I know I’ve said I do not like pain…but I must be a massicist for moving almost everything I do into something self-hosted. Why on earth would anyone do this to themselves?

Reason one – instead of paying a few bucks each to several different service providers, I simply upgraded my Linode instance to handled the extra load. Email (specifically anti-spam and anti-malware) takes up the majority a machine’s resources. Everything else is low impact.

Reaon two – I do not like being someone’s product (Google) nor do I want to pay good money for a service that I can do myself with relative ease.

Reason three – I’m learning a fair amount related to host-security and Linux, which I may not have gotten the opportunity to otherwise.

Replacing Feedly: Feedly is great, but it is a paid service with a free version. Remeber what happened when Google Reader went away? I was an avid Google Reader user, and have been a loving/leeching Feedly user for several years. But what will I do if they go away?

This one was easy. Go grab a copy of Tiny Tiny RSS and install it. If the default themes aren’t your style, there are more.

Replacing GMail: This one is not for the faint of heart. I wanted to learn a new skill, and bit off way more than I expected. I’ll be creating a special blog post for this one soon.

Replacing Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox: Nextcloud is the only way to fly for this. I had spun up an IOCAGE Jail on FreeNAS for this, but it quickly became a pain to maintain. I switched to an Ubuntu-based VM to make my life a little easier, then leveraged an NFS share back to my FreeNAS repo. There should be another blog post coming for this as well.

Pocket/Instapaper: I recently moved from Pocket to Instapaper on a whim (both are good services). I haven’t found something compelling to get me to move just yet.

Bookmarks: Currently, I’ve moved my bookmarking function partially out of the browser into Nextcloud’s Bookmark app. I can tie this into my browser somewhat, but there is no good integration into my iPhone yet.