A Mac Guy Gets Into Self-Hosting
Before 2025, my self-hosting experience had been limited to
running the media server software, Plex, on a 2009 iMac. When I retired
that machine, I didn't resurrect Plex on my new Mac, although I did hang
on to all the media files. I retired myself this year and resolved to
start self-hosting some services as a learning experience. My home
network consists of three Mac laptops, a Lenovo ThinkPad, that 2009 iMac
I mentioned, plus five iOS devices and an Amazon Kindle Fire (Android).
I elected to use the ThinkPad as a server, although the platform I chose, Unraid, will also run on a Mac. Many of the services it hosts are fully accessible on Mac and iOS devices. I picked Unraid because I have contacts who use it. It is not FOSS. A license that allows you to connect six hard drives in a RAID array is $49.
Unraid Benefits
• 1 year of free OS updates
• All Unraid OS features
•
Perpetual Starter license
• Access to Community Apps
• VM
and Docker Management
• Integrated Tailscale + VPN Support
•
Network-Attached Storage Dual Parity Protected Array, ZFS, BTRFS, XFS
Pools
In the two weeks I've been using it, I have installed a media server (Plex), a photo management server (Digikam), file sharing (Syncthing), and the Mac compatible VPN, Tailscale that allows geographically distant devices to interact as if they were on a LAN.
Other services I plan to investigate are:
- Nextcloud - a personal alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive etc.
- Self-hosted Calibre ebook server
- Paperlessngx - a document management system
In seeking advice from experienced self-hosting folks, I
received this detailed answer from a friend on Mastodon, @phillip@omg.lol
Unraid
"Unraid is probably the easiest turnkey solution if you have the cash to
throw at it. Easy App Store, Docker, VMs, NAS, etc. It stays easy while
leaving you tons of headroom to grow. There’s also a huge community with
tons of resources and docs behind it. The main con here imo is money.
Some have complained about performance issues, but afaik that’s only in
larger NAS setups."
yunohost
yunohost.org is pretty slick and even has its own App Store to make
downloading new apps dead simple. However, it doesn’t use Docker
containers (harder to switch to another platform later like Unraid) and
seems to prefer opening ports publicly. That not may be a con if you
were already planning on doing that anyways.
Yacht
For free + docker, I’d recommend a dashboard app like Yacht (or Dockge for even simpler). You’ll need to manually configure your apps, but it’s generally pretty straightforward and a “set it and forget it” kind of thing.