You already did this once
It worked for a year. Then a disk filled on a Sunday, an update broke mail, and you realised you had become the on-call engineer for your own house.
You did not fail at this
You stopped being paid to do it. Running mail properly is a job — the records that keep your mail out of spam folders (DKIM), the blocklists, backups you have actually tested. Doing it for free, at night, forever, is the part that does not work.
Same software. Someone else’s Sunday
Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Immich, a real mail server — the same things you chose, on hardware I buy and run, under your domain. You keep the control. You lose the pager.
You are not locked in either
The registrar account stays in your name. You hold the backup key. If you want it back, you take it back — documented, standard formats, no export ticket.
The honest catch: this costs real money, because it is a person’s time rather than a subscription. See what a setup includes.
Why it stopped being fun
The backup nobody tested
The nightly job ran for two years. The first time it was needed, the archive was empty — and there was nobody to be angry with.
The consultant who left
Someone set it up and moved on. No documentation, no handover, and now nobody knows what runs where.
None of that was a technology problem. It was nobody being accountable for it on a Tuesday afternoon.
What you get that you did not have
Service documentation
You get guides for every service: how to use it, how to import data, how to set up apps on your devices. Everything you need to get started.
A restore that has actually been tested
Twice a year the backups are restored for real and the result goes into your report. You are welcome to watch. That is the part that never happened at home.
Questions
What if something breaks?
Message me. Monitoring usually tells me before you notice, and what I owe you when it happens is written down rather than left to me.
What if you are ill or away?
Monitoring and backups keep running either way. What pauses is change, not the service — the response targets are written down, and what happens if I stop for good is too.
Can you take over what I already built?
Yes — the data, not the box. Everything on the stack is standard software with an import path, and mail moves like any other migration. Your old machine retires; the new one is bought and run by me, and it is included in the price.
How much storage do I get?
1 TB to start, expanded on request at no extra charge.
What happens if I leave?
I ship you the SSDs. Your files, as they are, on drives you own.
Can you manage my domain?
Yes — move it to my registrar, or give me access to yours.