Case study · my own kit
No Google, no Microsoft, no Dropbox, no stack of subscriptions bleeding you dry. My passwords, my files, my photos — even my own AI — all run on a server I built, in my own house, that answers to nobody but me. That's what Sovereign actually means.
One box, my whole digital life
Every password, encrypted, sitting on my server — not a company's I'm forced to trust.
A private ChatGPT-style assistant that runs offline and never sends a single word to the cloud.
Notes, files and photos synced across every device — no Dropbox, no Google Drive.
Ads and trackers blocked for every device on the network, before they ever load.
Nightly and encrypted, so nothing that matters is ever truly lost.
I know the second anything so much as hiccups — before it becomes a problem.
…and a good dozen more besides — a private git server, game servers, my own tools — every one isolated, every one humming along 24/7.
The machine
It's a custom Proxmox server — one physical machine quietly running a dozen separate, isolated computers at once. Under the hood: an Intel i9, 16 cores (a rare engineering-sample chip I hunted down and tuned to run rock-solid), 32GB of fast DDR5 memory, liquid-cooled, in a compact case with a live readout on the front. It runs around the clock and sips power doing it.
The whole network sits behind a hardened firewall that pre-emptively blocks tens of thousands of known-bad addresses out at the edge, a managed Cisco switch, key-only access, and encrypted remote access from anywhere in the world. Nothing's exposed that shouldn't be — because keeping other people's kit safe is the day job.
Every service up there is one you'd normally rent from a company that reads your data to sell you things. This is the opposite: you own the hardware, you hold the keys, and your data never leaves your house unless you say so. Convenient and private aren't opposites — you just have to build it right.
That's the whole idea behind Sovereign Tech. Most people have quietly handed their entire digital life — photos, files, passwords, even their conversations — to a handful of companies. You don't have to.
For you
Scaled to you, this could be a quiet little box in a cupboard that gives your family its own movie & TV library — your own Netflix, no monthly fee — plus a private photo library, password vault and file backup, all off the cloud, no subscriptions, nobody snooping. Or a proper self-hosted setup for a business that wants real control of its own data.
It's always bespoke — built around what you actually need and nothing you don't. The best first step is a straight chat about what you'd like to stop renting from big tech, and what you'd like back.
Tell me what you'd love to get off the big-tech leash — I'll tell you straight what's possible, and what it'd take.
