In this video, I share the real-world services I stopped self-hosting in my home lab and we look at why cloud or managed solutions ultimately made more sense for me for certain services in particular. For years, my default answer was to self-host everything, and while that mindset taught me a ton about networking, DNS, storage, security, and virtualization, I eventually realized that not every service is worth the operational overhead. I walk through why I moved away from self-hosted email, public DNS, remote access gateways, push notifications, and password managers, and how stress, time, and reliability became the deciding factors.
Read the written blog on this topic here: https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2025/12/things-i-stopped-self-hosting-and-why-cloud-or-managed-won/
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Chapters
00:00 Why I Questioned Self-Hosting Everything
01:20 When Self-Hosting Stops Adding Value
03:05 Why I Stopped Self-Hosting Email
07:10 The Reality of Running Public DNS
10:45 Internal DNS vs Public DNS in the Home Lab
13:40 Remote Access Gateways and Security Risks
17:30 Zero Trust Access for Modern Home Labs
20:55 Why I Gave Up Self-Hosted Push Notifications
24:10 The Risk of Self-Hosted Password Managers
28:20 Stress and Time as the Real Metrics
31:30 What I Still Love Self-Hosting
34:15 Final Thoughts on Smarter Self-Hosting Choices
