Immich/PhotoPrism/whatever you use for image backup. Cloud providers are snooping through your shit.
Plex/Jellyfin for streaming
Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent to support the streaming service(s)
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Immich/PhotoPrism/whatever you use for image backup. Cloud providers are snooping through your shit.
Plex/Jellyfin for streaming
Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent to support the streaming service(s)
The only one I haven't seen mentioned here that is a requirement for me is OPNsense. I've been using it for a couple years, and pfSense before that for a very long time. Never going back to commercial routers and their shitty / buggy / backdoored software. I highly recommend OPNsense over pfSense for the UI improvements alone, but there are other reasons to use/support OPNsense over pfSense.
On my network it handles internet firewall, internal firewall, and all routing across 5 VLANs and between two internet gateways. It does 1-1 NAT for my public IPs, inbound VPN, outbound VPN for my *arr stack, and RDNS blocklists with the data source being a script I wrote that merges from several sources and deduplicates the list. It is my internal certificate authority (I don't miss you at all, Windows CA), DHCP for the guest wifi, and does pihole-like ad blocking via DNS for my entire network. And it does all that running in a VM with 2GB of RAM, of which it only uses about 60% on my install.
It is an incredibly powerful tool, not terribly difficult to learn, has a pretty damn good UI for FOSS, and in my opinion is a fantastic foundation for a complex home network / homelab. Unlike pfSense, which corrupted itself twice over the years I ran it, it has never let me down. And every update has been painless over the years.
I understood some of those words. It make network go?
It make network go very good.
Went to try pfSense. Need to register to their shop to buy a free download link.
Then during installation it won't install unless it can phone home and report.
OpnSense all the way.
Samba (I can move files now, sweet!)
Jellyfin (I can watch stuff, sweet!)
Qbittorrent-wireguard (for pirating copyrighted material from the internet illegally)
Somesuch Wireguard solution (for accessing the backend and doin stuff)
A proxy somewhere else
The rest is extra. This gets my usual goals completed pretty well.
for pirating copyrighted material from the internet illegally
I'm pretty sure that's not the phase we use now
"Archiving legally purchased content as an insurance against corporate-sanctioned theft"?
In no particular order, the most essential ones are those I constantly use throughout my day and also weekly.
Proxmox holds all of these in different LXC's and VM's
Aside from that, i do have other services I use every so often like Memos, Joplin Server (holds most of my notes), Pingvin and a few others.
Paperless-ngx
The rest is already in the other comments
Everything else is a nice to have, not essential
The arr family with a torrent client is great for feeding Jellyfin. If you are a developer, you can host your own shit there too. Game servers for playing with family and friends (so far Minecraft, Terraria, Project Zomboid, V Rising). I like to host a bunch of different telegram bots I wrote for fun. Discord bots are another interesting side. I also run some automation runners for helping out with testing, building and deploying my projects.
Focus on your needs and what you want to improve of your online life, there is probably a project you can self host for it.
(if that service goes down, everyone in my house gets mad at me)
I bought a PiZero and set it up as a redundant pihole for this reason. It's slower because it's wireless, but not super noticeable since it's 'just' DNS. I have the router pointed at the main and backup all the time and if I need to do something (or break the main one messing with dockers) there's still the backup until I get the main up.
I messed around with some High Availability configs where they both had the 'same' ip but could never get it working smoothly. I just use the teleporter functionality within pihole any time I update anything to keep them in sync, which is rare.
I did something similar, but then I turned my pizero in a portable retro console lol.
Opnsense
Vaultwarden
Home assistant
Emby
Gitea
Paperless-ngx
Firefox
Honest question, I’d love to host email but it seems like a huge pain in the ass these days with trying to keep from being delisted. Is there a decent, home user accessible email system that’s useable out there?
A decade ago it was easy and doable but even in professional life I don’t deal with email backend anymore, all google or o365.
Highly recommend purelymail. No nonsense mail, with straight forward pricing.
Pi-hole. Get rid of at least some ads on the network level. Maybe add unbound for a faster DNS response.
I like AdGuard Home myself.
For me:
I have stopped using most of the services that got me into selfhosting. Things like rss and wikis. I try new things from time to time but kill them if I don't find myself using them regularly or if the maintenance cost is more than the value add.
where do you source your magazines from out of interest? Are they epubs etc?
Nextcloud for sure.
Depends on what your usecase is for what is "essential."
I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc... In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.
Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most "essential" thing.
No one metioned https://hoarder.app - bookmark app featuring offline archive, full text search and AI auto tagging
In terms of most used for me, it would be:
Arr stack plus Jellyfin/Plex, Nextcloud and Gitea.
Nextcloud, vaultwarden.
Arr stack, Jellyfin, and Nextcloud + some dashboard.
Nextcloud.
I was hosting nextcloud at home for years. Then when I worked in a Datacenter I got to host some servers there from free so I set up a two-node proxmox with nextcloud and some other stuff. Now I don't work there anymore and I really felt the hole nextcloud left, no more notes syncing for notes, tasks, calendar, podcasts no more place to upload my photos from my phone ... So now I'm hosting nextcloud at home again.
I also host jellyfin which is nice but if I don't have it doesn't actively hamper my workflow.
Some WebDAV server, can be Nextcloud but actually something more lightweight is better.
Also a XMPP server is very nice to have. Even if you don't have many contacts on it (yet), it works very well has a notification service and can even be extended to act as a Unified Push distributor.
WireGuard on my VPS, because otherwise I'm stuck behind CGNAT and can't access anything in my network from elsewhere. Or Tailscale, but that's not really self-hosted.
My three essential selfhosted services are :
Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.
I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.
VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.
For me it's the first thing i learned how to self host: Nextcloud ...which in turn allows me to sync Joplin notes, which I use constantly