Docker Compose Self-Hosted Services Guide

This article was originally published on danieljamesglover.com. There is a certain satisfaction in running your own stack. Not because self-hosting is always the right choice, but because the discipline of deploying, securing, and maintaining your own services teaches you things that clicking through cloud consoles never does. You understand what a reverse proxy is doing when you have configured one. You understand secrets management when you have broken something by leaving credentials in a compose file. I run a self-hosted stack at home and have built similar setups for small IT teams. This guide covers eight services worth running yourself, with working Docker Compose configurations, security notes, and an honest view of where self-hosting earns its keep versus where managed services are the right call. Before you start, two things. First: Docker Compose is the right tool here. Not Kubernetes, not Nomad, not whatever the current trend is. For a small team or a serious home lab, Comp