Selfhosted
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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The problem is you'd need someone to do maintenance and updates too, because stuff can/does break and if you didn't set it up, you won't know how to fix it.
You can sign up with a Nextcloud hosting provider for access to files, notes, photo management, calendar, contacts, etc..
For email I recommend a solid provider like mailbox.org or skiff.com
For video streaming with Plex and the supporting *arrs you can install all of those on windows AFAIK, so you can probably do those yourself with minimal effort on learning new things.
That is a fair point about needing to have someone troubleshoot for me.
I have been fighting with Plex for 2 years. Tried it on Windows and tried it on TNAS. Despite buying a static IP from my ISP and telling Plex to allow outside connection Plex always said it was unavailable outside my wifi. Most of the time it was anyways, but every once in a while it wouldn't. It would often just a stream in the middle and say the media was no longer available. On LAN and off. Could never link an error log entry with any of these failures. It would often mis identify movies and shows despite me following the naming schema. For example /Media/Movies/Hulk (2008)/Hulk (2008).mkv would often show up as "The Twelve Kingdoms"
I have thousands of discs I am scanning in and after going through 15 tutorials and trial and error I could never get *arrs to work properly. I couldn't get radarr or sonarr to watch folders for ripped movies and move them into the appropriate folder, and tdarr would happily check my files for errors, but refused to convert, compress, or find subtitles for my files. It would just "complete" the task in 1ms and do nothing and report it was done. After trying TDARR on the sixth different computer I almost through it through a window.
There is a LOT to learn to start self-hosting, that's for sure. With most stuff you definitely need at least basic knowledge of how your network functions, ports, NAT, and that kind of stuff.
Plex external access needs a port opened in your router to the plex server, it will try and do that automatically with UPnP but in some cases that's disabled and you need to setup NAT (port forward) manually. Your ISP could also be using CGNAT which means you can't open ports at all, but buying a static IP should make sure that's not the case (although you certainly don't specifically need a static IP for Plex). Often the message in Plex is wrong and will say remote access isn't working when it is in my experience.
Depending on your router/modem there may be some kind of security system running on it and that could be interfering with Plex as well.
Doing some external testing with a port scan on the plex port against your internet IP might help tell you something to figure out what's going on.
The *arrs not moving files or picking up watch folders is usually a permissions issue between the user they are running as, and your file/folder permissions for the source/destination folders. Windows definitely makes this simpler as you don't run into that issue as long as you're using an administrator account that has access to everything.
I've never used tdarr, but wouldn't your DVD rip software already be doing the encode for you anyways? You can also configure your DVD software to name the files and place them in the plex media folder, instead of the extra step of using radarr/sonarr to do it, since those are more for internet download organization.
Plex can also grab subtitles for you, at least that's how I manage mine.
Is skiff good?
I made an account when they were blowing up but I haven't touched it.
Have tried it for a while and Its ok, nothing super special. It's nice that they offer 10GB for free for. I would choose skiff any time over any other less privacy focused providers like outlook and Gmail. But my favourites still stand with Mailbox.org and Protonmail.
Wow, thanks for the mailbox.org recommendation. Looks like an easy and reasonably priced way to move away from Google for email and calendar.