Immich is the self-hosted Google Photos replacement that actually works. Deploy it on a Synology Plus-series NAS with Docker Compose, offload the ML container to a mini-PC, mount /dev/dri for Quick Sync transcoding, and expose it only over Tailscale — never public internet.
Use Pangolin if you self-host media, cloud storage, or anything Cloudflare's TOS excludes (Jellyfin, Immich, Nextcloud). Use Cloudflare Tunnels for blogs, dashboards, and small services where free + DDoS protection matters more than owning the edge. Running both is a valid answer.
Coolify gives you a Vercel-style deploy UI on any €5 VPS with Docker and Traefik doing the heavy lifting. For side projects and small SaaS, it saves you $20+/month and gives you full control — but you trade Vercel's edge network for single-VPS ops responsibility.
Ollama + Open-WebUI in Docker Compose is the boring, correct way to self-host a local LLM. Pass through your GPU with nvidia-container-toolkit (or ROCm for AMD), put Open-WebUI behind Traefik on Tailscale, and run Q4_K_M quantised models sized to your VRAM — 8B on 12GB cards, 70B on 24GB.
Traefik 3 with Docker Compose replaces NGINX conf files and manual cert renewal with container labels and automatic Let's Encrypt. This guide walks through the exact static config, Compose file, and per-service label pattern that gets HTTPS working on every subdomain in under an hour.
Full Docker Compose setup guide for Glance Dashboard v2 — RSS feeds, Uptime Kuma integration, server stats, and an honest Glance vs Homepage verdict.
Beszel vs Uptime Kuma compared with real Docker Compose configs. Pick the right self-hosted monitoring tool for your homelab before you install the wrong one.
Run a free, always-on phone LLM server using a Pixel 9 Pro, OlliteRT Gemma 4 E4B, and Tailscale — wired into n8n and Home Assistant for real homelab tasks.