Take your data back, one service at a time.

Hey, Hake Hardware here. This started because I got tired of being the product. I didn't like handing my files, my photos, and my habits to companies that sell them, change the terms whenever they feel like it, and raise the price once I'm too deep in to leave. Streaming was what gave it away for me. One service used to be great. Now there are seventy-five of them, each one a little pricier than last year, each with less of what I actually wanted to watch.

So I started small. The first thing I ran was Pi-hole, just to block ads on my own network. Then I wanted my documents off the cloud, then my photos, then a way to stream the movies and shows I already owned without renting them back from anyone. It grew one service at a time. Somewhere in there I noticed I was researching and writing these guides for myself anyway, so I figured I'd film them and put them somewhere useful. That became the channel, and this is the site.

You don't need a rack to do this

The biggest myth I want to knock down is that self-hosting is expensive and only for people with server racks and 10-gigabit networking. It isn't. Most of what I cover runs happily on a mini-PC that costs three or four hundred dollars. You probably won't run a multi-terabyte media library on one, but you can absolutely self-host your photos, your documents, and a good stack of services on ordinary consumer gear. The barrier to entry is a lot lower than people think.

I'll be honest that it's also a bit of a rabbit hole. You start with one mini-PC and a year later you're eyeing a second server. But you never have to buy the whole thing up front. Start with what you have, move one thing off the cloud, and build from there.

Tutorials that actually teach

Plenty of guides out there are just a wall of commands to paste. I don't want to make those. Every tutorial here explains what each step does and why, so you come away understanding the thing you deployed instead of staring at a running service you can't troubleshoot. If you follow one of my guides, I want you to have learned something, not just copied something.

Two kinds of writing here, nothing else:

• Tutorials. Step-by-step builds you can follow start to finish: Proxmox, Docker, Pi-hole, self-hosted apps, backups, running local AI on your own hardware. Each one has version-pinned prerequisites, a real time estimate, and shell blocks built for copying. Prompts and output never sneak into your clipboard, and one button copies every command on the page in order.
• Blog posts. Build logs, gear notes, opinions, and honest post-mortems for the things that broke.

Everything here runs on my own hardware before it's published. If a guide says a container comes up, it came up, on the machines a metre to my left. Most posts pair with a video, and the embed sits right under the title if you'd rather watch. The write-up always stands on its own, because a video is a terrible place to store a forty-line config file.

Why it's worth the effort

The honest trade-off is that running your own stuff takes more work than signing up for a Google account. Anyone can click “create account” and have Drive, Photos, and the rest in two minutes. The catch shows up later, when they do something with your data you don't like, or raise the price, and you're too far into the ecosystem to walk away.

Privacy and control aren't free. Like anything worth keeping, they take a little effort to hold onto. That effort pays back twice. You get your data out from under a corporation that doesn't answer to you, and you pick up real skills along the way. I use what I've learned in my homelab at my day job all the time. This stuff is genuinely marketable if you're headed toward IT or tech.

You don't have to do it all at once. Start small, learn as you go, and move one thing off the cloud at a time. That's the whole approach, and it's what these guides are built to help you do.

The gear and the money

Some posts and the gear pagelist hardware I actually run, and some of those links are affiliate links. They're marked with a dagger (†) right where they appear, never hidden. The gear I point to comes from my own setup, bought because I needed it, and the write-up is finished before any link goes in. The full plain-English version lives on the disclosure page.

Say hi

The fastest way to reach me is a comment on the Hake Hardware YouTube channel, or email at ops@hake.dev. Corrections are especially welcome. If a step failed for you, telling me makes the guide better for the next person moving something off the cloud.