Perhaps not the size you’re after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).

I love it. I started with pFsense, then really liked Untangle for its ease of use, then went (back) to OPNsense and preferred that for the fact it could run Caddy internally as a reverse proxy and was fast, but I was a bit frustrated at wanting to do more with it and needing to research everything. I already had Unifi APs and decided that it just made sense to have a Ubiquiti router. I’ve found it stable, easy to use with good feature updates, and have also just paid for the annual Cybersecure add-on which is reporting loads.

I was being too simplistic in my other reply. I was referring to basic router based DNS and NextDNS as the upstream resolver.

I don’t have an answer for hard coded DNS when it comes to NextDNS, which is essentially an upstream resolver with block lists functionality.

And to be honest, I misinterpreted OPs original question which was to take PiHole to the next level, whereas NextDNS is an alternative to.

I can run app based routing and blocking on my router, but whether that would restrict DNS for those services I don’t know.

Thanks for the clarification, you’ve got me wanting to pursue more DNS control now!

I think they’re forked form the same source, Bittorrent Sync, so function the same under the hood. I wasn’t suggesting Resilio did something Syncthing didn’t. I’ve just found Resilio easier to use for client devices. And that OP was concerned about losing files from syncing.

The only odd behaviour I’ve had with Resilio, is when hosted on Unraid, random files on the SMB share sometimes have database names on large folders with lots of files (RSH-78254 for example), but when synced to remote devices, the filenaming is then accurate. I’ve been meaning to spin up Syncthing to see if it does the same, but as Resilio has yet to lose me any files, I’m sticking with it.

Could be a Docker issue as well I guess.

If you’re referring to network based DNS, I use their script to have it on my Ubiquiti router as well. I have that with its own profile with full blocking for iot etc.

I had PiHole with unbound on my OPNsense way back when, but the internet just needs to work for both me and my family and not go offline with me tinkering with the homelab. NextDNS takes all of that hassle out of the equation.

I use Resilio to duplicate locally to my Unraid, which I know is hated as it’s not the FOSS Syncthing, but in 5 years of use, it’s never gone wrong, and the client software is dead easy to use. That has a hidden .sync folder which archives deleted files for 30 days. You can change the timeframe or remove this feature in settings. I go into the sync folder and remove the deleted files manually if it becomes too bloated.

From my Unraid, I then backup to Hetzner using Duplicacy, which with the GUI is also very easy to use. From what I’ve read about the other backup solutions being a bit flaky, Duplicacy seems to have nothing but love.

I’ve had pihole running in the past, then Adguard, but moved to NextDNS several years ago and have been happy with it. For a small fee, it removes all need for self hosting your own. I set up profiles for the kids, wife etc, then set the DNS in their phones, tablets, so I know its always working wherever they are. You can set local IPs in it if you want, but I use a reverse proxy for all LAN requests instead.

Only slight issue I’ve had with it was recently making several quick changes to DNS in Cloudflare, and NextDNS took several hours to propagate which was a PITA at the time.

Edit: I’ve just seen that they now offer a free tier which they didn’t in the past.

I can’t quite figure out the downvotes to my first reply for suggesting backups and docker… I think my mention of Windows did it (do please avoid Windows for what it’s worth).

If you have reliable, easy to access backups, then it takes away the doubt of self-hosting. Hence the suggestion for Backblaze as it’s so easy to implement. Put in an encryption key and your remote data is private. I use it for everything except Plex media, which is something I wouldn’t care if I lost.

I jumped to Unraid about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Docker on Unraid is as easy to use as it gets, and now my confidence with it has grown and my demands are getting slightly more complex, I’m moving to Dockge for Docker stacks, and Pangolin on a Hetzner VPS for remote access. Hetzner have a great firewall feature for your VPS, so you can lock it down to home access to get you started once you start on a VPS journey.

But I would recommend Unraid for sure on ANY old HP desktop PC from eBay. I got an Z1 i9-9900, 32Gb RAM for £250. Bonkers cheap for what it is.

Good luck!

Backup. I use Backblaze personal which is $179 for two years of ‘unlimited’ storage. All my important self hosted data is duped to some old 2.5" external drives connected to my work machine that then is backing up to Backblaze. I also have 1yr retention, so any deleted file is accessible for up to 1yr.

After backups are sorted, stick with the OS you know best. If Windows (I hope not), then HyperV for VMs is good. Try the official Nextcloud VM from Hanson IT. Nextcloud is a good catch-all, but it’s beaten by other specific tools. I now host all I need from specific Docker containers: photos, calendar, email backup etc etc

But I would say Docker. Docker desktop if Macos or Windows if your thing. Get to know docker and the world of self hosting is your oyster.

As what others say, keep it all to your home network and tread carefully when trying to remote access it all.

The absolute irony… I’ve used Immich for nearly 2 years without fail; it’s never skipped a beat. Today I update to the stable release and my Immich mobile app now has a sync error warning. This is the first issue I’ve ever had.

EDIT: Phew! Clear File Cache in mobile app has sorted the error. For a moment I thought the universe was against me.

I too looked for a way to move my imap emails out of the cloud, and after looking for years, 2 came along in a matter of months. Mail Archiver and Open Archiver. I’ve been using Open Archiver for about 2 months and like it. I just VPN to home (well, Pangolin), and have it as a proxied web page to search old emails.

I suppose there’s always a catch with them opening up for 3rd party support.

I was keen to move to Unifi primarily for a doorbell. I had a Hikvision which was very temperamental, and I didn’t want a cloud based one like Ring or Nest, so believe it or not, most of my decision was made around a stupid doorbell.

Not FOSS, and with an entry price tag, but I ditched my OPNSense firewall for a Ubiquiti UDM Pro SE router about 2 years ago and invested in 3 of their cameras plus a doorbell and love it. I previously had Blue Iris for CCTV.

The Unifi Protect app is great. Easy to navigate, great detection, and easy to store clips. There’s no subscription fees, and I get a great firewall/router alongside a CCTV package.

Oh, and you can now add 3rd party cameras to the Unifi Protect system.

I’ve run Nextcloud several ways, the smoothest, easiest and most powerful being the official image by Hanssen IT. Run that in a VM and use their setup/update scripts to do all the hard work. I highly recommend.

I’m on Vodafone here in the UK (CityFibre), and they let me use my own firewall to the ONT, and give me a static IP for no extra cost. It’s a PPPoE connection with a VLAN id. With work recently I’m using about 5-6TB monthly data. I should count my blessings for their service given all I’ve read here!

I had issues with connectivity around 2020 and they wouldn’t engage with any help troubleshooting it unless I used their provided router, which was a pita, but a few days of speed tests and they escalated it and fixed it.

Just to say I’ve tried this today and love it. Was running Authelia but wasn’t happy with the way it was configured. I spun up VoidAuth in about 5mins and am impressed. Running as basic auth for a Caddy reverse proxy, this feels very slick. Well done!

Easy to follow documentation as well. Less is more sometimes.

I like the way you have it checking SMTP credentials in the background with a simple ‘this is not configured properly’ on the UI.

just schedule an email to send at a later date/time, then if you don’t login to cancel it, off it goes.

I started with pfsense on Virtualbox, then quickly moved that to HyperV on Windows, where I had 3 locations running this as their routers for almost 2 years, even through COVID when I couldn’t get to some locations. I never had a single issue, just got annoyed at the constant Windows updates rebooting the systems and internet going down when it did. One of these sites ran over a 4G modem, that I connected to a VPS that I could tunnel down to access it remotely.

I then moved these sites to Untangle, still on Hyper V, then for own use, moved off VM onto baremetal on an HP Elitedesk 800 with 10GbE card that cost about £100 total, which ran wonderfully until Untangle got sold out and made me switch to…

…OPNSense on the same Elitedesk (after reading about PFSenses silly games they played), and this ran perfectly for about 18 months, and with solid 1Gbps on Wireguard, then after all these years of messing with routers, I finally switched to a Unifi UDM Pro SE last year and I couldn’t be happier. It does all I need, plus also CCTV recording (away from Blue Iris). I no longer have to worry that my DIY routers are going to fail on me. The other sites moved to ISP supplied modem/routers.

So, I would recommend Unifi hardware, despite it not being open source, mainly because, well, internet is a crucial service, especially in my household. And the UDM does WAN fail over well with my backup 4G modem. I can get it to do anything I need it to by just studying the GUI, I don’t need to read loads of info like I did with OPnSense etc.

I did once however, move from PFSense to Untangle on a remote machine. Because Untangle had a GUI, I fired up a VM on the same Windows machine as PFSense, set it all up with the same NIC settings, then adjusted Hyper V so that the Untangle VM booted and the PfSense one didn’t, then rebooted the machine and waited nervously for a few minutes, then boom, up popped the Untangle router! It felt good getting that done. It was only at my parents house, but still, it required a 90min journey if it failed.

With all the drama of Windows 11 in recent years, I’m glad I switched away from HyperV when I did.

I spend my days working on a MacBook, and have several old external USB drives duplicating my important files, live, off my server (Unraid) via Resilio to my MacBook (yes I know syncthing exists, but Resilio is easier). My off-site backups are to a Hetzner Storage Box using Duplicacy which is amazing and supports encrypted snapshots (a cheap GUI alternative to Borgbackup).

So for me, Resilio and Duplicacy.

I guess there is no one-size-fits-all for self hosting. We all have different requirements. Mine is NAS based, so hence Unraid. I think mostly we all rotate around the core of photo storage, and Immich is likely what’s fuelling a lot of self hosting now as it’s a legit alternative to Google Photos. As I’ve moved out of the Google eco system now for everything; it creeps me out to think how much of my information they used to have access to.