Selfhosted

Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.

I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.

VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.

I use my searxng instance several times a day.

DNS server/cache/pihole. If that goes down I can't browse anything.

I also selfhost a SaaS that I built. It's essential to me that it's available to my customers although I don't use it personally.

It's not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.

Audiobookshelf, Calibre-Web, Plex/Jellyfin, FreshRSS, NextCloud, DokuWiki.

My most frequently used are most likely vaultwarden, Memos, Trilium, Jellyfin, Frigate, Traggo, and beaverhabits. Also AdGuard and NPM but I don’t interact with them.

Oh yeah and freshrss

And! Nextcloud and Baikal. NC only for storage and Baikal caldav and carddav

I have a dedicated vm for things that are crucial to the home network, either latency-critical or network related.

That'd be my dns resolver (I enforce it over VLANs by hijacking anyone trying to do DNS to other resolvers, like random IoT devices), homebridge for less important home automaton and my own matter controller for most important home automaton (controlling the lights).

My router of choice is RouterOS in another VM. I tried opnsense, pfsense, vyatta, and a bunch of others (even a containerized Cisco route), and I settled on ROS, because it was the only one who could do IPv6 properly (apart from Cisco, but that has other issues).

For the less important things I run them on k8s and really, there are only two bits worth mentioning as essential: ArgoCD and nixhelm. Together, they provide effortless and mostly automated software updates with very easy rollbacks. I don’t have to go and manually update every single bit of software and that saves huge amounts of time.

For me, the most essentials are definitely:

• PhotoPrism
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Wiki.js

Depends on the situation of course, but for us:

• immich: family photos are important
• docker + ssh: we enjoy hobbying with code, nerds be nerds
• samba: a file sharing protocol that works on all of our things

Immich (Photo backup), Vaultwarden (FOSS Biwarden server for passwords)

Plex, channels, mail, calendar, contacts, wiki

Gitea, wger, jellyfin, samba, *arr stack, jellyseer

Adguard home

@bpt11 headscale is high on my list, since it enables everything else I host to be behind a tailscale VPN.

Radicale for calendar, tasks & contacts
Syncthing for file sync
FreshRSS is the best I've found for RSS
Jellyfin for media
Audiobookshelf for audiobooks (but really more for podcasts, in my case)