The cost of convenience you only notice when it's gone.
There are so currently many subscription services out there... It is too easy to forget about them or hard to cancel them just in time. OR better yet, when you do want to cancel them, you're being lured in with a price reduction of 50% for just 2-months so you stick around longer.
For me, it started with just the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions that kept raising prices while lowering the quality that I was seeing. I only watch a few new shows and mostly stick to the ones I know and like the most and rewatch them. My biggest problem with the subscription services is having no control over it. For example, this one time on a Saturday evening that I wanted to watch a certain movie, it wasn't on the services I was subscribed to OR it wasn't on any services at all.
So, I started buying movies again on physical media, in case there is a service or internet outage, I can always watch my own stuff at any time I wanted. I can simply and quickly transfer shows and movies from physical media to my own home server.
In an attempt to be less dependent on all the subscriptions and 'always online' functionalities, I have been moving slowly and steadily to a homeserver setup. It began as a simple media server, but as I explored the possibilities, I started expanding.
In this economy?!
Storage used to be the easy part. Then the AI boom happened. Hard drive prices jumped 200-400% compared to just a year or two ago - and that's just for a few extra terabytes. If you want to expand your home setup without spending a fortune, I had to be strategic about it.
Being strategic about it also meant being selective about what I actually needed. Here's what made the cut:
- Plex
- Gitea
- Pi-Hole
- Grafana
- YoutubeDL
- Convertx
- Docker
- Draw.io
There's more that I am experimenting with but haven’t fully committed to.
Why go through all this trouble?
I kind of liked the challenge of setting this thing up by my needs and rules.
But I was also able to remove subscription from increasingly more pricey services like indeed Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, Google Drive, Apple TV, etc. I can use it to backup my own code locally that I don't need in the Cloud anyways, and not know where it ends up. My system is far from perfect and ideally with more time and technical knowledge, I can keep expanding on it. I was also able to organize my tutorials and technical papers a bit better, since I can also access it from multiple points at home.
What did it teach me?
I was already quite fond of customizing my Steam Deck and have a debug-laptop running Linux, but this was a great opportunity to learn how to write Linux-specific shell scripts to help tweak or automate some steps and make processes easier. It can be a steep learning curve, and with the wrong prompt you can really mess up your system - so make backups before you start experimenting!