I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.

Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.

2024 was the year I got more serious with self hosting and migrating away from the cloud offered by Google etc. But 2025 was the year I pushed to run all my own services and get the family on board as well; trying to educate my kids with running our own services (the wife is so not interested!).

There were some really cool projects released last year and some oddly well-timed ones as I was looking for various services, and Jotty was one of those!

Thanks so much for you work and rest assured amongst the negativity you may receive in certain corners of the web, there are people truly appreciative of yours, and others like you, hard work.

I only started using Cloudflare tunnels recently, but I’m now using the self hosted alternative Pangolin on a VPS for private services, and I keep the Cloudflare tunnel for public web hosting, i.e WordPress. This also allows easy restriction to the WordPress login page for other users via Google auth etc which is something very simple with CF.

Having split up my private/public services to seperate tunnels also means I don’t stand the chance of taking the public services offline with my constant tinkering of Pangolin and the VPS it runs on.

I have pushed the CF tunnel for file transfers occasionally (which is against their terms), but it hits remarkable speeds for a ‘free’ service.