Homepage is great. I like that you get little snippets from the apps it links through but is more customisable than something like Heimdall which does similar. It’s become my go-to having tried pretty much every other dashboard out there over the years.

It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.

I moved from Organizr to Homepage via Heimdall.

I had no end of issues with Organizr. It felt like something broke with each update and performance was pretty bad (not to mention some apps just not working with it). Seemed to be pretty common when I last tried it a couple of years ago, there were lots of similar complaints.

The good thing about Homepage is that the widgets mean you rarely have to go in to each app’s ui, so it actually saves me time.

Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.