A service discontinued. My self-hosting journey began in September 2023 when Google announced the shutdown of Google Podcasts in favor of YouTube Music. That decision became the spark that pushed me to look for alternatives.
I wanted a podcast platform with a clean interface and no unnecessary bloat, but finding one proved harder than expected. As a Spotify subscriber, I naturally tried moving my podcasts there first. It didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t for me. I disliked the lack of control, and mixing podcasts with my already messy music library offered no real benefit. What I wanted was a dedicated podcast player, nothing more.
I continued searching and tried a wide range of Android podcast apps, both free and paid. The pattern was always the same, features locked behind subscriptions, limited customization, and design choices I could not change. I strongly prefer one-time payments, and each new install ended the same way, brief hope followed by quiet disappointment.
Just as I was close to giving up, I stumbled across a discussion on Reddit which mentioned a hidden gem, Audiobookshelf.
It immediately stood out. After weeks of compromises, Audiobookshelf felt different. It was clean, customizable, and fully in my control. Best of all, it was free, open source, and self-hosted, a service that could not disappear because of a corporate decision. Suddenly, the problem I had been struggling with felt solved.
However, one obstacle remained. I had no real experience with self-hosting and only limited Linux knowledge from an old Raspberry Pi in the basement. I also lacked suitable hardware and wanted to avoid port forwarding entirely if possible. This felt like the obvious path, as I had nothing but bad memories from failed attempts during my Warcraft 3 and Command & Conquer days, games where port forwarding was essential if you wanted to host your favorite custom maps.
The simplest way forward without buying expensive hardware or having to predict my future needs was to rent a server instead of running everything at home. In December 2024, I signed up with Contabo, a German VPS provider, for €5.78 per month.
It gave me a shared virtual server with enough resources to get started, removed the complexity of home networking, and let me focus on learning self-hosting step by step, getting to know both Docker and volumes.
At the time, I was just looking for a podcast player. What I found instead was an entry point into self-hosting. Audiobookshelf has exceeded all my expectations, and this post only scratches the surface of how my setup has evolved since. I will dive deeper into that in the posts that follow.
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