How and why you should Host Your Own Cloud

What is a Cloud?
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Before we can create our own cloud, we first need to know what a cloud actually is.

It has nothing to do with the clouds in the sky, but the cloud in the IT sense are servers that provide services on the Internet that would otherwise run locally in companies or at home.

These can be, for example, office programs, video editing software, gaming PCs, AD or LDAP servers, e-mails, etc.

In short, it is simply someone else’s PC that provides you with services. For example, if a friend of yours offers you to store data on his server via the Internet, then this is Technically speaking already a cloud. Even if it is only a 50$ PC.

What is the cloud for?
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Now that we know what exactly a cloud is and also that it is not a special thing. What is the point of a cloud? If you know what you’re doing, impressively little.

Large companies advertise their cloud solutions a lot and like to present it as the solution to all problems and that it is so much cheaper. Of course, this is marketing talk and has little to do with reality. Companies wouldn’t invent something where they make less money, that’s the goal of every company. If you are told that you can save so much money if you put your entire infrastructure that belongs to you in a cloud where you rent it forever and never own it. Then there is clearly something wrong, it can be cheaper in the beginning until enough companies are vendorlocked and the costs continue to rise and rise. Don’t forget Microsoft, Amazon and co are stock companies the line has to keep going up and up and up.

Nevertheless, there are certain cases where a cloud from large companies actually makes sense.

Examples include:

Offsite hard storage for the 3 2 1 rule which Microsoft and Amazon offer as an example.
A CDN to make the website quickly available to the whole world like Netlify offers for example.
Another CDN to make downloads and servers available to the whole world like Steam does.
For international companies that need extreme flexibility in their server capacity, a cloud also makes sense because of its elasticity
In fact, e-mail hosting can also make sense as it has become very difficult to configure e-mails so that they are not declared as spam

These are brief examples, but the tldr version is. If it’s completely unrealistic to host it locally, such as hosting YouTube as a whole in your own company, then you should use a cloud. If it is super easy to host it yourself like an DHCP Server then you should do that.

The risks with the cloud
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Monopoly
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I already mentioned halfway that the cloud can have a monopoly problem if too many companies and people rent everything in these few companies. Then Price will at some point go up Forever. Because from that point on, what do you want to do about it, if there are no more local devices that can do the same? You can already see that nowadays, try to get by completely without Microsoft, Google, Amazon and co. That’s very difficult and if everything is in the cloud that would only make it worse.

Data Protection and Espionage
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Data protection is an issue because just because the company claims that the data is not being stolen does not mean that they are not doing it secretly. In a closed network where all software is proprietary, there is no way to tell that data is not stolen or that this could not change in the future. The UK is a good example right now with Apple. The UK is currently trying to get a backdoor to read all the data of UK users in the ICloud. This can also affect other countries if they share data with UK citizens.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+UK+wants+a+backdoor+to+apples+I+Cloud&t=ffab&ia=web

Another example is Microsoft, which in the past denied the cooperation with the NSA. Eternalblue was a malware that exploited this backdoor to spread malware all over the world. Why shouldn’t this espionage still be going on?

The Backdoor: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Mircosofts+NSA+Backdoor&t=ffab&ia=web
The Malware: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Eternalblue+uses+NSA+backdoor&t=ffab&ia=web

Limited customizability
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Another problem is customizability, if a cloud does not support a function it simply does not work. Whereas locally you can customize everything as you need it.

How do I host a cloud myself?
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Forewords
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Self-hosting can be very complicated depending on the size and for many a thing that is completely impossible if they don’t want to invest time. So think carefully about whether it’s worth your time or not.

What should I host?
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Now that we know what the point of a cloud is and what the Risks are, we need to know what we want to host ourself.

I have some things on my Github account that you can host yourself, be it an RSS reader for news, music and movie streaming from your media, your own cloud storage, a calendar, etc.

In the end you have to know it yourself and I have a few sources where you can find inspiration.

Containers: https://hub.docker.com/
My Github: https://github.com/XenoElectronics/Docker-Compose-Files/tree/main/Portainer-Stack-Files
Nextcloud it dose a loot: https://nextcloud.com/
Youtube search for what other people are hosting at home to see if it is interesting for you.

What hardware do you need?
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You might think that you need an extremely expensive server that costs around 20000$ to even think about self-hosting, but that is completely wrong.

I myself have an 8 year old gaming PC for my home lab. It cost me 1800€ at the time and can host up to 30 servers without any problems and can play in my gaming VM at the same time. But there’s even more to it these days as you can get more performance for less money. So you can do something similar nowadays even with a 1000$ PC or if you want to host very little even with one for 50$ be it with a Raspberry PI. But you can also buy old servers or PCs second-hand and use them.

You have to look at what exactly you want to do and plan accordingly.

My best recommendation for a server that runs with Linux without problems and has a lot of power without you wanting to play games on it is this one:

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-Nano-Pro-Gen13-AMD.tuxedo#specs

You can get it for about 1000€ and it will easily serve you for the next 5-10 years. Depending on the load and what it should do of course.

Which software should you use?
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For this I have my Linux Distro Guide where some good server OSs are presented. But my recommendation would be Proxmox.

Distro Guide: https://xenoelectronics.com/posts/2025/which-linux-distro-should-you-use/
Proxmox: https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads/proxmox-virtual-environment/iso

Proxmox covers a lot of things that you can use for self-hosting. Because you can create a VM for all purposes to do the job.

You need containers? Make a VM with Alpine and host Portainer on it. You need a database server? Make a Debian VM and host Postgres on it and so on.

Other OSs would make it harder as they are less flexible or purpose built. With TrueNAS for example you have an excellent OS for storage and can also create VMs but it is less easy than with Proxmox and you can also host TrueNAS in a VM with Proxmox if you need it.

You can also create clusters with Proxmox if you have more than one server.

Summary
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You now have an idea of what the cloud is and have an idea of how and what you can host yourself and what risks the cloud can pose. I can only recommend you to deal more with the topic of self-hosting because otherwise this article will take several hours and if it is too much work for you, I hope that you have at least learned something new.