I’ve got a Synology NAS DS416play for several years now as a trusty backup/storage. But not using their Photo Galary feature. What I like about Synology is their long term support. They still offer software updates for this rather old model.

I’m still using Google Photos as main photo dumping ground as it has clients for iOS and macOS which automatically uploads all photos there and of course for the search and sharing feature. I’m even paying for the extra storage needed to host all the family pictures on a 2TB plan.

My concern having only the Synology would be that in case of fire/flood/zombies I’d loose all this stuff. Sure it’s a 4 disk raid, but I’d have to make regular backups off-site. Which is pita and expensive as well. Synology does offer Backup to various cloud locations though. But overall I considered this more expensive than just paying for the Google Account.

Hosting a whole bunch of stuff for myself, the family and also the public. For the larger family I’m hosting eMail but using a managed service offering for that (Hetzner). Too old to run my own IMAP/SMTP infrastructure ;)

For a few private societies I’m hosting:

• Mattermost
• NextCloud
• WordPress https://www.uckermark-blog.de/

For the public I host:

• Mastodon at https://hub.uckermark.social
• Mastodon at https://tetrax.de/
• BookWyrm at https://books.mxhdr.net/
• Mobilizon at https://termine.uckermark.social/
• MatrixChat at https://matrix.mxhdr.net
• Element WebUI for Matrix at https://element-web.explain-it.org/

Mostly formyself, but not restricted I’m hosting:

• Pixelfed
• LinkDing for Bookmarks
• Excalidraw
• Grafana
• OverLeaf
• StandardNotes Server
• PiHole
• GitTea
• FreshRSS
• Minio S3-kompatible Object Storage as Backend for Mastodon & Pixelfed (on an old Dell Optiplex at home over my DSL Line)
• GoToSocial Fediverse Client (On a RaspberryPi at home)
• PeerTube for public projects (on the same old Dell OptiPlex)
• PeerTube as private Video Streaming platform (on a Dell Precision 3500 tower)

Most services run in Docker Containers on some VPS at Hetzner. Some stuff runs in Docker Containers on old spare hardware at home.