Is anyone self-hosting a genuinely snappy and robust media hosting service for themselves? What’s your setup look like?

The best thing about Apple’s Photos on my iDevices is the speed at which everything loads. Even videos (usually) load reasonably fast over LTE. The user interface is decent enough and has a high percentage of features I’d like to have on the go. The on-device AI is awesome (recognizing / organizing faces and objects and locations).

I’d like to get away from iCloud for numerous reasons: the subscription, the chance the UX gets worse, privacy, ease of data ownership and organization, OS independence, etc.

I currently have a QNAP TS-253A with 8GB RAM, Celeron N3160 1.6GHz 4 core, (2) Seagate IronWolf 8TB ST8000VN0022 at about 98% capacity, Raid 1 . I mostly use it for streaming music and videos at home but I also stream music outside the house without issue. Movies don’t stream at HD immediately but once they cache up they’re good within a minute.

Some people have suggested this hardware should be sufficient. I feel like it’s archaic. What do you think?

I’ve tried Immich but find it to be slow and very limited with features. I’ve even tested hosting it on Elestio but that didn’t go too well. I’m not opposed to paying for offsite services but at that point it just seems like I should stick with iCloud.

I already have Plex running on my NAS so I use that for archiving but it’s way too slow to use for looking at pictures, even locally. QNAP has the photo app QuMagie with facial recognition and it seems alright but it’s agonizingly slow, if it works at all.

All of the self-hosted apps, in my experience, are well outside the scope of iCloud Photos’ speed and feature set. If I could even just test one that matched its speed, I could better assess whatever features they have.

What I’m not sure of is if I’m hitting a wall based on the apps, my hardware, or even my ISP (Speedtest reports upload: 250mpbs). The fact that apps like Plex and QuMagie suck even locally suggests to me it’s not an ISP issue (yet).

My NAS is already at capacity so it’s time for an upgrade of some sort. While I’m in the mindset, I wanted to see if there’s a better product I could use for hosting. My space and finances are not without limits but I’m open to ideas.

I realize I’m not a multi billion dollar company with data centers around the world but I feel like I should be able to piece something together that’s relatively comparable for less than an arm and a leg. Am I wrong?