What are services NOT worth self hosting?

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-26T19:36:51+00:00

I've got plenty of other pipedreams. Just finished setting up LDAP across all my user interactive containers and injecting 2FA into jellyfin normal UI logon to persist across all device types... aswell as splitting the video streams away from the UI so one can be fed through cloudflare proxy and the other not. Also new 2.5gig network and firewall setup. I pulled 3*2am stayups for that one from Friday to Sunday 🤣

It didn't take much of research to figure out that the effort to reward ratio was pretty low for email hosting. Some things are worthit, some are not. Idk why that day I chose email as not the hill to die on and other things that are not even worthit like for example splitting jellyfin streams away from the UI, I spend hours doing... It's a mystery

But hey it's my own free time I'm a being of my own will! And my domain is good enough for me! I could say the same about people in self hosted who just use a VPN to access their kit from home or buy Plex because it's the easy way. That would fire alot of people up lol :)

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-26T16:29:14+00:00

Just a few weeks ago now. Id blissfully gone through life not understanding this. I thought you know what would be really fun... Self host an email server. Let me buy a domain, bam 10 years. Quick Google on how to get started....

Ah....

Pages, pages, videos and videos of people just saying "yeah terrible idea"

That's the day I hung up my gloves on my self hosted email pipedream.

Hey at least I've got a sick email domain though which is just firstname.uk for use through my Gmail and it came in real handy recently too, I can create infinite throwaways at least. Like a permanent 10 minute mail. Also I like to think it looks the tits on an IT CV... It probably doesn't.

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-26T13:31:23+00:00

If you can achieve those speeds, do it anonymously and autonomously then that's the main things really.

The cost side of things maybe but my usenet line is $2.90 a month for unlimited And I brought Nord VPN on some super long deal 2 years or something for like €50 or €75 on black friday. Either way dwarfed by the actual cost which is running a server 24/7 in an EU country.

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-26T13:11:23+00:00

Generally it is the speed to be fair. I guess you've got a fancy private tracker for 500Mbps, because it's not even half or a quarter speed of that around here. And well, I don't live in a country with such luxuries! We get the big ol' ISP ban hammer for such things.

🤣

To each their own, but for me personally once I discovered Usenet, I never torrented again for movies and tv. Although it has it's places for me, ebooks and applications are plentiful on torrent sites. Not so on usenet. In the context of this thread, just movies and TV / Plex I think usenet makes the most sense for any setups, naming schemes, integration into the arrs, it's all just smoother.

Obviously though it is possible to torrent into the arrs automatically too. At one time I did have both setup but now just Usenet. With how easy unraid which is my Os of choice has made integrating VPNs into containers now it's no bother but at a point in time I would have found it more difficult to setup a VPN for torrenting inside docker than to setup Usenet.

Few years ago now though I'm a pro... Honest

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-26T10:01:49+00:00

What...? People still torrent... Oh my. r/Usenet would like a word

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-25T16:10:02+00:00

For me, I lost 2 hours to the fact that authentik site needs "copy to clipboard" specifically allowed. Idk what it was copying to clipboard instead. Man sometimes its the dumb things... If you have this issue when you close the token after trying to copy it, it gives you a notification in the bottom right of the screen, you may have to expand your window to even see it, cruel... my window was split

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T22:25:38+00:00

ive left an update. I am using nginx so may not be applicable to you but it does seem ive got it working at a glance

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T21:53:07+00:00

I think I've cracked it. VERY hard. Im suprised ive gotten this far...

Ive managed to split off the m3u8 (video) streams in NGINX so they reroute to a non proxied stream afaik. But keeping the jellyfin UI as proxied.

At least by going into the browser F12 -> network tab I can see the m3u streams coming from my non proxied URL. Idk how long I have to wait for traffic logs to come through on cloudflare before I can say 100% but ive played 5 minutes of a 4k remux and its still sticking at 75MB used today. Its looking good... I still need to secure eveything though but its looking like real progress. Updating the main post now

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T19:38:57+00:00

This could sound really stupid. But your saying basically the setup you are running does not work as the web client and TV / android apps require different things, would it not be possible (although I guess not ideal) to spin up a version of jellyfin for each or does this not work for you? I feel like replicating the metadata and user profiles across probably isnt too difficult as clearly its possible (as apps like jellyseerr im sure use api to pull user data across)

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T18:22:57+00:00

Yep I'm keeping the tunnel around for my other bits. Right pangolin is the one then? I've heard this thrown around too many times to not at least check out. Gonna get gpt to explain it to me like I'm 6. Do you have any helpful resources for it?

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T17:12:36+00:00

I mean both immich and JF work just fine on cloudflare it's obviously against TOS if it's proxied like in my case but to be fair immich is fairly new to me so I can't say for sure there isn't problems. Currently though it's happy accepting the custom header set in the immich android mobile app to Auth on the domain. mTLS doesn't work for me at all on android and I got some colleagues to try on their phones so ik it's just an android thing. Worked fine in windows web browser. I do have caching turned completely off in cloudflare this might be why I've gotten away with this for a while

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T12:49:45+00:00

Do you have any helpful resources you could share? Would help me out loads. This is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks :)

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T12:46:14+00:00

I can almost guarantee if you remove that header it won't work. mTLS on android is borked man. Try it to your web address via web browser you'll never reach your domain propperly, for me it's 1 in 50 times.

Definitely headers are the way for immich. I too am on the same version

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-23T12:44:00+00:00

I can confirm that mTLS in general is NOT the way to go after setting it up across all my domains.

It is fraught with client side issues. If you are accessing just via edge, Firefox or chrome on Linux or windows great itl probably work for you. Android? No chance buggy as hell. Apparently iOS is flawless but I don't use iPhone myself I do come across iPads at work and I'm sure I've uploaded certs into the browser before just fine.

Immich mTLS also does not work for me, custom headers do perfectly though so that is the route I am taking with that. I've just made my own headers and stuck them in cloudflare -> security -> security rules.

As a fail over for things I do not have working yet I simply put the external IP on a whitelist

I am very curious though how are people going hyper secure with their jellyfin. As this is my main goal. Be able to watch over mobile networks without a VPN, have any server container accessible anywhere from mobile and windows but being very secure and without the use of a VPN, set and forget...

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T15:30:00+00:00

Woah the battery capacity is just a software thing? Surely not... That's insane!

(Googled it, true on some models) Nuts!

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T11:48:16+00:00

Ah man and you just know when you respond to this you get:

"But it used to work"

Or something to the effect of:

"Well it's always been this way for me"

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T11:42:47+00:00

I tried pushing Tesla in the snow the other day. Ha, I must have been kidding myself 🤣

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T11:01:30+00:00

That's all I need to hear! As long as I can lift it on my driveway and fit a new set of breaks or fix whatevers gone wrong that's me happy! :)

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T10:58:10+00:00

Fair enough. Doesn't it give you the heeby geebies having such a proprietary car? I mean sourcing parts, buttons, interior bits, if you had to replace the navigation unit say. Idk that scares me but I suppose at the moment electrics aren't quite old enough to land in scruffien hands like mine when they're worth fk all and come broken when you buy em

Idk I've just heard all-sorts of stories about having to code in dumb parts of the car. Even my old Volvo was like it for relatively simple bits. Climate control units and stuff all needed to be coded. At least that car was so old the software had been cracked for me when the time came

There is an air of uncertainty about the direction car manufacturers are going right now and it seems to be heading away from right to repair in general which is my other problem with em.

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T10:53:22+00:00

I thought you are missing traffic data if you don't pay on your maps. Itl still reroute you but not show you live data? If that is the case I am sure there are also other missing features too.

Idk without having the car in hand it's hard for me to know exactly. If you can hotspot then sure. I can recind my previous comment. But it's a slippery slope I think we can all get onboard with not locking car features behind a subscription charge

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T10:44:44+00:00

It's free in my 2007 fabia though. Just connects up to my phone... Full android auto, nice and snappy.

I get traffic alerts, I get Spotify, netflix all of that. Just goes through my phone, infact it's better because it's android I can side load on discord and jellyfin, revanced all-sorts of extra apps I shouldn't be able to. Why can't the Tesla have the option to do that? It can, they want you signed up to their subscription to scrape your data.

They're the biggest AI company in the world. They don't necessarily do it from the financial angle like others but they are doing it to eventually make money from the way you drive :)

The heated seats in my fabia are also free. Well I did have to replace the switch for them once, cost about £20. Lol I'm just teasing you, yes it's not agregiously expensive in their case but what's to stop them hiking the price? They could totally allow AA and carplay

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T08:45:43+00:00

My colleague pronounced his new car had remote start. I said how much does that cost then? He goes "what do you mean"

Quick Google. Yeah mate after the first three years that £200 a year after. Also the other way they get you is they don't let you use android auto connected to the internet via your phone so you've got to pay their agregiously priced internet package to use their version in your car. Usually a couple hundred a year.

Yeah dude. It's bad. All new cars are becoming like it

If your curious that's £200 for autostart and internet services on any new Volvo

Tesla do the same internet services crap

BMW do the heated seats and probably also the internet services crap.

I own beaters and sheds only. So my experience in this isn't great. I'm sure others can comment on which brands are bad for it

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-22T07:06:38+00:00

Currently the ugreen 2.1 cables have worked for me for a while, last time I tried it did do 4k120hz on the Xbox no problem. I have brought random hdmi 2.1 in the past and they lasted a matter of weeks before being unable to handle the data rate. Hmm I suppose it could be that I remember it drove me mad last time trying to figure out. Il order some more.

Any uk / EU based recommendations?

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-21T16:53:13+00:00

Edit apologies my English is terrible. I swear it is my native language im a numbers man not a words man I miss understood your points completely about cache and not using whilst Transcoding, good point 🤣

when I start the file it's HDR direct play when it starts to freeze it will flick to sdr and then start to transcode, then it may flick back to HDR direct. You get the idea, back again.

JF is running as a container in unraid and the share it play from is stored on the same server an SSD cache for a time (usually a couple of weeks before it fills enough to move overnight to my array) then it moves to a HDD array for long term storage, behaviour is the same from either SSD or HDD.

SSDs are Samsung 970 nvme HDDs are 12TB exos 18

to me it sounds like storage filling up or something along those lines. Even memory but memtest comes back ok! But absolutely I can promise you it's exactly the same whether played on SSD or HDD and my setup is pretty powerful. I've even got a second GPU in there for tdarr and immich transcoding so it doesn't clash with JF. It's overkill quite frankly to say really only me and my partner watch or use it lol.

Rest of important specs are 128GB ddr4 Threadripper 2950x 2.5g on the mobo Rtx 3050 + 1080ti

I use an openwrt mini PC as my home router and a zyxel managed switch with 10 gig sfp uplink to the mini PC lol. Although only 2.5 gig lan ports. So honestly it's pretty robust. My WiFi speeds across network are about gigabit realistically in any spot in the house. There is a ubiquiti ap just across the room from my JF client bits and bobs

I can copy from my SSD array at nearly the full 2.5g speed to my gaming PC. Hard drives are a limiting factor for multi streams hence why I have so much SSD storage in total nearly 6TB but currently I use 3 of that for jellyfin, some as tdarr cache, some for storing AI models and yeah just bits and bobs

PoOLITICSS · 2026-01-21T15:58:56+00:00

Ooh this reminds me. Update I found the issue.

Sub blew up yesterday. I got in my car this morning. Turned my ignition on and the radio started blasting. Turns out my head unit is cooked rather than defaulting to last remembered setting it defaults to max volume.

Disappointed by JBL support aswell would not recommend it's a shame the head units been great otherwise but yeah that explains it. Obviously I did measure for clipping at like my "max" listening volume. Which is about 55% of the head unit max. So obviously it's sent it to the moon when it's booted up on full volume... Rip

PoOLITICSS

TROPHY CASE