Hey, c/selfhosted! Thanks to all who participated in my recent ‘2026 Self-Host User Survey’. This community contributed a bunch to this year’s increase in respondents (+52%), and I’m incredibly grateful for the support.
The results are visualized as usual via Chart.js. Happy to talk through any of the results or provide more details where things might not be clear.
New this year is a section on AI usage, a Linux distribution question, and the ability to overlay prior year responses on the charts for easier year-over-year comparisons.
Thanks again!
Great data, thanks for doing this!
I am pretty disappointed with the donation percentage. Pay for your FOSS, folks! Even if it’s just a dollar, every little bit helps, and you might make a small scale dev’s day. 🙂
You all should donate more. Even if it’s just 10usd a year or something. By the looks of it, there’s a lot of tenners to be gained
shout out to the three 80+ folks that self host!
“Most respondents use a VPN or reverse proxy for remote access, while 15% still use forwarded ports in some capacity.”
How was this question phrased? A reverse proxy still needs “forwarded ports in some capacity”…
A reverse proxy still needs “forwarded ports in some capacity”
Nitpicking and very specific case - but it is not necessarily true if you use a VPS to host the reverse proxy. I have a wireguard tunnel in pfsense where I configure my VPS as a peer and all communication between VPS and home happens over that tunnel. Doesn’t require me to open any ports in my home. This also lets me have two layers of access control - through allowed ip in wireguard config and through interface firewall rules in pfsense.
It was along the lines of, “How do you reach your apps/services outside your LAN?” I doubt anyone forwarding 443 for their proxy selected ‘forwarded ports’, but now you have my second guessing myself…
I understood as you explained here. Before I started using a proxy manager and a public domain I would have to forward the ports on my router for each service I wanted to access over the LAN (inside/outside).
I really appreciate your efforts with this. I avoided selfhosting for the longest time because “there wasn’t anything I needed that bad” to learn it and sink the time.
These surveys opened my eyes not just into cool projects but also things I didn’t realize were a pain that the FOSS community had already solved.
Sort of the state of modern video games: the ones you can self-host are just about all survival games. I have to go back almost 20 years to find a self-hosted FPS I enjoy.
Tried Sauerbraten? Warfork? Red Eclipse 2?
I really liked I am your Beast but I don’t think that’s multiplayer.
Yes, no, and I can only seem to find evidence of a first Red Eclipse, which I also haven’t played.
But I’m also not looking for something that’s just like Quake and Unreal Tournament. I have Quake and Unreal Tournament. There are all kinds of ways to spruce up a shooter with different mechanics and themes, but a lot of these games that still retain these features are intentionally throwbacks to the very familiar. I did pick up Angels Fall First this year, which has some ideas of its own, but for what I’m getting out of it, I’d probably choose to play Star Wars Battlefront II (2005, the good one that can be self-hosted) 99 times out of 100 and have a similar or better experience.
I miss the era of approximately Half-Life to Titanfall 2, where new shooters were coming out all the time, and they’d have a campaign, maybe co-op, and usually a competitive multiplayer alongside them. You’d end up with stuff like Crysis suit powers that make the standard deathmatch in Crysis Wars feel wholly unique, because they came up with a full campaign of use cases for how you might use those powers.
Heh. You like the good shit.
Played Geist?
It’s GameCube (so you’ll have to emulate it) but it’s 4 player. Dolphin might even let you play it online.
You can find in the dwelling of mr Vimm.
I have not. Reviews weren’t stellar for it at the time, so it was hard to justify $50 for it when I was like 13 years old, but I’ve got a friend with a copy, so maybe I’ll ask him to break it out next time I visit. We already break out 007: Agent Under Fire every now and then, which probably is my favorite multiplayer shooter.
It’s uneven but it’s good. Same vibes as OG Half Life. I won’t spoil it.
Agent under fire. A man of culture.
And here I am playing Hulk Ultimate Destruction and SMS like it’s 2005 all over again.
No school like old school. 🤜
Hm. More people use Arch Linux than Fedora for self-hosting.
(I’m one of them though)
(I’m one of them
thoughbtw):P
Debian btw
Ubuntu Server here, after a short stint on Proxmox that felt like extra layers for what I was doing with containers. I’m in the Nginx Proxy Manager camp too, running it on a small cloud VM with most of the hosts behind it limited to my Tailscale network, so only a couple of things face the public internet. On the forwarded-ports question, I’d guess a lot of people answered based on whether they opened ports at home, since a proxy on a VPS lets you skip that entirely. The year-over-year overlay is a really nice addition.
That is a very close spread on reverse proxies.
I also bet Forgejo is happy with that selfhosted number.Would have liked to seen the donations spread a bit closer.
I was surprised NPM was so low on the list. It is super easy to use.
