIs while AI companies are subsidizing costs with VC and government money, avoid lock-in by staying provider-agnostic, and only consider self-hosting in special cases like air-gapped environments or massive existing GPU infrastructure.

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    Article
    Avatar of selfhstselfh.st·7w

    Self-Host Weekly (20 March 2026)

    A weekly self-hosting newsletter covering the growing problem of AI-generated pull requests overwhelming open source project maintainers, Unraid v7.3.0 entering beta with support for non-flash-drive installation, a satirical site called Malus mocking AI-driven open source relicensing, and a spotlight on Sure — a self-hosted personal finance platform forked from Maybe that supports account linking, budgeting, investment tracking, and LLM-powered AI chat, deployable via Docker with PostgreSQL and Redis.

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    Article
    Avatar of selfhstselfh.st·9w

    Self-Host Weekly (6 March 2026)

    Weekly roundup covering self-hosted software news and community highlights. Notable items include Microsoft banning 'microslop' on Discord, rumors of a subscription-based Windows 12, OpenAI building an internal GitHub alternative, OpenClaw surpassing React as GitHub's most-starred project, Anthropic launching a Claude for Open Source program, a Home Assistant integration to play DOOM from dashboards, and Ente announcing Ensu, an offline privacy-focused LLM app. The content spotlight features Versity S3 Gateway, a lightweight self-hosted bridge for accessing local filesystems via object storage APIs, deployable via Docker. Also includes curated videos on Cloudflare Tunnels, Home Assistant 2026.3, and Dokploy vs Coolify.

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