Hey Grazie for following up, appreciate it. Sounds even more impressive now that I understand it fully.

I was thinking about it after I posted and I suppose the fact that its complex is part of why the big corporations can benefit so much from our data. They have full control and a million services to host your site, manage your email and analyse your data, and all it takes is a two minute sign up and you are in. Sounds great for the basic user, which is most of the world, but the price you pay is that your data and privacy is effectively gone. They have a captive audience and we go running to them. Its a shame.

I suppose if self hosting was easy, many more people would be doing it. I still love the idea but i think its still a bit technical and that puts me off.

Again, appreciate the response and time taken to explain. I can almost feel feeling of satisfaction you must have, knowing that you are saving money, protecting your privacy and running part of your business in such an excellent way! Great work.

Ciao!

I like posts like this (certainly the spiffy world map looks like you are in a movie!), and I like the self hosting idea, but here’s the issue I see with self hosting stuff…

Its so complex. To me its bordering on inaccessible for the regular user. What you have described is very technical, and I see this all the time in the self host section; very cool looking dash, doing cool stuff, but then the description is like its literally in a different language. I’m usually lost before I have read three lines.

In your post, I’m actually not even sure what you have built. Mail server? Website? I’m fairly techie but I find it hard to understand. Is “software house” your business?

Its great and I commend your work, but its mind boggling and my overarching feeling when I see these posts is usually: “damn, way too complex, I wouldn’t know where to start”.

Thanks for the post however and for taking the time to document and answer questions. 👍🏼

This is what I use: https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-7-5-ePaper-Panel-p-6416.html

Using ESP Home Builder in Home Assistant I can push updates to it.

It works, but for me its far too much work for what it is. Updates are a pain in the hole, and come fairly frequently.

I’ve just ditched it now to be honest.

I was using it to display the weather where my wife worked each morning so she could dress accordingly. It did what it was supposed to do but was too much work. Wireless firmware updates seldom worked and it needed to be connected to a computer to reliably update.

For me personally the convenience isn’t there. Compare it to a similar sized tablet that I can run Fully Kiosk in to display a Home Assistant dashboard that updates effortlessly, and its a non-runner.

May be absolutely fine for other use cases but for me it was prohibitive. Battery life is a few months based on waking up each morning to refresh and going back to sleep until the next morning, but, you can’t monitor the battery level, a known issue with these. That simply is bananas!