February 2026 has been one of those months that reminds us why the self-hosting community is so special, full of passion, rapid growth, but also the occasional reality check. On the positive side, Dockhand continues its incredible rise day after day. What started as a breath of fresh air is now becoming the go-to Docker management tool for thousands of us running serious home labs. It’s replacing Portainer at an impressive pace, delivering real quality-of-life improvements with every single update: cleaner UI, better multi-host support, rock-solid stability, and features that matter to self-hosters who care about privacy and control. And the best part? It remains completely free for personal use and 100% self-hosted. If you haven’t tried it yet, you’re really missing out. Dockhand has quickly become one of the most important tools in the modern self-hosted-from-home community.
Unfortunately, not every story this month was positive. A few days ago, I decided to remove the Tracearr guide from mariushosting after a conversation with the developer on Discord. He told me that my guide apparently did not meet his standards, specifically because I had recommended mounting the storage folders with the :supervised tag so that the data would survive NAS restarts and DSM firmware updates. During the same exchange he also stated that “the trademark will be in shortly for Tracearr” and that “the next path of mine would be seeking legal counsel as it certainly is toeing a line”, adding that it was “not the values we represent at Tracearr or want to be associated with”. Moreover, he raised the issue of the clean donation section in the steps in my blog. At that point I preferred to remove the guide entirely and step away from any further discussion. I’d rather dedicate my time and energy to projects and developers who maintain a constructive and respectful relationship with the self-hosting community.
This episode also explains why, when many of you ask me “ Marius why don’t you make a guide for X?”, I sometimes hesitate. A perfect example just happened with Huntarr, which has now been completely eliminated as a project (repo deleted, subreddit private). Huntarr was full of critical security vulnerabilities; apparently, it was exposing your passwords and all the API keys of your entire *arr stack to anyone on the network. According to voices active in the self-hosting community, the project was a textbook case of “vibe-coded” software: a development style where the creator relies heavily on AI prompts (“give me something that does this vibe”) instead of proper engineering, code reviews, security audits and testing. The result? Fast-looking features built on shaky foundations that collapse the moment someone looks closely. This is exactly why I’m cautious before recommending or writing full guides for new tools. Your data and your lab deserve better than vibe-coded experiments.
The self-hosting world keeps growing at a crazy speed, our communities are getting bigger and more active every month, and I’m genuinely happy (and sometimes protective) to be sharing this journey with you. The guides on mariushosting stay relentlessly up-to-date (it’s a ton of work, believe me), but if you’ve been following along, you’ve seen how I try to keep them crystal-clear, screenshot-heavy, and beginner-to-pro friendly even if you’ve literally never touched Linux, Docker, or a NAS before.
The mission is unchanged: turn complete newcomers into confident, independent self-hosters who can build exactly what they want. mariushosting is meant to feel like home: a reliable, no-BS spot where you always find peace of mind, step-by-step certainty, and the reassurance that your goals are within reach. It’s because of your support and encouragement that I keep going and like to give you only the best of my work and efforts! On mariushosting, you will see only top-notch content and resources.
Dockhand is a modern, self-hosted Docker management platform with an intuitive web interface for homelabs, small businesses, and enterprises. It simplifies container operations, stack deployments, and observability through real-time management (start/stop/restart containers, web terminals, file transfers), a visual Compose editor, GitOps auto-sync, metrics, logs, OIDC/SSO, MFA, vulnerability scans, and multi-host support via the open-source Hawser agent. You can deploy it quickly as a Docker container with no cloud dependencies or telemetry. It’s forever free for personal use. Note: Install Dockhand on Your Synology NAS.
Airstation is a self-hosted web app for streaming music over the Internet. It features a simple interface for uploading tracks and managing the playback queue, along with a minimalistic player for listeners. Under the hood, it streams music over HTTP using HLS, stores data in SQLite, and leverages FFmpeg for audio processing, all packaged in a compact Docker container for easy deployment. Note: Install Airstation on Your Synology NAS.
Penpot is the first open-source design and prototyping platform for product teams that allows true collaboration between designers and developers. The Penpot mission is to provide an open source & open standards platform to bring collaboration between designers and developers to the next level. Note: Install Penpot on Your Synology NAS.
Ocular is a small budgeting app as an alternative to Google sheet’s annual budget planner. Its goal is not to track individual expenses, work with multiple currencies at a time or anything related. Ocular is a simplistic, beautiful and straight-forward budgeting app to track your budget across the years. Easy to use, to get started and to set up. Note: Install Ocular on Your Synology NAS.
Ghost is a free and open source blogging platform like WordPress and Grav. Ghost is written in JavaScript and distributed under the MIT License, designed to simplify the process of online publishing for individual bloggers as well as online publications. Ghost CMS is actually used by millions of people. Note: Install Ghost on Your Synology NAS.
PrestaShop is an open source e-commerce web application committed to providing the best shopping cart experience for both merchants and customers. It is written in PHP, is highly customizable, supports all the major payment services, is translated in many languages and localized for many countries, and has a fully responsive design (both front and back office). Note: Install Prestashop on Your Synology NAS.
Planka is a free open source Trello-like kanban board for workgroups built with React and Redux. Note: Install Planka on Your Synology NAS.
OrangeHRM is a comprehensive Human Resource Management (HRM) System that captures all the essential functionalities required for any enterprise. The software is built to support teams of any size, including start-ups, SMEs as well as Large Multinational organizations. Note: Install OrangeHRM on Your Synology NAS.
Answer is an open-source knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more. Note: Install Answer on Your Synology NAS.
BookLore is a self-hosted web app for organizing and managing your personal book collection. It provides an intuitive interface to browse, read, and track your progress across PDFs and eBooks. With robust metadata management, multi-user support, and a sleek, modern UI, BookLore makes it easy to build and explore your personal library. Note: Install Booklore on Your Synology NAS.
Mini QR is a customizable QR code generator to create beautiful and unique QR codes. You can easily customize colors and styles and save the QR code in a SVG or PNG image. Note: Install Mini QR on Your Synology NAS.
Pi-hole is a Linux network-level advertisement and Internet tracker blocking application which acts as a DNS sinkhole and optionally a DHCP server, intended for use on a private network.. Note: Install Pihole on Your Synology NAS.
Leantime is an open source project management system for small teams and startups written in PHP, JavaScript and using MySQL as the database. It combines lean product development and agile project management into one platform so that users have the right features from start to finish. Note: Install Leantime on Your Synology NAS.
This post was updated on Tuesday / February 24th, 2026 at 9:24 PM