If you're not careful, self-hosting can change from an interesting hobby into a second job. You'll find forums and pages full of people recommending all sorts of services that are finicky or difficult to maintain.

I try to keep clear of anything that actively makes my life more complicated or requires a lot of work to keep running. Here are 5 that actually make my life and work easier.

A Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole. DNS sinkholes work by selectively preventing devices on your network from receiving the IP addresses of domains on your blocklist.

That prevents any device on your network from connecting to a domain you block.

In practice, you can use it to block ads, trackers, scam or phishing sites, and known malware command domains.

It also covers devices that you normally don't have much control over, like smart TVs, gaming consoles, phones, and IoT gear.

There are trade-offs, of course. If your Pi-hole hardware dies, DNS for the entire network goes offline with it. You should set up a secondary DNS server to avoid a total outage. You also won't be able to block YouTube or other first-party ads served from the same domain as the content.

Don't be like me, make sure to prepare for these things before deploying Pi-hole the first time.

Homepage is a dashboard that links to your services and displays live stats . It is a big part of making your homelab feel tidy. x:port URLs, you can access your services from a single page.

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