Self-Hosting Day 2026!

Hey r/minilab! 👋

We're ZimaSpace! You may know us better through ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube. We build personal servers and operating systems for people who love tinkering and self-hosting, making it easier to host your own services as part of everyday life.

Over the years, we've watched self-hosting culture grow into something incredibly diverse and active. Maybe it's time it had a day of its own.

So this year, together with r/minilab and a group of excellent self-hosting projects, we're launching the very first Self-Hosting Day 2026. We hope that, starting this year, September 25 can gradually become a day that belongs to the self-hosting community.

We'd love for you to share your setup, your journey, and your experiences, so more people can see what self-hosting can make possible and maybe find a reason to try it themselves.

Just share your self-hosting story in the comments below to join.

📅 Self-Hosting Day: September 25
🎉 Event Period: September 25 – October 25
🏆 Winners Announced: October 30, 2026 (EDT)

🤝 Meet the Self-Hosting Day Partners

Self-Hosting Day belongs to the whole community. A huge thank-you to the r/minilab mods for organizing this together with us, and to everyone here for giving us a place to meet, exchange ideas, and share what we're building.

We're also honored to have AdGuard, Emby, PhotoPrism, OpenClaw, Karakeep, and Blinko joining us. Some of these names may already be part of your setup. Others might become your next discovery.

AdGuard
AdGuard helps block annoying ads and online tracking, protect your devices from malicious content, and make browsing faster, safer, and cleaner. Beyond your home network, AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN, and Private AdGuard DNS can also help protect the devices you take with you.

Emby
Emby organizes your movies, music, photos, and live TV, then streams them from your personal server to the screens and devices you use every day.

PhotoPrism
PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, privacy-first app for self-hosted photo and video management. With smart search, automatic classification, face recognition, maps, and broad media format support, it makes large libraries easier to organize and explore on your own server.

OpenClaw
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent project built around privacy, model freedom, and local-first use. It lets users choose their own models and tools while keeping their data, and the technology they rely on, under their control.

Karakeep
Karakeep is a self-hostable "bookmark-everything" app for saving links, notes, images, and PDFs. AI-powered tagging, summaries, and fast search make it easier to organize what you save and actually find it again later.

Blinko
Blinko is an open-source note-taking project designed for quickly capturing and organizing ideas, helping you save thoughts the moment inspiration strikes.

Together, these projects, and everyone reading this post, show just how many different things self-hosting can make possible.

Now we'd love to hear your self-hosting story.

🎉 Join In!

Just leave a comment below. There's no fixed template and no "right" kind of story. We want to hear about your real self-hosting experience.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few ideas:

• Your setup: Tell us about your Mini PC, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or server rack. Photos and screenshots are welcome too!
• The apps you use: What self-hosted apps do you rely on every day?
• Your journey: Tell us about moving away from cloud services, lessons learned the hard way, or something you've been building recently.
• Your everyday life: How has self-hosting changed the way you, or your family, use technology?

Whether you've just built your first setup or have been tinkering for years, we'd love to hear your story.

Great giveaways from Self Hosting Day partners!

🎁 Awards & Giveaways

To make the first Self-Hosting Day even more fun, we've teamed up with our partners to prepare plenty of prizes for the community.

Whether you share a story that inspires others, get a little lucky, or simply join early, there's a chance to walk away with something.

🏆 Community Story Awards

Together with the r/minilab mods, we'll select 5 winners from eligible entries, considering authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Here's what each winner will receive:

🥇 1st Prize × 1

• 1 × ZimaBoard 2 1664
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🥈 2nd Prize × 2

• 1 × ZimaBoard 2 832
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🥉 3rd Prize × 2

• 1 × ZimaBlade 7700 with power supply
• 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
• 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
• 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🍀 Lucky Giveaway

We'll also randomly draw 100 winners from eligible participants who haven't won a Community Story Award. Each winner will receive one of the following software licenses:

• 35 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Personal · 1 Year
• 35 × AdGuard VPN · 1 Year
• 25 × Private AdGuard DNS · 1 Year
• 5 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year

🎁 Early Bird Treat

It pays to be early! The first 100 participants to submit eligible entries, based on comment timestamps, will each receive:

1 × ZimaOS Plus Lifetime License

A special thank you to AdGuard, Emby, and PhotoPrism for supporting the first Self-Hosting Day and providing these generous prizes for the community! ❤️

📋 Event Rules

Joining is simple:

• Share a real self-hosting story in the comments of this post between September 25 and October 25.
• Each person may submit one eligible entry. If you post multiple entries, only the earliest eligible one will count.
• Spam, plagiarism, duplicate content, mass AI-generated submissions, and purely promotional content are not eligible.
• Community Story Awards will be judged based on authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Upvotes may be considered as a sign of community interest, but they are not the only judging factor.

🏆 All winners will be announced on r/minilab on October 30, 2026.

For the full event rules, prize redemption details, and shipping information, please visit: the Self-Hosting Day 2026 event page.

❤️ A Day for the Self-Hosting Community

More than anything, we hope Self-Hosting Day brings us together to share what we've learned, discover hidden gems, and meet fellow self-hosters.

Spot a clever setup in the comments below? Ask how they got it running! See someone taking their first self-hosting steps? Recommend an app you can't live without. Know a simpler way to get something working? Pass it along!

A huge thank you to the r/minilab mods, AdGuard, Emby, PhotoPrism, OpenClaw, Karakeep, and Blinko for believing in this idea and bringing the first Self-Hosting Day to life with us.

The comment section is all yours. We can't wait to read your stories!

Best,

r/minilab & ZimaSpace