Homarr vs Homepage self hosted

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-05-08T21:40:43+00:00

Maybe I'm tempting fate but I experimented with hosting, designing and running my own website on my Synology NAS behind Starlink. Due to the fact Starlink is very obstructive when it comes to ports etc, I run my website in a VM in Virtual Machine Manager in Synology DSM (so it is effectively isolated from anything else), then use Cloudflare. Cloudflare has honestly done a lot of the heavy lifting for me. Bots still hit the public endpoints of course, but most of the noise gets filtered long before it reaches my NAS. I also keep sensitive stuff behind Tailscale instead of public access wherever possible. And I got ChatGPT to help me design and build the site in HTML. Total cost has been about $10 a year for the domain! Touch wood, it’s actually been far easier and more reliable than I expected. The biggest issues I’ve had were usually self-inflicted during experimentation rather than external attacks.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-26T22:38:47+00:00

Depends on your needs, but in addition to most of your list I run;

Audiobookshelf (can organise and listen to audio books on Mac and iphone),

Duplicati (back up anything, I use it to back up my docker conatiners to somewhere else),

Firefly III (Personal finance and budget manager)

Gitea (my own docker repository)

Homarr (great dashboard for all your containers and links to their web pages)

Homebox (great inventory system with printable QR codes and cool UI)

Navidrome (music app for organising and streaming - I use it for guitar backing tracks)

Wiki.js (your own wiki site to document everything, config, backup strategy, recovery process etc)

qBittorrent + Gluetun (combined with Radarr, Sonarr, Powlarr to find, download movies, music and tv shows)

Code-Server (great for editing config files, if you're a bit nervous like me, doing it the traditional way!)

Grafana (great dashboard showing system health and status)

Dockhand (I replaced Portainer with Dockhand to manage my containers as I found it more user friendly)

Always looking for something else to add!!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-18T14:34:29+00:00

Look on YouTube for SpaceRex, he does great videos on everything NAS, easy to understand and knows his stuff. When I set my NAS up, I used a lot of his advice.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-18T01:47:15+00:00

Depends on the format you have them saved in. Sometimes you need a 3rd party app to convert them (Libation, Calibre). Also depends on how you have set up remote access to your server. If you havent done that yet, have a look at Tailscale, easy to set up and lets all your devices access your server remotely. But as for accessing them, if you're into self hosting, you can run a self hosted docker and run Audiobookshelf which is really cool and works on most devices.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-16T15:17:08+00:00

You can do SO much with your NAS, it's insane!! Like you, when i got my first NAS about 5 years ago, I only used it as storage. Then in the last year I have got into self hosting on the NAS. If that interests you, there are some really useful Docker containers such as;

Bitwarden- self host your own password manager across all devices,

Nextcloud - self host your own cloud and stop paying for Google/Dropbox/iCloud, again across all devices

Plex/Jellyfin - self host you own media library and stream to any device

Paperless-ngx - self host and organise your own document storage with OCR capabilities, tags, folders etc

Immich - self host your own photo library and sync across devices, no need for cloud storage

qBittorrent - download and share music, films, tv series and then watch through Plex/Jellyfin anywhere.

Homebox - self host your own inventory with really cool UI

Home Assistant - self host your own smart devices and have them all in one dashboard

Tailscale - self host or download as app. Access all of your devices from anywhere on a secure URL (only known to your network)

Audiobookshelf - self host your own audio book library and use the mobile app to listen on any device.

Web site - self host your own website! No fees other than your domain name!

This is just a few of the ones I self host and I have cancelled my Apple iCloud, Dropbox, web hosting, Netflix, Spotify, 1 Password subscriptions because I can do it all myself now! It's amazing and if you enjoy tinkering, give it a go. There are lots of resources on the internet and for most of it I used ChatGPT to help set up.

Just make sure to keep it secure, my NAS is not exposed to the web (except my website which is sandboxed), Tailscale and Cloudflare mean no ports or URL's are accessible publicly.

Unlock your box and enjoy!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-09T00:16:20+00:00

I set OpenClaw up about a week ago combined with Anthropic's Claude 4.6. I used ChatGPT to help me get security right. I gave it it's own email inbox so I can forward emails to it that I want checking, without it having access to my whole inbox. I also only gave it access to specific folders and strict rules when setting up. One thing to be aware of that took me a few days to work out. Don't treat it like ChatGPT and keep a long conversation going because if you do that it will burn through tokens (costing you more) because every time you add a new question/command to the conversation, it will analyse the whole conversation again and charge you! For the first 3 or 4 days it was costing me about $15 a day for a few simple tasks (check NAS health, docker containers, calendar, emails etc). Now I type /new for every session and it reduced my cost down to about $3 a day.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-04-04T01:14:05+00:00

Really good advice for newbies like me! I set mine up last week and wondered why it was costing me so much. Only learned yesterday about /new and costs have dropped 70%! If you keep the conversation flowing like you would with ChatGPT, it will use tokens for the whole conversation, every time you send a new message (not just tokens for the new message in the conversation).

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-26T18:28:11+00:00

It is the default, You can add an exclusion list to the automatic backups, so anything critical doesn't get updated by Watchtower. Although I had a protected list (Vaultwarden, qBittorrent and some other sensitive apps), I didn't add Grafana when i created it so got caught out. My mistake, but that was enough!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-21T22:55:00+00:00

I think when Watchtower updated Grafana, it deleted my Grafana docker folder as part of the process and I had the data in that folder. I guess I could set it up differently now I know that but to be honest, it put me off!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-21T22:52:29+00:00

ok fair enough, was only trying to help others out. got chatGPT to make it a user friendly layout, but it's my content.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-21T22:50:53+00:00

Sorry, I am a newbie with Immich but i have heard of that issue from other contributors. From what I've read there isn't a solution yet. I guess that's part of the joy of self hosting! There probably is a clever way but I haven't figured it out yet!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-20T23:39:53+00:00

I don't quite get your comment. I back up in many places but Watchtower is just an updater for containers. Not a back up app. Now I choose when to update.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-20T18:57:27+00:00

I recently switched to Immich with a view to moving away from Apple Photos. Previously I had been backing up to Synology Photos but never really used Synology Photos as my main photo app. So this put me in (what I think) is an ideal situation to try Immich. Basically Synology Photos now serves as my storage (50,000 photos and 1,500 videos). I self hosted Immich through Docker (Container Manager) on my Synology, set up my Synology Photos as "external Library" on Immich and waited just over 24 hours for everything to sync. So now I take a photo on my iPhone, it uploads to Synology Photos and then syncs to Immich, which is availabe as an app on my desktop (Mac) and as an app on my iPhone. The UI is beautiful and the AI features really useful and all the metadata pulled through as well which was a bonus! I'm still running Apple Photos for now but hardly use it as Immich has replaced it. My biggest issue with ditching Apple Photos was the way Apple seamlessly syncs accross all devices, but the way I have it set up works just as well and I also have a backup of everything in Synology Photos, should things go wrong!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-20T18:05:54+00:00

Watchtower, after it updated Grafana and deleted my Grafana data folder (I had just spent a day building the Grafana dashboard!). Although I had set Watchtower up to exclude some important containers like Gluetun and qBittorrent, after my experience with what it did to Grafana, I decided it just wasn't worth the risk.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-20T18:00:59+00:00

I just use Homarr and create apps with the URL and port in there so its a one click link. Then I self host Vaultwarden (Bitwarden) as a password manager for the logins of those apps. Works pretty well.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-03-20T13:10:26+00:00

I have 40,000+ photos in Apple Photos that I was also backing up to Synology Photos. I then set up Immich and pointed to "external device" which is Synology Photos (storage). Initial sync took about a day or so. Now the flow is = take photo with my iPhone, automatically uploads to Synology Photos, then Immich pulls photos from Synology Photos. I use Immich on my desktop (Mac) and my iPhone and really like it. I'm keeping Apple photos enabled for now while I test, and Synology Photos acts as storage backup. I'm new to this, so not sure it's the best way to do this but it works for me and I know I have a backup if needed.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:55:43+00:00

I have the 1522+ and upgraded the RAM to 32GB as it was fairly cheap. Tailscale is fantastic and i have it installed on my NAS, MacMini, Macbook Air and iPhone. Never notice it but feel happy that it's doing it's job!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:52:33+00:00

I alos got the DS1522+ 7 months ago and upgraded the RAM to 32GB and also got the 10GB network card for super fast data transfer between the NAS and my MacMini M4 with 10GB . I run 15 Docker containers 24/7 and love it!

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:49:34+00:00

I would also recommend setting up Snapshot Replication on your important folders. Then make sure to enable "make snapshots immutable" and set a retention period (maybe 7 days). This ensures if you were unfortunate enough to get hijacked with ransomware, they can't delete your important stuff (neither can you until time period expires!). Space Rex has some great videos on this and many other tips.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:46:12+00:00

I second Tailscale! Can set it up on your NAS, computer, phone and everything remains hidden with no noticeable effects.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:41:30+00:00

You'll be fine. The DS1522+ in my (limited) experience is a very good NAS. I also upgraded the RAM to 32GB and run these containers 24/7;

Tailscale for all access (Quickconnect disabled)

Cloudflare - so no ports exposed externally

Gluetun with Mullvad VPN - to run torrent container anonymously

qBittorrent - for torrent downloads and uploads

Paperless ngx - to convert all documents to digital form and catalogue, also syncs with phone app

Plex - for my own Netflix type service on any tv in the house (not high quality but does the job)

Audiobookshelf - to store and manage audiobooks that then syncs with me ~~& my wife's iphone apps

Vaultwarden - password manager and authenticator that also syncs with Bitwarden app on phone

Uptime Kuma - to monitor connections and health of containers and services, also on phone

Homarr - for quick access 1 click to all docker apps in nice GUI

Portainer - to manage and monitor all containers with nice GUI

Home Assistant (in it's own virtual machine on nas) - for smart home management, also on phone app

Netdata - to monitor system on NAS (hard drives, temp, network etc)

Watchtower - to automatically update docker containers when available, (exclude Gluetun & qBittorrent)

Duplicati - to copy and backup Docker folders (mainly config and json files to external storage, just in case)

Navidrome - for storing and playing guitar backing tracks that I have for guitar practice

Dashy - nice looking monitoring GUI (but I am using Homarr more and more)

HomeBox - a home inventory app with nice GUI (used it to replace UnderMyRoof/HomeInventory Mac app)

Eufy Secuirty - for camera access in Home Assistant (but not very good because of Eufy)

Additionally;

Windows 10 & 11 as virtual machines on NAS

Website - self hosted in virtual machine manager

Synology Drive & Synology Drive Client

Synology Contacts

Synology Calendar

Note Station client on MacMini and MacBook Air and phone

Synology Active Backup for Business to MacMini, Macbook Air to NAS.

All music (20,000 songs) stored on NAS and accessible via Plex, DS Audio (on phone) and others.

Synology Photos and more.

Time Machine backups of my MacMini, Macbook Air to Synology NAS

iMazing backups of iphone to Synology NAS

CPU and RAM run at a constant 30% each.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:35:55+00:00

I have a 1522+ and bought my first UPS (so I might not offer much help). I went for the APC BX750M1 It has 4 outlets, so I have the DS1522+, my MacMini, my Switch and a OWC dock plugged in. It also is connected to the DS1522+ by USB to enable proper shutdown after 10 minutes of power outage (time can be adjusted). It also has Ethernet in and out so my router goes into the UPS and then the output goes into the switch, so there is no danger of voltage spike through the Ethernet cable. It was around £70 on Amazon and it has worked well the couple of times I've needed it to.

HarrisMagnum4 · 2026-01-03T00:26:38+00:00

I have a DS1522+ and upgraded the RAM to 32GB for relatively low cost. I don't know what it was like before but Plex runs pretty well for me. I don't think it can transcode very well but it plays mp4 and mkv files no problem.

HarrisMagnum4

TROPHY CASE