Present and future of my baby Raspberry Pi server

My home server began almost nine months ago now with an idea from some youtube videos. One trip to Micro Center and $130 later I had docker, portainer and my first app, Tandoor set up on my server. Nine months later, seeing where my server is compared to then is something that makes me proud.

Soon after Tandoor, I added FreshRSS and Actual Budget to my server. All three apps have now replaced other services for me. Now I have them all on a domain I own and they're exposed to the internet securely using Cloudflare and nGinx Proxy Manager. Then I added this blog to the portfolio.

Going forward I want to get domain addresses even for my internal applications. I will need piHole on the Raspberry Pi 3 again when I get my new place to do it. It's annoying to use the ip address to get to the internal applications every time.

I think this server won't have too many more applications on it. One app I definitely want is paperless-NGX. It seems like a dream to organize and cold store old documents.

Other than paperless-NGX I might want a pdf manager type app. Going through an apartment purchase made me realize how much of a headache it is to handle and work with pdfs without paying for a commercial app. Having a self-hosted instance of a pdf management, editing app would let me take control of it.

I think once I get my side business up and running I might want some CRM or business organization apps on the server as well. Lute, an app that is good for learning new languages could join the portfolio. Ideas are plentiful but I want to reign it in. I want apps that I will actually use and my life will benefit from them. Gratituous apps because they're interesting will end up adding noise to my life.

The Raspberry Pi server was a perfect introduction to the self hosted environment for me, and I think the big next step will be going beyond this server. I want to build a NAS next. I'm thinking it will have a Dell, HP workstation as the power station with 4-6 bays of hard drives for a total of 36-60 terabytes of storage. I will host a Jellyfin server on it with tons of 4k movies, maybe a big Criterion collection. Although I maybe want to buy a subscription to Criterion collection.

This new NAS server will also host Immich and be my storage for all my pictures. I want to start taking pictures with my camera and the RAW images get big, so I will probably want to go for 60 terabytes.

This is all down the line, and it will be costly. Also I will need better cloud backup when this all gets rolling because right now only a little of the pictures I want to keep are backed up in the cloud.

The journey has been interesting and I have so much to look forward to. This has been fun and the best part is control. It feels like I'm taking control of my life and taking it away from a company who simply wants to sell me more and more things.