The tools, and why.

Self-hosting is often sold as “free”. It isn't: you swap a monthly subscription for hardware, electricity, and somebody's time keeping it patched. The sum only works when you're paying per user for something simple, the team is growing, and the service isn't one your customers see directly.

The article walks through the arithmetic with example numbers for a ten-person office: file sharing, password management and an internal wiki. It also lists the services I'd never self-host for a small firm, starting with email.

n8n is a workflow tool: boxes joined by lines, each box doing one step. For clients the useful part is that the boxes are visible. Six months on, you or another developer can open it and see what happens to an incoming email without reading code.

It runs on your own server, so your data doesn't pass through another company's automation platform. I don't use it when a process needs heavy data processing, or when it's simple enough that a twenty-line script is clearer.

Language models are good at reading and drafting, and occasionally confidently wrong. The fix isn't a cleverer model; it's deciding in advance which actions need a person. My rule: anything that spends money, leaves the building or can't be undone goes into a queue.

In practice the queue becomes the most valued part of the system. Staff stop doing the typing and start doing the checking, which is the part that needed their judgement anyway.

The database is the part of your software you'll keep longest. Interfaces get rebuilt; the data stays. PostgreSQL is open source, supported by every major host, and understood by a very large pool of developers.

That means if you outgrow what I've built, or want to move supplier, your records come with you in a standard format. The article explains what to ask any developer about where your data lives.

Most small firms have backups switched on. Far fewer have ever tried getting something back from them. This piece explains the 3-2-1 rule in plain terms, what restic does differently, and the twenty-minute monthly check I run for care-plan clients.

Smaller open models now handle sorting, extraction and short summaries well enough for many office jobs, on hardware costing about as much as a good laptop. They're slower and less capable than the big hosted models, so the trick is matching the model to the job.

The article covers which tasks I'd keep local (anything with health, legal or HR data), which I'd send to a hosted model, and how to tell the difference.

An expired security certificate is one of the most common reasons a small business site suddenly shows a scary warning. Caddy handles certificates automatically, with a short, readable configuration file. I use it on almost every client server.

Spreadsheets are brilliant until several people edit them at once, someone builds a formula nobody else understands, and the file becomes the one thing the office is afraid to touch. This note lists the warning signs and what a sensible first step looks like. Often it's still a spreadsheet, just a better-organised one.