Why the pendulum is swinging back
For most of the 2010s, the smart money was on cloud. Move everything to AWS. Shut down the server room. Let the hyperscalers handle it. The economics made sense when cloud was dramatically cheaper than running your own hardware, and the operational overhead of managing infrastructure was high.
Things have changed. Cloud costs have ballooned — particularly AWS egress fees, which can make extracting your own data eye-wateringly expensive. SaaS subscription creep means many businesses are now paying for dozens of services, each with their own logins, data policies, and price increases. And the tools available for self-hosting have matured enormously.
Tailscale made private networking trivial. Caddy made TLS certificates automatic. Docker and Podman made deploying applications a matter of pulling an image and running a container. The operational overhead of self-hosting has dropped dramatically.
What we self-host
Forgejo — Git hosting
We moved our code repositories from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance a couple of years ago. Forgejo is a community fork of Gitea, lightweight and fast. It runs comfortably on a VPS with 2GB of RAM and handles everything from private repositories to CI/CD triggers.
The main benefit for us isn't cost — GitHub Free would handle our workload. It's about keeping our code on infrastructure we control, with no risk of account suspension, policy changes, or access being revoked at a third party's discretion.
Nextcloud — Files, calendar, contacts
Our replacement for Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts. Nextcloud has been around for years and has improved substantially. The mobile apps are solid, CalDAV and CardDAV sync work reliably with iOS and Android, and the web interface is better than it was.
We use it for internal file sharing, shared calendars, and contact management. It runs in a Podman container with a PostgreSQL backend and a Caddy reverse proxy handling TLS termination.
Vaultwarden — Password management
Vaultwarden is a Bitwarden-compatible server written in Rust. The Bitwarden browser extensions and mobile apps connect to it just like they would to the official Bitwarden cloud — but the vault data lives on our server.
For a business that deals with dozens of system credentials, self-hosted password management with no per-seat subscription costs is a meaningful saving. And you know exactly where your credentials are stored.
Uptime Kuma — Monitoring
Simple, self-hosted uptime monitoring with a clean UI. We use it to monitor client-facing services and get notified via Telegram when something goes down. A very different experience from the complex enterprise monitoring stacks we used to run — and more than adequate for most SMB needs.
This website
Yes, this site runs on our own infrastructure. It's a static HTML site served by Caddy, containerised with Podman, sitting behind a reverse proxy on a Hetzner VPS. Total cost: around $7/month. No CDN, no cloud provider, no platform fees. Pagespeed score: 99.
What we don't self-host
Self-hosting isn't the right answer for everything. Here's what we deliberately leave in the hands of third parties:
Running a reliable email server in 2026 is genuinely difficult. Deliverability depends on a combination of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS, reputation, IP warming, and the whims of Microsoft and Google's spam filters — all of which can bite you in ways that are hard to debug.
We use Fastmail. The cost is trivial relative to the value of reliable email delivery. If we were recommending something for SMBs, Microsoft 365 Exchange Online is the pragmatic choice.
Video conferencing
We've tried Jitsi. It works — until you have more than four people and the bandwidth requirements become uncomfortable. Zoom and Teams are genuinely better products for this use case. Some things are better left to the specialists.
Global CDN / static asset serving
For any workload that needs to be fast from multiple geographic locations, a CDN is still the right answer. Cloudflare's free tier is excellent and there's no good reason to self-host a CDN.
The honest truth about operational overhead
Self-hosting means you're the ops team. That's the trade-off you accept.
In practice, for a set of containerised services running on a well-maintained Linux VPS, the ongoing work is:
- Monthly OS updates (30 minutes)
- Container image updates, which we do quarterly (1–2 hours)
- Backup verification monthly (30 minutes)
- Occasional troubleshooting when something breaks
Call it 3–4 hours per month on average. For our workload, that's a reasonable cost compared to the SaaS subscriptions we'd otherwise be paying.
But this assumes someone technical is maintaining the systems. If you're an SMB with no internal IT capability, the calculus changes. Self-hosting requires expertise to do safely. A misconfigured Vaultwarden instance, or a Nextcloud that isn't getting security updates, is worse than the SaaS alternative.
When self-hosting makes sense for SMBs
- You have someone technical — either in-house or an IT provider who can maintain the systems. Self-hosting without this is asking for trouble.
- Data sovereignty matters — if your data has compliance requirements around where it's stored (Australian Privacy Act, GDPR, health records), running your own infrastructure on Australian VPS gives you clear control.
- High storage volumes — if you're storing large amounts of data, self-hosted object storage or NAS is dramatically cheaper than cloud storage at scale.
- Internal tools and development — CI/CD pipelines, development environments, internal dashboards, and tooling are excellent candidates for self-hosting.
Getting started
If you want to experiment with self-hosting, the combination of Hetzner (or Vultr) VPS + Ubuntu LTS + Podman + Caddy is a solid foundation. A CX22 instance at Hetzner (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD) is €4.35/month and can comfortably run:
- Forgejo for git hosting
- Vaultwarden for passwords
- Uptime Kuma for monitoring
- A static website or two
- A small self-hosted project management tool
With Caddy handling TLS automatically via Let's Encrypt, getting a new service online with a valid HTTPS certificate takes about 10 minutes. That's a world away from managing certificates manually five years ago.
Start small. Run one service you already use. Learn how it works. Add another when you're comfortable. Self-hosting is a skill that compounds over time.
The bottom line
We're not ideologically opposed to cloud services. We use them when they're the right tool. But the assumption that cloud is always better — cheaper, more reliable, easier to manage — deserves to be challenged. For the right workloads, self-hosting is cheaper, faster, and gives you a level of control and understanding that managed services can't replicate.
After 25 years of managing IT infrastructure for other people, managing our own is something we find genuinely satisfying. And it keeps our skills sharp in ways that just clicking buttons in AWS console doesn't.
Interested in self-hosting for your business? Drop us a line at info@corenetworks.com.au — happy to share what we know.