Field notes / self-hosting
Most guides stop where the permission errors start.
Field notes on self-hosting: run your own services at home, put them online for free, and know when paying is actually worth it.
$ docker pspermission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket$ crontab -e/var/spool/cron: Permission denied
Every wall on this site is one that actually blocked me. So is the way around it.
The walls, and what got past them
- photos trapped on phones
UGREEN DXP4800 Review: Months of Real Use as a Photo Backup NAS
I bought the DXP4800 with a 16TB drive to get our photos off our phones. Here's what daily use actually feels like, the one mistake that cost me 268GB, and who I'd recommend it to.
Read the guide - no public IP, no open ports
Cloudflare Tunnel: Put a Home Server Online Without a Public IP or Port Forwarding
How Cloudflare Tunnel exposes a service running at home to the public internet for free, why it works behind CGNAT, and the one setting that will hand you a 502 on the first try.
Read the guide - the free tier that vanished
Free Hosting Tiers in 2026: What Got Cut, What Survived, and How to Tell Which Dies Next
A timeline of every major free hosting tier that shrank or died between 2022 and 2026, the short list that survived, and the one structural difference that predicts which is which.
Read the guide - the bill you did not agree to
How to Avoid a Surprise Cloud Bill: The Three Kinds of 'Free' Hosting
The $104,500 static site, why budget alerts do not stop anything, and how to tell in advance whether a platform's worst case is downtime or debt.
Read the guide - no sudo, no docker, no cron
Running a Long-Lived Service on a UGREEN NAS (UGOS) When Every Normal Route Is Blocked
No sudo, no Docker socket, no unzip, no cron, no rsync. A working path to a service that survives reboots on UGOS, and the four walls you will hit getting there.
Read the guide - knowing when to stop
Self-Hosting at Home vs Paying for a VPS: When Free Actually Runs Out
A decision framework for hosting at home versus paying for a server, based on what free genuinely covers, what it cannot promise, and the four signals that mean you have outgrown it.
Read the guide
- Run on real hardware, at home
- Failures kept in, not skipped
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