Digital sovereignty is the practice of keeping your data, communications, and infrastructure under your own control. These guides cover the tools and patterns that take you off the hyperscaler treadmill: self-hosted email, encrypted messaging, decentralised identity, hardware wallets, offline backups, and operational security practices that work in daily life. Not paranoia, prudence. Privacy is a right, not a suspicious activity. The goal is a dual persona that lets you participate in normal society without surrendering ownership of your digital footprint. Whether you are protecting a journalist source, locking down a business, or just tired of being the product, the approach is the same: own the stack.
The hosting landscape has fundamentally changed in the last three years. If you last looked in 2022, you probably still think the choice is “shared hosting for a tenner a month, or a VPS if you’re technical.” In 2026 there are four realistic ways to put a website on the public internet, and the right
How to Host Your Own Website in 2026: Four Realistic Options Read More »
In Barclays’ 2024 CIO survey, 83% of enterprise CIOs said they planned to move at least some workloads back from public cloud. Gartner forecasts worldwide sovereign cloud IaaS spending of $80 billion in 2026. The direction of travel is clear. But direction isn’t capability. I’ve spent 20 years building infrastructure – enterprise, cloud, and self-hosted.
The Cloud Exit Skillset: What Your Team Needs to Leave Read More »
How to Install Paperless-ngx with Docker (Go Paperless at Home) I have a filing cabinet in the spare room that I opened twice in the last five years. Once to file an insurance renewal, once to find a gas safety certificate that the letting agent needed in 48 hours and that took me two hours
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How to Install Jellyfin Media Server with Docker (Own Your Media) In December 2019, Plex added a free ad-supported streaming service to its apps. The media server I installed to watch my own content now shows me someone else’s ad-supported films in the same interface. Then on 29 April 2025, Plex made remote streaming of
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Why You Should Own Your Files I run Nextcloud in my homelab. It replaced Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud across every device in my household. The honest version of that story is that it took me two attempts to get it right, and there were weeks where I genuinely considered going back to Google. Nextcloud
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Microsoft just moved the goalposts. Again. On March 9th they announced Microsoft 365 E7 — branded “The Frontier Suite” — the first new enterprise tier since E5 launched in 2015. It goes GA on May 1st at £79 per user per month. I’ve spent 18 years watching Microsoft licensing evolve. Every few years the pattern
Published on 25 February 2026 | Homelab / Self-Hosting | 12 min read Right, so you’ve got Docker running on a spare PC or a Raspberry Pi. Maybe you followed a YouTube tutorial, maybe you just winged it. Either way – now what? I’ve been running a homelab for a few years now, and honestly,
5 Containers Every Homelab Should Run (2026) Read More »
From the field: I help enterprises move to Azure for a living. I have built the business case for cloud adoption dozens of times. And I self-host most of my personal services. This is not hypocrisy, it is the same risk assessment I apply professionally, pointed at a different problem. I help enterprises move to
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