Do you still run a home server (self-hosting)?

TL;DR: Yes, it’s alive and well, and it feels like this space has never been better than now. A lot of things have changed since then. Now it’s called “self-hosting”/“home lab”.

Due to the advent of low power small form factor PCs/SBCs like the Pi, and all the additional management options you get these days: conventional bare-metal, but also containers, VMs, and everything in between, coupled with IaC like Ansible or Salt. A single machine can now be far more useful than just classical Unix services like LAMP or SSH - but you can still have those if you wish in addition to the new stuff!

I recommend checking the subreddits /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab to get an idea what people do these days. These are by no means the only places where all the cool discussion takes place, but they are a very good jumping off point. If you’re interested in managing file storage that goes beyond a few TB, /r/datahoarder is a good place to look too.

(And yes, running an email server still sucks. This time, the complexity is no longer about setting up or maintaining the thing (Mail in a Box/Mailcow basically put this whole thing on auto-pilot for you, including initial setup), but about fighting the major email providers to force them to not silently drop incoming messages sent from your server).

I have a NAS and it works pretty well since I mostly don't have to worry about it. Backup scripts talk to it automatically. The TV can read stream from it directly (I'm a huge fan of borrowing DVDs at the library and making them available for the NAS), I git push stuff to it, etc.

I know a NAS is not what you're asking about, but it goes give you a huge % of the features of a home server with only 5% of the effort.

I do, I use an old (note to self: probably need to upgrade to a new) Raspberry pi 2B with headless Ubuntu server. For storage I use also an old 2.5 HDD. This system was one of the first I built for playing around with RPi. When updated & upgraded, it is a cheap and very easy solution. Even after so many years I still store stuff on it and use it on daily basis.

File Server. HTML, FTP.

Website server.

SSH server for remote logins.

I refuse to use a third-party service for these items.

Yes for backup’s and media storage. Both benefit from local storage.

I am and I have been since the mid 90s! Mail, DNS primary, Web, etc.

All off-grid on a RPi (well two, because I'm too idle to consolidate them and save another watt at the moment)!

I have a "FamilyTube" server at home with videos the kids can watch without the same level of parental supervision as when they are on YouTube.

put Unraid on an old pc a few months ago. it runs backups for all the macs. photo storage, pi-hole and a bunch of home automation stuff. the vm/docker support is nice, not much messing around with configs and the ease of setting up an sdd cache drive was great and makes a huuuge difference.

Yes - even have few servers.

Mostly - for web servers, ssh and few vpn services.