About

About SelfHostLife

Hi, I’m David Han

I’m a writer who’s spent the past two years deep in the
self-hosting rabbit hole, and the past few years before that
covering technology and personal finance for online audiences.
What I bring isn’t enterprise expertise — it’s the perspective
of someone who learned this stuff the hard way, and now writes
about it in a way that doesn’t assume you already know what a
reverse proxy is.

It started with a subscription audit. I added up what I was
paying every month — cloud storage, streaming, productivity
apps, password managers, photo backup — and the number was
almost $80. Most of it for services I barely used. All of it
sitting on servers I didn’t control, run by companies that
could change the rules anytime they wanted.

So I started learning. Slowly. One service at a time.

The first six months were genuinely rough. I broke containers,
misconfigured Caddy, lost a Plex library twice, bought a mini
PC that was overkill, then a Raspberry Pi that wasn’t enough.
I spent way too many evenings reading documentation written by
people who assumed I already understood Docker networking.

But eventually it clicked. I’m now building out a self-hosted
stack on a small mini PC running Proxmox — Immich for photos,
Jellyfin for media, Vaultwarden for passwords, and a growing
list of smaller utilities. My monthly subscription total has
already dropped from $80 to under $20, with more to cut as I
migrate the rest.

That journey — the mistakes, the wins, the “wait, why is no
one explaining this clearly” moments — is what SelfHostLife is
built on.

What You’ll Find Here

Every recommendation on this site is either something I
personally use, or something I’ve researched against at least
five alternatives before writing about it. I cover:

• Hardware reviews — Mini PCs, NAS devices, and home servers,
  with real power consumption numbers and use-case matching
• Hosting comparisons — VPS providers, cloud options, and
  honest pricing analysis (including the fees they don’t
  advertise upfront)
• Self-hosted apps — Open-source alternatives to subscription
  services, with setup time estimates and real-world reliability
  observations
• Privacy tools — VPNs, DNS, reverse proxies, and other ways
  to take back control of your data
• Money saved — Concrete numbers on what self-hosting costs
  vs. what it replaces, including the hidden costs nobody talks
  about

How I Recommend Things

Three rules I follow on every post:

1. I only recommend products I’ve used myself, or that I’d
   genuinely buy after researching alternatives.
2. If a cheaper option is better than an expensive one, I say
   so — even when the expensive option pays better affiliate
   commissions.
3. When something has tradeoffs, I name them. There’s no
   “perfect” self-hosted app for most things, and I’d rather
   help you pick the right tradeoff than pretend it doesn’t
   exist.

This site is reader-supported. Some links are affiliate links,
which means I might earn a small commission if you buy through
them — at no extra cost to you. Affiliate income never changes
what I recommend. If I wouldn’t deploy it on my own setup, I
won’t tell you to deploy it on yours.

For full details, see my Affiliate Disclosure.

Who This Is For

If you’re tired of subscription fatigue, worried about how much
of your digital life lives on someone else’s servers, or just
curious whether you can run your own Netflix replacement on a
$200 mini PC — you’re in the right place.

You don’t need a CS degree. I don’t have one either. You just
need to be a little stubborn about owning your stuff.

Say Hi

If you have a question, a recommendation, or want to share what
you’re running — I’d love to hear from you.
Email me at hello@selfhostlife.com.

Thanks for being here.

— David