Self Hosting My Media Library With Jellyfin And Wireguard On Hetzner (2026)

Disclaimer: This post was written without the help of AI. Research for the self hosting setup (which docker images to use, Jellyfin vs. Plex) and the creation of initial configurations (docker-compose, wireguard) were supported by AI (among others like e.g. Reddit, Stackoverflow)

If you don’t care about my motivations and are only interested in the technical setup just directly jump to Self Hosting Setup!

For the time being I decided to sit it out. So November 2025 arrived and my Premium membership ended.

I decided to give Spotify’s free plan a try. How bad can it be? I had used the free tier 10 years ago and it was perfectly fine. How wrong I was!

The free tier forces shuffle after a certain amount of free choices. So while the tier might be free, your song choice is not. Although there are reports that Spotify supposedly got rid of this feature as of September 2025, I still encountered this restriction as of end of December 2025

I don’t remember these restrictions being in place back in the day, but I may be wrong. It might be a case of enshittification of the free tier?

Okay, fair enough: Companies need to make money, I’m not entitled to Spotify providing their services for free! For all those services I still pay for I certainly get an awesome user experience?

Across all streaming services I have noticed a decline in user friendliness, UX & UI.

All streaming services have seen price increases and / or introduced ads. I get it, companies need to make money. My day job consists of helping companies increase their revenues, it pays my bills!

The issue: These price increases are accompanied by a worse UX/UI. From a user perspective my interest lies in getting the best value for money!

Source: HackerNews