The Self-Hosting Paradox

Published:

4 min read

The Self-Hosting Paradox: Choice, Chaos, and the Fear of Missing Out

Self-hosting is a thrilling rabbit hole. There’s a special satisfaction in spinning up your own services, shedding your reliance on SaaS giants, and taking control of your data. But once you’ve taken the red pill and peeked behind the curtain of “self-hosted alternatives”, you quickly encounter the darker side of freedom: too many options.

Let’s talk about the paradox of self-hosting: the more control you have, the more paralyzed you become. And the root of that paralysis? Good old-fashioned FOMO.

A Thousand Ways to Say the Same Thing

Say you want to monitor your system uptime. A quick trip to GitHub or Reddit’s r/selfhosted will hit you with options:

Each tool shines in its own domain, but they overlap just enough to cause a crisis of confidence. Is Kuma too basic? Is Prometheus overkill? Is Elastic too heavy? Is Beszel too new?

Now apply the same logic to backups:

Or to authentication:

It doesn’t take long before your “homelab” planning turns into a spreadsheet (or notion page, or obsidian bases, you get the idea) of pros and cons, feature comparisons, memory benchmarks, community activity metrics, and philosophical debates on reddit about identity federation.

The Fear of Missing Out, Infrastructure Edition

At its core, this isn’t a technical problem— it’s a psychological one. The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that plagues social media now haunts infrastructure choices.

This is the self-hosting curse: the more you care, the harder it is to commit. Because every commit feels permanent, and the grass is always greener in the next GitHub repo.

Decision Paralysis as a Service (DPaaS)

Ironically, the abundance of open-source tools, a blessing of the ecosystem—can lead to decision paralysis. We see it in the broader DevOps world too: Kubernetes or Nomad? OpenTofu or Terraform? Grafana or Kibana? Maybe both? Probably all of them.

In self-hosting, where a single person is often the sysadmin, network engineer, SRE, and janitor, these choices become existential. And the stakes feel higher, because it’s your data, your uptime, your weekend spent debugging.

So how do you break the loop?

1. Start with your constraints. Storage size, network speed, technical comfort, time budget—these can eliminate half the choices before you even get to features.

2. Prefer boring tech. If something is widely used, well-documented, and stable, that’s usually a sign it’s good enough.

3. Go modular, not monolithic. Instead of looking for the perfect one-size-fits-all platform, pick interoperable tools. Prometheus with Grafana. Restic with rclone. Authelia with your favorite reverse proxy.

4. Be OK with switching. Don’t treat every decision like a marriage. Your stack will evolve. Make your setup portable. Use Docker. Script everything.

5. Use FOMO as fuel, not fear. Try out other tools in test containers. Build comparison charts. Write blog posts (like this one!). Make FOMO productive. As this is what selfhosting is all about, right?

The Joy of “Good Enough”

At some point, you have to draw a line and say: “This is the stack that works for me.” Sure, it might not line up with what some battle-hardened Hacker News commenter with a 15-year-old dotfiles repo would suggest—but hey, it works. It may not win benchmarks. But if it fits your needs and doesn’t wake you up at 2 a.m. with a broken cron job, then congratulations—you’ve won.

Self-hosting is about empowerment, not perfection. Let others chase the latest release. You’ve got backups to rotate and dashboards to admire.

And if you really want to switch from Borg to Restic next month… hey, that’s your superpower.

TL;DR