I am not running a company, just a household but this article speaks to me. I have given this topic plenty of thought in the past year as I have a growing unease with large American tech firms and how they use data. These are some of my setups (in the spirit of the article)

I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.

Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.

Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.

Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.

Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).

Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.

There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.

CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.

DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.

Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.

Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.

VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.

Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

user:	alaudet
created:	April 6, 2026
karma:	53
about:	old chill IT greybeard