Setup
We turn your requirements into a working system: hardware selected and installed, services configured, access secured, backups set up, and everything documented. Usually in days or weeks, not a hiring cycle.
Specification
Rev. 2026.09
Your own cloud.We keep it running.
We design, build and operate the infrastructure your company relies on — file sharing and business applications, development environments, private AI, networking, monitoring and backups. You keep the hardware, access and documentation; we make sure everything works.
- What runs
- The services your team actually needs: business applications, file storage, development environments, private AI, networking, monitoring and backups.
- Scope
- One team responsible for design, setup, maintenance and monitoring. No gaps between vendors when something stops working.
- Costs
- Hardware and setup are quoted separately and itemised. Ongoing maintenance is optional, with no mandatory platform or per-user fee.
- Hardware
- Sized for your workload and budget, with room to grow — not forced into a predefined package.
- Control
- The hardware, configurations, automation, credentials and documentation are yours from day one.
- Location
- Your office, your rack, a data centre or a hybrid setup. We use public cloud only where it adds a clear benefit.
- Experience
- More than thirty years of hands-on experience, supported by modern automation.
Request a quote
One email. No form, calendar link or newsletter.
What you are actually buying
Maintenance
Updates, security patches, certificate renewals and tested restores. The routine work that keeps essential services available when your team needs them.
Monitoring
Metrics, dashboards and alerts that reach a person. We catch failing disks, stale backups and expiring certificates before they become outages. Critical checks can run off-site so they still work when the local system does not.
Digital freedom
You can fire us.
Everything is handed over as we go: configurations, the automation used to build the system, credentials and documentation written for someone who was not there. Give it to your own IT team, another supplier, or take over yourself. All are valid choices. Nothing is designed to keep you dependent on us.
What you hold, from day one
- Every configuration file, in a Git repository you control
- The playbooks and scripts used to build the system
- All credentials, stored in a vault you control
- Documentation: what runs where, how to update it, how to restore it
- Any tooling written specifically for your environment
- Administrative access to every system
The infrastructure does not need our systems or permission to keep running. If you leave, everything already delivered remains yours.
Digital freedom
Know where your data is.
Running services in your own environment gives you direct control over where data is stored, how it is protected and which systems can access it. It can reduce the number of outside processors and make audits easier. It does not make GDPR compliance automatic — policies, access controls, logging and responsible operation still matter — but it gives you evidence you can inspect instead of only assurances from a provider.
Questions you can answer directly
- Where is the data physically stored? — on a specific system, in a specific location
- Which networks and services can reach it? — the configuration you manage shows you
- What access has been recorded? — in logs you control
- How can you retrieve it? — directly, without an export queue or provider egress fee
- Who decides when the system changes? — you approve the change
Control is not compliance by itself. It is the foundation for making deliberate, verifiable choices about your data.
What you can stop renting
Self-hosting is not about buying hardware for its own sake. It is about moving suitable, predictable workloads away from recurring per-user, per-host and storage charges. We assess each service individually; public cloud stays wherever it is the better fit.
File storage and collaboration
What you rent nowDropbox, SharePoint or cloud storage priced per user
What runs insteadNextcloud Files and Office on storage you control
Source control, CI and registries
What you rent nowHosted plans, build minutes, paid concurrency and storage tiers
What runs insteadGitLab on your own runners and storage
Test environments and internal applications
What you rent nowCloud VMs billed continuously, including when they sit idle
What runs insteadVMs sized for actual demand on hardware you already have
Monitoring and alerting
What you rent nowDatadog, Grafana Cloud, priced per host and per metric
What runs insteadPrometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager
Backup storage
What you rent nowCloud capacity, retention tiers and restore or egress charges
What runs insteadLocal snapshots plus an independent backup copy
Private AI
What you rent nowPer-seat assistants and external processing of sensitive work
What runs insteadOllama and Open WebUI on a local GPU
Photo, video and camera archives
What you rent nowCloud photo storage and NVR plans
What runs insteadImmich and Frigate on local storage
The right split depends on workload, availability requirements and current contracts. The quote shows the comparison rather than assuming every service belongs on-site.
What we run
These are tools we operate day to day. We choose from them according to the job; no customer gets a fixed bundle simply because it is our default.
| Area | Tools | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Files & collaboration | Nextcloud Files, Office, Groupware | Shared files, collaborative documents, calendars and contacts, with data stored where you choose. |
| Version control & delivery | GitLab, CI/CD pipelines, container and package registries | Code, build runners and artefacts on systems you control, without competing for shared build capacity. |
| Applications & VMs | XCP-ng, Xen Orchestra | Isolated production, test and internal systems that can be cloned and restored without adding another monthly cloud instance. |
| Storage & backups | TrueNAS, ZFS, snapshots, replication | Snapshots, replication and independent backup jobs, with restore tests that verify the recovery path. |
| Monitoring | Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Alertmanager | Dashboards and alerts for service health, certificate expiry, backup freshness, storage capacity and hardware faults. |
| Networking | MikroTik, UniFi, WireGuard, VLAN segmentation | Separated networks and encrypted connections between locations and people working remotely. |
| Web & certificates | Traefik, Let's Encrypt, DNS-01 automation | Secure service access and certificates that renew automatically, including on devices that cannot renew their own. |
| Automation | Ansible, encrypted vaults, signed package repositories | Repeatable, reviewable changes instead of one-off commands that nobody can reproduce later. |
| Documentation | MkDocs, published from the same repository | Runbooks published from version-controlled sources, so documentation changes can be reviewed alongside system changes. |
| Private AI | Ollama, Open WebUI, local GPUs | Local models for work that should stay within your environment; external models can still be used when they are the better fit. |
| Media archives & cameras | Immich, Jellyfin, Frigate | Photo, video and camera archives with fast local access, controlled sharing and storage sized for large files. |
Open source, and who pays for what
Most of the stack uses software published under open-source licences. We do not charge for software we did not create. You pay for the hardware, the work required to make the components fit your needs, and any support or custom development you choose.
Design, configuration and implementation
yes
Maintenance and monitoring, if you want them
yes
Tooling, scripts and integrations we write for you
yes
Hardware
itemised
Third-party commercial licences or support, when requested
itemised
Selected open-source and community editions used in the agreed design
0
Per-user, per-device or per-camera fees from us
0
There is no mandatory selfhosted.life platform subscription. You pay once for design and implementation. Maintenance and monitoring are optional recurring services; if you stop them, the system and everything already delivered remain yours. Any third-party licence or support cost is shown separately before you approve it.
What goes back
Work on real deployments can uncover defects and missing documentation. Where we can share a useful reproduction, test result or fix without exposing customer information, we contribute it upstream instead of keeping a private patch that only we can maintain.
You could install all of it yourself. What we sell is time, experience choosing and integrating the right pieces, clear documentation, and ongoing operational responsibility if you want it.
Who this is for
Your company depends on digital systems, but maintaining infrastructure is not the work your customers pay you for. We take responsibility for the platform so your team can focus on its own work.
Startups
You need reliable systems now, but the workload does not yet justify a full-time infrastructure role. We provide a working foundation that can later be handed to your own team.
Small and mid-size companies
You have business applications, servers and cloud accounts, and your IT capacity is already full. We simplify the mix and take responsibility for systems that otherwise fall between suppliers.
Media and creative teams
Large files, working archives and cameras need fast local access, predictable storage and controlled sharing — without uploading every asset before someone can use it.
How it works
Tell us what you need in one email, with whatever detail you have. A rough description is enough to start.
We decide with you what belongs on-site, in a data centre or in the public cloud, then quote the hardware and work separately so you can see every cost.
We implement and document the system. If you want ongoing care, maintenance and monitoring start on day one rather than after the first outage.
Hands-on since
1995
More than thirty years of hands-on experience
Modern automation makes delivery faster and more repeatable. Experience since 1995 is what helps us choose dependable hardware, recognise fragile designs and plan for failures that only appear after months of real operation. You get the speed of current tools with judgement earned from running physical systems. For products with hardware-specific requirements, Trillinis Lab also develops firmware and custom Linux distributions with the Yocto Project.
Tell us what you need.
One email gets you a proposed solution and an itemised quote. If we are not the right fit, we will say so.
Request a quotehello@selfhosted.life