You found a solution and you are looking for a problem.

This is not the way it goes. You identify a problem, and if the solution involves self-hosting then you solve it with self-hosting.

I have a couple of friends with nextcloud, and I have nextcloud too. Low tech ish? But we just host our files on Nextcloud and then copy backups to the other machines every now and then.

My NC uses about 6gb of RAM, and it is really badly optimized, since it's been running forever and isn't a container, or even a server deploy. (It's a snap running in desktop Ubuntu since 2016.)

Anyone could do better, I just can't be bothered.

My buddy has his running on 1.5GB of RAM in a container.

I also host a bunch of other stuff. Navidrome and freshrss get the most use, other than Nextcloud. Immich, searx-ng, jellyfin, guacamole.

What do you personally self-host?

Oh gosh....a plethora of things. I use probably 98% of what I self host on a regular basis, the other 2% are things I'm testing out, or learning how to do. Some of the things I host:

• beets
• BTOP-PLUS-PLUS
• btop
• calibre-web
• change-detection
• cloudreve
• codeserver
• composetoolbox
• cronmaster
• barcodebuddy
• deemix
• dozzle
• duplicati
• FileZilla
• git-sync
• gotify
• grocy
• homarr (dashboard)
• ntfy
• invidious
• it-tools
• jdownloader2
• linkwarden
• mega_nz
• n8n
• navidrome
• netdata
• network-toolbox
• nexterm
• owncloud
• pihole
• portainer
• postgresql
• Readeck
• redis
• searxng
• speedtest
• syncthing
• theme-park
• trillium
• tt-rss
• uptime-kuma
• watchtower (fork)
• Web-Check
• wg-easy
• 13ft

I do have two spare Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and one small computer with an old i5 / 8 GB RAM.

Do it OP. You got to start somewhere. 8 gb of RAM will run a nice group of apps. That's kind of the nice thing. These apps do not run constantly, but rather mostly on demand. You're probably not going to be able to run heavy programs like Elasticsearch, LLM/AI, or apps in that group. I haven't found much that I need that I can't self host.

I'm currently learning Ansible and CI/CD type environment on a test server. I'm no where close to prime time tho, but that's the thing. You can always have something in the skunk works you're working on, and when you get to the point you're ready for production, you can deploy it on the production server.

Welcome to the most fun, frustrating, educational, useful hobby you'll ever dive into.

I self host jellyfin, free anime for me and my closest friends

Just get a vps it still counts as self hosting if you run all the software yourself.

Photo backups with Immich.

File storage with OwnCloud.

Device syncing with SyncThing.

A blog with Ghost.

etc. etc.

I have three servers running these days.
One is a NAS that hosts the .arr suite and my torrent client. This is just to keep the media management in one place.
A N100 NUC that runs a lot of stuff in Proxmox, like Jellyfin, Heimdal, HomeAssistant, PiHole, Tailscale. I hope to add Caddy to this in the future, but I've never played with a reverse proxy before so I'm a tiny bit scared hehe.
Lastly is a inudstrial PC I got from work that hosts game servers. Right now it's down as we haven't had time to game, but usually it's either a Minecraft server or Valheim.

For backup I have one copy on the NAS and I upload the most critical data to a cloud service I trust and pay for. This is now Proton.
My dream is finding a tech friend with his/her own NAS so we can set up a encrypted partition on each others NASes for automatic backup. I give you 1 TB, you give me 1 TB, life's good!

Everything starts with what my family needs/uses. Jellyfin for media. Grocy to track which kid has done their chores. Home assistant to make a nice dashboard in the kitchen to see the family calendar (still on google) and the chores. I've tried a few other things, but those are the ones important to me.

I used proxmox and its made backing things up pretty simple. Once a week I have backups copied up to filen for remote storage.

I host: Heimdall - easy homepage for my wife and I to access services. Gitea - git stuff. Photoprism - running into a number of bugs and considering switching to immich. HomeBox - asset tracking with associated documentation NGINX reverse proxy - what it says on the tin BookStack - simple book style wiki Portainer - docker container management Paperless-ngx - Helps organize documents. Jellyfin - media server

I guess for me it kind of depends on your definition of "self host" as 90% of what I host is a hetzner server running out of finland. because well that's off site backups lol.

my setup is.

Local: Frigate (CCTV manager), Homeassistant (home automation), Matrix (chat).

Remote: Mealie (recipe collection), Vaultwarden (works with bitwarden clients), Nextcloud (files and documents), Freshrss, gitea (github alternative)

Now in terms of wanting an offsite backup, you are probably right, assuming you don't have something offsite that you can syncronize with, and assuming you don't have any major privacy fears of what is hosted, those things are probably best to use cloud for, assuming you are more worried of losing everything in a house fire, than you are of say the stuff being spied on by a 3rd party or caught by hackers.

So yeah I'd say, personally in things I like to have self hosted... on site, probably I'd say a local messanger is good if you'd like a reasonably private communication for friends/family etc... Niche things like RSS readers, or recipe books, really anything strange niche you can probably search for some program to self host it.

Rustdesk server/node?

I don't do a whole lot right now, partially because I'm just not sure what I want to run or how much risk I want to take on in terms of security (for exposed services) and data recovery. I started with pihole to get better ad blocking on my tv, and recently started hosting a dinner vtt server for my d&d group. Some time in the future, I might spin up a nextcloud instance to replace my dropbox or immich for google photos

lmao, people out here on VPSs acting like they went from renting to owning, when really they just rented the motherboard, the case, the fans 🤣🤣

OP get an end-to-end encrypted remote backup app.