I've been looking for self-hosted alternatives to applications and software that I use a lot, and it's caused me too much headache.

I use Google Drive and Google Docs a lot, plus I have RSS feeds on my phone, my PC, my laptop. Then there are the TO-DO lists, various calendars, and the constant reminder-emails that I send myself.

I want to free myself from Google's surveillance-machine. I also am an amateur web-developer and I figure I should be able to set up some kind of online office suite on the webspace that I rent.

I heard that OwnCloud, NextCloud, and SeaFile were all fantastic pieces of software that you can install on a webserver. I tried each of them on WebFaction but can't get either of them to function properly. When they do work they rely on more pieces of outside software (such as a certain kind of word processors installed in just the right way, in just the right place) which usually doesn't work.

Now I've got open questions on several different forums, regarding several different kinds of software, and I'm afraid they're all dead-ends. The software I'm trying to use is all built for big companies who own their own servers and have root control. There are too many moving parts and it requires too much control for this to be useful to me.

This is an ongoing problem for me! I feel guilty when I buy spaghetti sauce because I feel like I should just buy a thousand tomatoes and make my own giant batch of spaghetti sauce instead. I don't want to spend $15/month on DropBox's storage and editing services when I'm already spending that much on renting webspace where I should be able to host my own private apps. I don't want Google having control over ALL my data as they do, although I can't think of any practical drawback.

I'm re-evaluating my self-hosting plan. I can't have everything I want. It's counter-productive to spend an enormous amount of time trying to get productivity-software to work when there are already good pre-packaged solutions out there.