Yup that’s why I started self-hosting, when my wife got pregnant and we started to think about what technology access for our future kids would look like.
I started with CasaOS and Jellyfin. Quickly outgrew Casa and moved to learning Docker and setting up my own container stack, moving from media self-hosting to adding new containers of stuff like budgeting apps. I’m still working on building out my server but every container I add, the goal is basically to self-host a version of something I’m doing on a centralized service on the web and ultimately take my data and privacy back.
I will say some peoples’ elitist attitudes about stuff can be annoying and discouraging; it’s the same general spillover attitude from the Linux supremacy crowd. When I started with Casa I had someone basically tell me I was wasting my time and if I wasn’t running everything in VMs why bother. Which is entirely the opposite attitude to get “normies” and low technical literacy people on board, they need easy one-click install solutions like CasaOS. And if they decide to move onto something more complex, well I’m sure they can figure out how to reimage and rebuild their server in ProxMox or Docker as part of that.
I've been "self-hosting" for 30 years now (= running a 24/7 linux server)
And I still don't get the "VM for everything" crowd. Why would you do that when you have containers?
It's much simpler and lighter. Any 200€ old corporate PC can run a dozen containers easily. What it can't do is run that same stuff in 12 VMs.
Ha we basically had the same journey though you are certainly further along than I am.
Definitely agree about the elitist attitude problem. The amount of people who dunk on people for using Plex when I think it’s a fantastic jumping off point for true self hosting…it’s just so unnecessary and becomes a missed opportunity.