Watch on YouTube or on TilVids (Peertube)

References

Everybody should have a home server (or a friend with one)

Intro

Now I know what you're gonna say, "Why would I possibly need a home server? isn't that just a bunch of nerd crap? I'm too cool for that." Well over the course of this video I hope that I can convince you otherwise. I fully believe that running a home server can not only be beneficial to everybody, but these days also quite accessible, you don't need to be into a bunch of nerd crap, or even have very much computer knowledge. The things you can do with your home server once it's running are nearly limitless. You can host your own streaming service instead of using Netflix, run a game server for you and your friends with ease, or build a website without paying a dime, and much much more that we'll talk about later. You can access all of this from anywhere in the world, and it doesn't have to cost you anything but the electricity it takes to run it.

So why would I want a server?

Streaming services suck

There's a million different streaming services out there right now. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Audible, and one million others. I'm sure you pay for or use someone else's subscription for at least one of them, and I'm sure you've had some frustration with it in some way or another. For example, one of my very favorite bands is The Roots. I think that they have an excellent discography, and I love all oftheir albums I don't think they have any misses. And that's great, except for that on Spotify I can't listen to this one as intended since there's three grayed out tracks.

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Or their best of mixtape which is just completely gone

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One of my wife's favorite songs is "Anyone Else but You" as covered by Michael Cera and Elliot Page from the Juno original soundtrack and guess what? It's gone too. I remember she was actually devastated when she found out.

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But it's not just a Spotify, Netflix famously removes content from their platform all the time, like when The Office left in 2021 just so it could be put on Peacock instead. Now if you want to watch that you've got to pay another 12 dollars every month and that doesn't even get you ad free viewing. Or I'm sure that many of you remember the whole situation with Infinity Train being removed from HBO Max without the creator even knowing about it a few years ago.

It's not limited to streaming services either, Amazon Kindle e-books let you pay to "own" your content without a monthly fee, but they still can and will take away your access to the things that you paid for. Back in July of 2009 Amazon removed many of George Orwell's books, including 1984 which is kind of hilarious, from their w kindle e-book store. And not only were they removed from the store, but they were straight up removed from kindle devices that already had them downloaded. People that had paid to download these and believed them to be their's forever no longer had access anymore. The same kind of thing could potentially happen to almost any of your digital purchases.

Ownership is dead and everything is expensive

The sad reality is that in the digital age we're in right now, you own almost nothing. Your digital purchases don't actually belong to you, you're usually just buying a license that allows you access to the content you paid for, and that license can be revoked by the vendor that gave it to you, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want, without any warning. Most vendors don't make this clear to their customers in the slightest. Just this past February Amazon finally started making that clear with e-book purchases. But this goes for more than just e-books, this is your movies and tv shows on Amazon Or Vudu, the video games you buy on Steam, or for your console. As for all the streaming platforms out there, you're basically just renting access to their libraries one month at a time, it was never even close to yours to begin with.

I'll be honest, the fact that you can pay Spotify $12 a month and listen to almost any song ever released is kind of awesome, but again it's just "almost" any song, and sometimes your favorites will just disappear with no real explanation. Not to mention that the prices keep increasing, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced a cheaper paid plan that's "ad supported" like Netflix has.

And when it comes video streaming like Netflix, you can almost never find all the shows you want in one place. For example, I've got a few shows that I've been wanting to check out, let's say I want to watch Twin Peaks. justwatch.com says I can watch it on Paramount+ which is only $7.99 a month which is great that's on the lower end for streaming services. But, I've also been meaning to check out Severance which is an Apple TV+ original series, so I'll have to pay for that too and it's $9.99 a month. The new Stranger Things season is supposed to be coming out soon so I'll probably rewatch the series beforehand, so I'll just have to pay for Netflix at $17.99 a month because I don't want ads. That's just three shows I want to watch and I'm already paying $35.97 a month, or $431.64 a year. That's an insane amount of money for just three shows, and I think it's pretty safe to say that most people paying prices like this are in a similar boat where they're only watching a couple things. Nobody is taking the time to watch everything these services have to offer.

So what in the world is supposed to be done about this? The streaming services that I pay for take away my favorite media all the time, my digital purchases can be revoked without warning, and it costs me a million dollars just to watch a couple shows it's basically like the very thing streaming services swore to destroy, cable, is back again. How can we fix this? Well I think that I can solve these problems, with what is perhaps the most practical reason to run a home server for most people.

Run your own media server

Allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of media servers. You can self-host your own video, music, e-books and audiobooks with a home server. The most popular solution for multimedia streaming is Plex. Plex allows you to host your own media server, all you have to do is download it from their website, point it to your files, and it'll automatically scan and organize them. Now you can login to your account on pretty much any device and boom, you have your own little personal streaming service that's completely in your own control. But honestly, I wouldn't really recommend Plex because it's not entirely free. There's a lot you can do without paying, but they do also have a monthly paid "Plex Pass" plan that let's you do a little more, like letting other users stream your content, hardware transcoding, downloads, and the ability to skip the intro and credits of tv shows. If it's not stuff you think you really need then you'll probably be decently happy with the free plan.

But I'd instead recommend going with Jellyfin. It does all the same things as Plex and even more. Jellyfin can stream almost anything, movies and TV shows, music and music videos, audio books ebooks and comics, you can even use it as a digital photo library in place of something like Google Photos or iCloud. All this and pretty much every benefit you get from Plex Pass completely for free.

Of course when running a Plex or Jellyfin server, you'll have to provide your own media. I trust you to make your own choices and I'm not going to tell you how to acquire your media, but there's also a lot you can do with physical media you may or may not already have. If you're like me, you (or more likely your parents since you're in your 20s) probably have a collection of old CDs, DVDs, or even home movies lying around somewhere in a closet. They probably haven't been touched in years, but now is the perfect time to give them some use. Why not just pick them up, rip them to your computer and host them yourself? Software like Jellyfin makes this easy and something genuinely worth doing, you can literally take your entire collection with you on the go anywhere in the world.

Imagine what you could do with a setup like this. Let's say there's a tv series you want to watch, you go to look up where you can watch it, discover that it was taken off of Netflix just a week ago and now if you want to watch it you have to pay for Hulu, and now you're all angry at the world because all you wanted to do was watch the ABC mini golf game show Holey Moley. But now with your sick new media streaming server, all you have to do is acquire whatever you want to watch, and boom! It's available to you now and forever. No more juggling 10 different streaming services, no more of your favorite shows or movies randomly disappearing to only be available somewhere else, everything is in your control. It's just you, and the ABC mini golf game show Holey Moley.

And while Jellyfin really can do pretty much all of the media you want, and when it comes to movies and TV Jellyfin is probably your best choice, but there are some other more specialized tools worth looking into. On my own homeserver I have Jellyfin running with a few movies and shows as well as my music library, but for the most part I run my music through Navidrome. It's an application similar to Jellyfin but it's built specifically for streaming music and it doesn't do anything else, which means it's got some music specific features that Jellyfin doesn't offer. It handles high res audio files better, it's a bit more efficient and quicker with reading and organizing your library based on the tags, and since it's just for music it's quite a bit more lightweight making everything across the board a bit snappier and stable while you're listening . There are similar cases for pretty much every kind of media you'd want to stream, like Kavita for ebooks, comics or manga, or Audiobookshelf, I bet you can guess what that's for. That's right, Podcasts! And Auidobooks too, I guess.

Host your own photo backups

I also briefly mentioned that you could use Jellyfin as a digital photo/video library like Google Photos or iCloud. And yes, this is definitely something you can do but I wouldn't recommend it because surprise! There are dedicated applications for this use case as well, the big ones being Photoprism and Immich.

I've been using Immich myself and I can't recommend it enough. It works pretty much identically to Google Photos, it supports easy sharing, collaborative albums, even facial recognition and automatic sorting based on recognized faces. You can also make multiple user accounts with their own photo libraries making it a great choice for households. It's accessible through a web interface or the dedicated mobile app for both iOS and Android, which automatically backs up all the photos on your phone the moment you take them. It's a perfect replacement for casual users or families that just want to keep their photos in the cloud.

Photoprism is a bit more robust and mature as it's been around for a while longer. It supports RAW files including HEIC, CR3 and others, it has strong metadata management tools, and excellent Adobe Lightroom style tagging, labeling, filter and search capabilities. It's a bit better at working with huge libraries and would be better suited for power users, professional or hobby photographers, or anyone that just really needs or wants solid control of their massive photo library.

Both Immich and Photoprism are free and open source, but Photoprism does offer some paid features, many of them being team and organization focused, for personal use the free features are more than enough to get you by.

Host your own cloud storage solution

Another application that you could use to backup your photos is Nextcloud. But, Nextcloud isn't made specifically for photo backups, it does so much more than that. Nextcloud is essentially a self-hosted replacement for Google workspace or Microsoft 365. You can use it for cloud storage like OneDrive or Google Drive, you can use it as an office suite in your browser, it can sync your calendar and contacts between devices, or you can use it for team chat and video calls like Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Now unless you're a business owner, a lot of that might not sound very appealing to you, Nextcloud is kind of positioned as a strong Workplace environment tool. But what I think is so cool about Nextcloud is that it's fully modular. All of the individual components Nextcloud, the calendar, the team chat, etc, are known as apps, and you can remove anything that you don't want. If you just want cloud storage, you can turn everything else off and it's super easy to do they don't even hide it. But there's another huge benefit to the app ecosystem, that being you can add apps to your Nextcloud instance as well.

There are hundreds of community made and maintained apps adding tons of functionality and integrations that wouldn't be there otherwise. If there's something specific you want to do with your home server, there's a good chance that there's a Nextcloud app out there that can solve your problem. Before I installed Jellyfin and Navidrome, my music server was run directly out of Nextcloud with an app called "Music". All I had to do was choose a folder in my cloud storage that I wanted to be my music library and boom, it's got a cute little UI and everything.

Other things you can host

So yeah, you can host your own cloud storage, media, and photos, but what else can you do with a home server? Honestly, pretty much anything. I'm gonna put a link in the description to a site called awesome-selfhosted which is basically a giant list of self-hosted software, but right now I'm just gonna do a quick lightning round of some that I think could be worth checking out.

Crafty Controller is my software of choice for running Minecraft servers, supporting both Java and Bedrock.

Paperless-ngx is a tool for scanning, indexing, and organizing both your digital and physical documents.

n8n is a fully open source and self-hostable workflow automation software with over 1000 different integrations. It's like Zapier or IFTTT, but a lot quicker and also on steroids.

Ollama let's you self host a fully functional AI chatbot.

You have several options to build a blog or website, like Wordpress, Ghost, and a bunch of others.

Copyparty is a lightning fast portable file server that has recently been my replacement for Nextcloud, but be warned it's a bit more advanced and not super beginner friendly.

Glance is a self-hosted dashboard, letting you add various widgets like RSS feeds, market prices, server statistics and more, basically letting you make your own internet homepage.

Valutwarden is a self-hosted password manager that supports official Bitwarden clients.

SearXNG is a self-hosted search engine that aggregates from over 200 search services, and private data is stripped from all your searches letting you browse the web truly privately.

Pi-Hole is a network wide ad blocker. Once you install and configure it, it blocks ads and tracking for literally every device on your home wifi, computers, phones, even TVs it feels like cheating.

Funkwhale is another music server, but it's more so for communities to share music that they created themselves like Soundcloud, because it's federated through Activitypub! If you watched my last video you know what that means.

Speaking of federation and Activitypub, you can self-host any Fediverse software you want, whether it's Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, whatever, and run your own social media network.

You can also self-host your own Matrix server, Matrix is a free and open source communication protocol similar to activitypub, but it's built for instant messaging instead of social media. It's like self-hosting your own Discord.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's something that you currently use an online service for, chances are there's some kind of free self-hosted version of it out there somewhere that you can set up for yourself. And whether you're just curious, think it's sounds fun, your concerned about your privacy or you want to just because you can, you should give it a try. Once you set up a home server it's basically like a playground, it can be whatever you want it to be and there's not really any harm in just trying out a bunch of different software you just gotta go for it.

So how do I set one up?

Hopefully by now I've sold you on the idea, or you're curious at the very least. But I'm sure now you're thinking "Okay, that sounds great, but I still don't have any idea how to do any of this." And that is 100% fair you've got a good point thank you for sharing that. But I've got good news, in 2025 it's easier than ever. You don't need a computer science degree, you don't need to know how to code or how to be a crazy command line hacker or anything like that, I swear it's a lot less intimidating than it seems.

Hardware

First things first, you need some hardware. You don't have to run to eBay and buy the first thousand dollar server rack you see, that's gonna be crazy overkill. You probably don't even have to buy anything, if you have an old desktop PC laying around in a closet, or better yet an old laptop you don't use anymore, that is a perfect place to start. Running a home server is a great way to reuse your old PC you replaced a couple years ago, or your laptop you got for school and haven't touched since. The hardware that I use to run my server right now is just my old family computer. My dad upgraded and I decided to put it to use, and it's more than enough for what I'm currently doing with it, a little overkill even since it's been upgraded a couple times in the past.

A laptop is actually a pretty compelling option because it has a screen, keyboard and trackpad built in so you don't have to bring your own. It's compact and can easily fit somewhere in a closet without being obtrusive, and it even supplies it's own battery backup so if it gets unplugged or your power goes out, your server keeps running. But, a desktop will work just as well and has it's own benefits, far easier to upgrade. You just have to grab a monitor to plug it into temporarily and a keyboard. If you don't have any old computers lying around Facebook marketplace is a good place to check, you can probably find something pretty decent for this use case for around $100 give or take.

After you've decided what hardware you're gonna use, it's important to make sure that you backup anything left on the device that you don't want to lose. The next step of the process is going to delete everything, so even if you haven't touched whatever you're using in several years, give it a quick double check and make sure there's nothing important.

Software

Next we're gonna choose the software we're going to run. There's a lot of options out there for server operating systems, but for the purposes of this video I'll be showing you how to install YunoHost, as I believe that it let's you do a whole lot without being very intimidating. It's very beginner friendly, the whole process is very simple and comes with what's basically an app store, letting you install any service you want with one click. Almost every service that I've mentioned in this video is available for free in their app catalogue. However, if you're feeling adventurous and would like to check out some other operating system options, I'll leave a couple others in the description

Installation Guide

Installing YunoHost is a really easy process, it might seem a little scary if you've never done anything like it before, but don't worry! I'm gonna do it right along side you, it really only takes 6 steps. All you need is a USB flash drive, access to a computer separate from the one you're turning into a server, and of course your server computer. I'll be installing it on an old Dell Latitude laptop, this is actually the computer that I started my home server with before I upgraded to the desktop I showed you earlier. The battery is shot and it has this really cool dead spot in the screen, but it'll work just fine for this use case. You'll also need a keyboard and a monitor if you're not using a laptop.

DISCLAIMER!

If you follow this guide, the public IP address of your server will be exposed! This is normal, but you need to be careful. Don't mess with YunoHost's firewall settings (unless you know what you're doing), and only keep the services you use consistently enabled to avoid any unnecessary security risks. Always use strong, unique passwords, and only share access with people you trust. It is possible to self-host without exposing your public IP directly, but it will not be covered here.

Okay, the first thing we're gonna do is write the installation media to your usb flash drive. On your computer that we're not turning into a server, you're going to install a tool called Balena Etcher, and you're gonna download an ISO file from the YunoHost website, links to both are in the description. You'll have to choose the ISO file that's right for your hardware, but chances are you're probably gonna choose the regular computer, 64 bit option. The ISO download page will also provide you with a very nice and well written installation guide if you find mine inadequate. Once you've installed Balena Etcher and downloaded the ISO file, make sure there's nothing important on your USB Flash Drive because we're gonna delete everything off of that too. Plug in your drive, open Balena Etcher and select the ISO file you downloaded, then choose your USB drive and click flash. It might take a bit of time but once it's done you're free to unplug it.
Now we're going to plug the flash drive into your server. We're going to boot into the bios, to do this you need to mash the bios key while powering on the device. Which key is the bios key? I can't tell you that for certain, it varies between different manufactures and I don't know who manufactured your computer. If you're lucky, your computer might actually tell you what it is while it's booting. But if it doesn't, common bios keys are DEL, F2, F10, F12, or ESC. Mine is F2. If none of those seem to be working for you, you'll have to look it up and figure it out for yourself.

Great, now we're in the bios. Your computer's bios might look like this, or maybe you have an epic gamer themed bios like this. Mine looks like this. But regardless of what your bios looks like we're looking for the same thing, an option called something like "boot order" or "boot sequence". We need to move the flash drive to be first so that we don't boot into Windows or whatever operating system is currently installed on your server to be. After we do that all we have to do is restart the computer once more, and you should be booted into the YunoHost installation media, which will look like this:

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Select Graphical install and press enter. It'll ask you a couple questions; your language, location, keyboard layout, your wifi network and password if you're not connected through ethernet (which you should be using if you have the option to.) We'll then put in our time zone and answer some questions about how we want to partition the disk. Choose the top option labeled "Guided - use entire disk", and when asked to select a disk, assuming you only have two options like I do, we're going to select the option with the bigger capacity, since the smaller one is the USB drive we currently have plugged in. If you have more than two options you're gonna have to use your critical thinking skills to figure out which one you want to use. Then we'll choose the "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk" option and continue. This is our very last chance to back out before reformatting the drive and YunoHost is going to ask if you are sure you want to continue. If you've already backed up the drive, go ahead and press yes before continuing. It's going to download, install, and configure everything automatically which might take awhile, especially if you're using pretty old hardware like I am. A few minutes later it'll reboot, and after this point feel free to remove your USB Drive. If you get stuck on a screen that says "grub boot loader", select the option labeled Debian and press enter. You'll probably see a login screen, but you can ignore that because it'll be skipped, and you'll see a screen like this:

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[^]: This screenshot was captured inside a virtual machine

To finish the installation process we're going to return to our non-server computer or any other device with internet access and a web browser that is connected to the same wifi network as your server. At the very top of the screen you should see a line that says "Local IP" followed by a bunch of numbers, probably starting with "192.168". These numbers are your servers local IP address, it's basically how your wifi network identifies your server. This is not to be confused with your public IP address. It's only accessible within your own wifi network, so don't worry about getting doxed with this or anything. Put the local IP right into your web browser and hit enter. If it warns you that it might be unsafe, go ahead and select continue anyway. And bam, now you're in your servers web interface. You probably want to save a bookmark for this to your web browser.
From here on out we don't even need to interact with the server directly anymore, so feel free to close it in your closet, unplug your keyboard and monitor if you were using them, and forget about it. The rest of the setup will be done from this web interface. We're gonna select the "I agree" slider and continue. It's going to ask you to provide a web domain to make it easy to access your self-hosted services, and if you're worried because you don't have a web domain, that's okay! The YunoHost team will provide you one for you free of charge, you just have to choose what you want it to be and create a password, but of course if you'd like to purchase your own domain name feel free to do that as well. Next you'll create an admin user, this requires a username, full name, and password. Make sure you write down your password and keep it somewhere safe, you need access to this admin user to install and configure your applications.

Now the server is gonna use everything you provided to finish all the post install stuff. It'll take a few minutes but after that, you're done! Congratulations you just successfully created your very own home server. Login with the admin username and password you created before and you're now free to install and run any application your heart desires. Again, if any software I mentioned earlier seemed interesting to you, it is available in their catalogue completely for free with the exception of Plex and Crafty Controller. These two applications can still be run, it just won't be as easy as the one click installs everything else has.

But, there's also hundreds of applications I didn't mention, so do some exploring and see what piques your interest! There's no harm in giving it a quick install and trying it out. Everything you install and run will be accessible through your fancy new web domain, you can add more users and admins, you can make your services accessible to everyone on the internet, just the users you added to YunoHost, or even just you. It's fully customizable to meet your needs. So go ahead, have fun with your new server you deserve it after setting it up yourself.

Outro

So yeah that's the basic idea. I hope that I've at least sparked a curiosity in you, it really doesn't hurt to give it a try and if you do I'm sure you'll find something that you think is awesome. I think taking back the internet and making it a little more personal to you is always a good idea, and I hope I've shown you that it's more accessible than you might think.

As always there is a written version of this video available on my website that you're more than welcome to check out and have open as you set up your server. If you have any questions or need help during the process, I'd highly recommend heading over to the self hosting subreddits or lemmy communities which I'll link below, you can even leave a comment on this video and I'll try my best to answer, or I'm sure someone far more qualified than myself will be down there helping out as well.

Description

Home servers aren't just for nerds anymore, and I think you should run one! If you want to of course.

Here's all the various links mentioned in this video:

Sources

https://screenrant.com/infinity-train-hbo-max-removal-creator-response/
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-kindle-5317703
https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-changes-licensing-text-when-kindle-books-are-purchased
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E5530.82783.0.html

Downloads needed for server setup:

Download Balena Etcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Download the YunoHost ISO: https://doc.yunohost.org/admin/get_started/install_on

Alternative OS options

Proxmox (what I use): https://proxmox.com/
Umbrel: https://umbrel.com
CasaOS: https://casaos.zimaspace.com/

Get good setup support:

r/selfhosted: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/
c/selfhosted: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted or paste "!selfhosted@lemmy.world" into the search field of your chosen Fediverse server.

Software mentioned in this video:

Find software to do anything and everything with Awesome Self-Hosted: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/

All links are to the projects official website or official Github repository, where you can learn more about the project, find installation guides and more. Every piece of software here excluding Plex and Crafty Controller, is also available in the YunoHost app catalogue for free, easy installation on your new server.
Plex: https://www.plex.tv/
Jellyfin: https://jellyfin.org/
Navidrome: https://www.navidrome.org/
Kavita: https://www.kavitareader.com/
Audiobookshelf: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/
Photoprism: https://www.photoprism.app/
Immich: https://immich.app/
Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/
Crafty Controller: https://craftycontrol.com/
n8n: https://n8n.io/
Ollama: https://ollama.com/
Open WebUI: https://docs.openwebui.com/
Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/
Ghost: https://ghost.org/
Copyparty: https://github.com/9001/copyparty/
Glance: https://github.com/glanceapp/glance
Vaultwarden: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
Searxng: https://docs.searxng.org/index.html
Pi-Hole: https://pi-hole.net/
Funkwhale: https://www.funkwhale.audio/
Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/
Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.org/
Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/
Matrix: https://matrix.org/

Comment what your personal song of the summer was this year I wanna know