"Elf-Disclosure" for Jan 2025
January was a quiet "public-facing" month, as our various team members and developers were either focusing on holidays, or focusing on in-progress projects. We've quietly added a few new apps / providers to our stack, giving them time to "smoke test" before publically announcing them.
To get us started, here are some geeky stats for Jan 2024, followed by a summary of some of the user-facing changes announced this month in the blog...
Stats
Focus | Nov 2024 | Dec 2024 | Jan 2025 |
Discord members | 2219 | 2328 | 2427 |
YouTube subscribers | 579 | 618 | 654 |
TikTok followers | 28 | 28 | 28 |
X followers | 88 | 90 | 93 |
The stats below illustrate CPU cores used (not percentage). These stats only cover the DE cluster at present, we're working on cross-cluster metrics aggregation to make this data more useful.
Tenant CPU load on average is the same as th previous month, but since the graphs now (more usefully) relect 24h of time, it's harder to see minor variations in usage over time.

kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 3253m 20% 48989Mi 38%
fairy02 2219m 13% 38351Mi 29%
fairy03 3600m 22% 35117Mi 27%
gretel01 1976m 16% 31328Mi 48%
gretel02 882m 7% 20904Mi 32%
gretel07 1617m 10% 27626Mi 21%
gretel08 2241m 14% 41597Mi 32%
gretel09 1145m 7% 28556Mi 22%
gretel10 1587m 9% 27677Mi 21%
gretel11 5257m 32% 40538Mi 31%
gretel13 681m 4% 64061Mi 49%
gretel14 944m 5% 26839Mi 20%
gretel15 1624m 10% 35381Mi 27%
gretel16 1876m 11% 29543Mi 22%
gretel17 2683m 16% 40151Mi 31%
gretel19 1813m 11% 25495Mi 19%
gretel20 1739m 10% 39069Mi 30%
gretel22 756m 4% 20475Mi 15%
gretel23 791m 4% 28535Mi 22%
gretel26 1452m 9% 24623Mi 19%
gretel27 1378m 8% 19278Mi 14%
gretel30 6652m 41% 31794Mi 49%
gretel31 2038m 12% 82366Mi 63%
gretel33 2047m 12% 30128Mi 46%
gretel37 3329m 20% 27933Mi 21%
hansel01 3332m 27% 49937Mi 77%
hansel02 2432m 20% 43139Mi 67%
hansel03 1523m 19% 32627Mi 50%
hansel13 2077m 25% 45012Mi 70%
hansel14 3078m 25% 43553Mi 67%
hansel15 1652m 13% 46544Mi 72%
hansel16 2741m 22% 42101Mi 65%
hansel17 1620m 13% 30437Mi 47%
hansel18 2203m 18% 40614Mi 63%
hansel19 6146m 51% 48192Mi 75%
hansel20 1712m 14% 25911Mi 40%
Last month (Dec)'s for comparison:

kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 2937m 18% 76426Mi 59%
fairy02 1869m 11% 55905Mi 43%
fairy03 701m 4% 79816Mi 62%
gretel07 1011m 6% 44513Mi 34%
gretel08 3809m 23% 56575Mi 43%
gretel09 2334m 14% 52190Mi 40%
gretel10 605m 3% 37128Mi 28%
gretel11 2564m 16% 51529Mi 40%
gretel13 693m 4% 86985Mi 67%
gretel14 1566m 9% 47162Mi 36%
gretel15 1870m 11% 45069Mi 35%
gretel16 2009m 12% 42307Mi 32%
gretel17 2758m 17% 51826Mi 40%
gretel19 613m 3% 42791Mi 33%
gretel20 2339m 14% 46208Mi 35%
gretel22 654m 4% 39190Mi 30%
gretel23 2001m 12% 54414Mi 42%
gretel24 1264m 7% 26617Mi 20%
gretel25 541m 3% 43809Mi 34%
gretel26 914m 5% 41056Mi 31%
gretel27 3908m 24% 38143Mi 29%
gretel29 1371m 8% 51807Mi 40%
gretel30 623m 3% 18808Mi 29%
gretel31 3176m 19% 54015Mi 41%
gretel33 841m 5% 28607Mi 44%
gretel37 3779m 23% 63097Mi 49%
hansel01 3718m 30% 50790Mi 79%
hansel02 558m 4% 27102Mi 42%
hansel03 1065m 13% 23775Mi 37%
hansel13 730m 9% 20304Mi 31%
hansel14 3016m 25% 49720Mi 77%
hansel15 3220m 26% 52838Mi 82%
hansel16 1362m 11% 32593Mi 50%
hansel17 674m 5% 26916Mi 41%
hansel18 566m 4% 21870Mi 34%
hansel19 2093m 17% 53533Mi 83%
hansel20 1968m 16% 56627Mi 88%
This graph represents memory usage across the entire (DE) cluster. Tenant memory is relatively stable and consistent with the previous month.
Other high consumers of RAM:
- csi-rclone: used for mounting all rclone-compatible storage mounts, primarily RealDebrid libraries
- kube-system: the Kubernetes control plane, including the cilium agents which manage the networking / policy enforcement (currently 11K flows/s across 30 nodes)
- traefik: all inbound access to the cluster / services
- mediafusion: an excellent (but RAM-hungry!) Stremio addon

kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 3253m 20% 48989Mi 38%
fairy02 2219m 13% 38351Mi 29%
fairy03 3600m 22% 35117Mi 27%
gretel01 1976m 16% 31328Mi 48%
gretel02 882m 7% 20904Mi 32%
gretel07 1617m 10% 27626Mi 21%
gretel08 2241m 14% 41597Mi 32%
gretel09 1145m 7% 28556Mi 22%
gretel10 1587m 9% 27677Mi 21%
gretel11 5257m 32% 40538Mi 31%
gretel13 681m 4% 64061Mi 49%
gretel14 944m 5% 26839Mi 20%
gretel15 1624m 10% 35381Mi 27%
gretel16 1876m 11% 29543Mi 22%
gretel17 2683m 16% 40151Mi 31%
gretel19 1813m 11% 25495Mi 19%
gretel20 1739m 10% 39069Mi 30%
gretel22 756m 4% 20475Mi 15%
gretel23 791m 4% 28535Mi 22%
gretel26 1452m 9% 24623Mi 19%
gretel27 1378m 8% 19278Mi 14%
gretel30 6652m 41% 31794Mi 49%
gretel31 2038m 12% 82366Mi 63%
gretel33 2047m 12% 30128Mi 46%
gretel37 3329m 20% 27933Mi 21%
hansel01 3332m 27% 49937Mi 77%
hansel02 2432m 20% 43139Mi 67%
hansel03 1523m 19% 32627Mi 50%
hansel13 2077m 25% 45012Mi 70%
hansel14 3078m 25% 43553Mi 67%
hansel15 1652m 13% 46544Mi 72%
hansel16 2741m 22% 42101Mi 65%
hansel17 1620m 13% 30437Mi 47%
hansel18 2203m 18% 40614Mi 63%
hansel19 6146m 51% 48192Mi 75%
hansel20 1712m 14% 25911Mi 40%
Last month (Dec 2024)'s for comparison:

kubectl top nodes
NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%
fairy01 2937m 18% 76426Mi 59%
fairy02 1869m 11% 55905Mi 43%
fairy03 701m 4% 79816Mi 62%
gretel07 1011m 6% 44513Mi 34%
gretel08 3809m 23% 56575Mi 43%
gretel09 2334m 14% 52190Mi 40%
gretel10 605m 3% 37128Mi 28%
gretel11 2564m 16% 51529Mi 40%
gretel13 693m 4% 86985Mi 67%
gretel14 1566m 9% 47162Mi 36%
gretel15 1870m 11% 45069Mi 35%
gretel16 2009m 12% 42307Mi 32%
gretel17 2758m 17% 51826Mi 40%
gretel19 613m 3% 42791Mi 33%
gretel20 2339m 14% 46208Mi 35%
gretel22 654m 4% 39190Mi 30%
gretel23 2001m 12% 54414Mi 42%
gretel24 1264m 7% 26617Mi 20%
gretel25 541m 3% 43809Mi 34%
gretel26 914m 5% 41056Mi 31%
gretel27 3908m 24% 38143Mi 29%
gretel29 1371m 8% 51807Mi 40%
gretel30 623m 3% 18808Mi 29%
gretel31 3176m 19% 54015Mi 41%
gretel33 841m 5% 28607Mi 44%
gretel37 3779m 23% 63097Mi 49%
hansel01 3718m 30% 50790Mi 79%
hansel02 558m 4% 27102Mi 42%
hansel03 1065m 13% 23775Mi 37%
hansel13 730m 9% 20304Mi 31%
hansel14 3016m 25% 49720Mi 77%
hansel15 3220m 26% 52838Mi 82%
hansel16 1362m 11% 32593Mi 50%
hansel17 674m 5% 26916Mi 41%
hansel18 566m 4% 21870Mi 34%
hansel19 2093m 17% 53533Mi 83%
hansel20 1968m 16% 56627Mi 88%
Last month's spikes on the contended nodes (hansels) turned out to be related to in-cluster backups, rather than tenant-driven load, and this misconfiguration was resolved. Hansel and Gretel traffic patterns are now more aligned to what you'd expect, comparing December to November:
Why Hansel & Gretel?
Bundles are datacenter-agnostic, but nodes are specific to each datacenter, and we needed a way to differentiate US nodes from DE nodes. The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel originates in Germany 


Last month (Dec 2024)'s for comparison:


Retrospective
January saw changes in debrid-land, with TorBox pivoting away from Plex users to becoming more of a Stremio-only debrid provider, Riven and Comet slowing/stalling their development, and a new addon (AIOStreams) and infinite-library-building app (cli_debrid) being released.
Mooar apps
The following apps made their debut on ElfHosted during Jan 2024:
AIOStreams
AIOStreams is a clever new Stremio addon by Viren, author of one of the most popular guides linked to r/StremioAddons.
AIOStreams combines the search results from other addons, sorting / filtering them nicely and presenting them to you in one of several beautiful, parsable formats.
Two "killer features" for AIOStreams are:
- The inclusion of torrentio results (more on that below)
- The support of MediaFlow Proxy, allowing any results from any addon to be proxy-streamed through your MediaFlow Proxy instance (avoiding RD IP bans and the like)
A few days after an ElfHosted-sponsored public AIOStreams instance was deployed, torrentio started blocking all VPS / server ranges entirely. It may have been co-incidental timing, but the change made it clear that torrentio doesn't want automated scraping from VPS/server ranges (quite reasonably, since one VPS can probably generate 1000x the load that an average Stremio user can).
As a result, we disabled torrentio scraping on the public AIOStreams instance, but continue to support it via private instances, on the basis that there is user accountability in the case of abuse.
There's a dedicated #elf-aiostreams channel in Discord to discuss the addon, and for direct-to-developer interaction.
CWA Automated Book Downloader
Calibre Web Automated Downloader is an app intended for use alongside Calibre-Web Automated, whose role it is to search and download ebooks from online web sources. It augments the existing OpenBooks app, which does a similar thing, from IRC sources.
More details in this blog post
CLI Debrid
cli_debrid is a new project inspired by the original plex_debrid, and is currently very actively developed by godver3.
Ironically, the first thing you'll notice about cli_debrid is its web UI. The UI handles all the settings / config / scraping options (farewell, annoying plex_debrid menu structure!), and the app itself still runs in a CLI within the UI.
We have cli_debrid versions of all of our bundles, and a dedicated #elf-cli-debrid channel in Discord for your direct-to-developer access.
godver3 is also an Elf-illiated developer (see more below), so 33% of your cli_debrid subscription funds his ongoing development!
CineSync
A challenge with offering non-zurg-based Debrid storage mounts has been how to separate movies from TV shows, so that Plex has different libraries to scan for different types of content.
We have bespoke options for various debrid providers (Zurg makes this easy enough for RealDebrid, DebriDav does the same with the Aaars for Premiumize, and DavDebrid for DebridLink), but running multiple providers at the same time can get messy, and AllDebrid doesn't work for us with DavDebrid due to API restrictions.
CineSync is a standalone project which will look at multiple source locations (think RealDebrid combined with AllDebrid!), sort the contents based on regexes and TMDB lookups, and create a separate set of structured symlinks sorted by content type, resolution, etc. These symlinks are maintained by CineSync (so they're deleted if the source is deleted), and CineSync is able to (with a Plex token) tell Plex to refresh a library when new content is added.
A few users have been trialling CineSync for the last month or so - it can be too slow on large libraries (development is ongoing in that area), but it's also super-handy for the Zurgling design, when users want a better-sorted view of their content than the mess of inconsistently-named folders that Zurg reflects from RD.
DebriDav
DebriDav is sort of like a combination of Zurg and RDTClient. It both simulates a qBittorrent API (for the Aars to add downloads), and a WebDAV server (for rclone mounts), and is an ingenious workaround for the 1TB "cloud storage" limit on Premiumize.
DebriDav works not by adding cached items to your library (which would hit the 1TB limit), but simply storing its own "placeholder" file representing items known to be cached, and serving that via WebDAV as if it were the full file.
This fake-file trickery means that (as with symlinks), the file the user "sees" can be renamed, moved, etc, but it's only when the file is attempted to be played, that the actual content is streamed from Premiumize. Since the file is not actually added to your Premiumize, just played directly from the cache (like when you use Stremio with Premiumize), it doesn't incur cloud-storage costs. Premiumize "fair use" points are still required to stream from the cache.
We have a few enthusiastic users testing the Premiumize implementation, on the understanding that it's new-and-may-break, and a recent release has also enabled EasyNews support (currently entirely undocumented on our end, but hit me up if you'd like to test).
Once the existing trials have had a little more time to bed in (and especially EasyNews users), we'll do a bigger announcement.
Torrentio blocks servers
As noted in the AIOStreams introduction above, torrentio no longer permits access from server ranges, presumably to prevent abuse and to reserve their (freely available) resources for the widest range of standard Stremio users.
Respecting this position, while the VPNs on our Stremio addons avoid this ban for private instances, we are not going to attempt a VPN-based workaround for Plex-library-building apps such as Prowlarr, plex_debrid, etc.
ElfHosted's super-charged internal Zilean instance, combined with our internal (un-ratelimted) MediaFusion access, provide very good coverage of cached content already, and users can add a range of external scrapers and indexers to their tools, without imposing unfairly upon torrentio.
Stremio Addons SSO
Initially we made Stremio addons fully public (they need to be public for Stremio to use them, since it doesn't support auth), but users raised valid concerns about the security of their API credentials when sharing their addon with friends and family.
In early Jan, we added SSO support to the /configure
pages of the addons, such that in order to configure an addon, you'll need to be signed into your ElfHosted account. The addon can be used (and shared) without SSO though, a compromise between security and practicality.
Additionally, some addons (AIOStreams and MediaFusion currently) support user-managed encryption schemes, so that a shared addon URL doesn't expose any sensitive data.
More details in this blog post.
Comet cools
The Comet Stremio Addon has been semi-functional since the debrid providers withdrew their cache endpoint checks in November. With the help of StremThru, we've restored some ability to work with RD/AD/DL, but development on the "rewrite" branch to properly address this, is currently on hold.
If Comet is working for you currently, then continue to use it, but if you're having issues, we should note that they're unlikely to be fixed in the short term, and we'd suggest transitioning to MediaFusion, which now also has Jackett support (for searching your own indexers), and the ability to proxy-stream using MediaFlow Proxy.
Open an #elf-help ticket if you'd like advice re transitioning.
TorBox turns
Torbox has made it clear that they're not to be used for "infinite library" setups, to the point that cached items in your library will be removed after 30 days of inactivity, and that efforts to circumvent this expiry are classified as "abuse".
TorBox also requested Riven remove their TorBox integration, since this was observed to be a common vector for automated abuse, so as of the next published release of Riven, TorBox support will be removed (there are no longer any ElfHosted Riven+TorBox users).
Riven recedes
On the heels of the TorBox change, Riven's development team took a 2-month hiatus during Dec/Jan, to rest and recuperate, and many user issues / bugs went unanswered / unfixed, causing some users to question whether Riven was abandoned.
The development team has re-organised and brought on another front-end developer and project-management skills, but has made it clear that Riven is a passion project, to be progressed as and when the developers have the time and the enthusiasm.
For ElfHosted users, this means we can no longer reasonably expect Elf-specific bugfixes / features "at pace", and users who find themselves "stuck" are advised to transition to the classic Aars stack, or try out the new-but-energetically-developed cli_debrid.
Open an #elf-help ticket if you'd like advice re transitioning.
Now that we have a workable way to integrate Premiumize as a debrid provider into Plex libraries, without the 1TB cloud-storage limit, we intend to polish up our Premiumize-integrated offering.
We're pursuing a special deal with Premiumize (TBD), but in the short-term, we've been given a collection of 14-day trial vouchers for Premiumize, for Plex users who want to try it out.
More details will follow once DebriDav settles, and if a special Premiumize deal can be reached, but open an #elf-help ticket in the meantime to request your Premiumize trial voucher!
US Cluster speed fixes
Due to the gradual way we grew out the US cluster, we ended up in a situation where our cluster CNI was using VXLAN tunnels between publically addressed nodes (on different subnets) to provide our network overlay. While not wrong, this is inefficient and hard to debug.
Additionally, the integration of tailscale on a node level seemed to cause unwanted interaction, "amplifying" tunneled traffic between all the cluster nodes, and effectively creating a hard-to-debug intermittent speed problem which only affected some of the users, on some of the nodes, some of the time.
There are some technical limitations to the hosting configuration which led to this setup, but during a few glowups towards the end of January, we worked around these to get rid of the tunnels (and the tailscales), and as a result we now have optimal speeds in the US cluster again.
We've recently been quiet about encouraging migrations from DE to US until the speed issue was resolved, but now that it's been put to bed, we'll be suggesting that US users test their speed at https://speed.elfhosted.com, and migrate their stack if it's significantly to their advantage.
Coming up
US East Coast DC
Yes. I know. We talk about this every month. The latest from CrunchBits as of 30 Jan is that they're waiting for their provider to make space for new gear, and our order (placed months ago but not paid yet) is a priority.
Watch this space (as usual).
Elf-illiate program trial
We have an automated referral program, making it possible for happy Elfies to "pay it forward" by referring us to friends, and receiving a $10 credit against their account if this referral converts.
During January, we transitioned our (previously manual and dumb) developer contributions system to a more advanced "Elf-illiate" program, which allows us to calculate and pay out our participating open-source developers for a portion of subscription fees.
Unlike the referral program, the affiliate program requires approval, but pays out directly in cash, as opposed to account credit. The idea is to encourage users with an "audience" (elf-influencers?) to spread the word about ElfHosted, in return for a percentage of commission on sales.
We'll cover this in a detailed blog post during February, but if you're interested in helping with an initial trial, start your Elf-illiate application here.
Even mooar apps
Apps currently requested can be found (and submitted!) here
Notable suggestions:
ElfGuides (ongoing)
We've made videos about how to drive our most popular setups, but given the tools and apps change so fast, the videos very often become out-of-date. Re-recording a video simply to address a change a single tool in a larger workflow can be tedious and time-consuming, so we've been exploring another option.
The "ElfGuides" are a collection of ScribeHow documents, assembled modularly from a collection of "Scribes" (screenshot-driven guides), which can be mix/matched up to provide a detailed guide per-stack (there are more than 30 variations now!). When a tool in the stack changes, updating the guides is just a matter of updating the individual "module" covering that tool.
If you've been a long-time Elfie, you'll not have seen any guides, but they're emailed to new subscribers as they start their subscription!
The most popular app stacks are covered in the ElfGuides currently, but given the variety / rate of change we face, the effort to maintain these is... ongoing.
Your ideas?
Got ideas for improvements? Send us an EEP (ElfHosted Enhancement Proposal) here!
How to help
Another effective way to help is to drive traffic / organic discovery, by mentioning ElfHosted in appropriate forums such as Reddit's r/plex, r/realdebrid, and r/StremioAddons, which is where much of our target audience is to be found!
Join us!
Want to get involved?
Want to get involved? Join us in Discord!
What users say..
Here's what some of our usersfriends say..
I am new here, but today I learned realized that Elfhosted is one of the best free and open source software communities I've seen, and FOSS communities have been at the center of my life since the 90s (Perl, PHP, Symfony, Drupal, Ethereum, etc.). Great open software built by great people who care = great community, and that is something special.
You've done an amazing job @Funky Penguelf with the platform you provide and this place has an awesome mix of active community caretakers and software creators that I've seen here so far like BSM, Spoked, LayeZee and other elf vengers. Keep up the energy, productivity and community and take time to enjoy it and appreciate each other!




@skwah (Discord)
I self host and share a fully automated ‘arr stack with Plex. Been doing so for around 4 years. Also recently got into real debrid and hosting a Comet and Annatar for Stremio. The amount of time and head banging I’ve put into it is in the hundreds to thousands of hours. From setting it up to keeping it running smoothly. Let’s not forget the cost of my server and how much it cost to keep it running.
Anyway I wanted to see what ElfHosted was about to compare. Yeah I had the whole thing setup in just a few hours. It also passes the headache of maintaining it to ElfHosted. Will I keep it no because nerdy things and maintaining my server are my hobby and quirky passion project. Will I recommend it to my friends who don’t have the money up front to buy a server, the knowledge to maintain it or desire.
Just my server alone was $2k. Power cost to keep it on yearly is $250ish, annual memberships to RD, Usenet and indexers are around $100. Then whatever a value my free time at. Which is currently at minimum my hourly pay at work or more. Yeah so take the monthly cost of all that and compare to ElfHosted Ultimate Stream package at $39 monthly, add RD to the cost and get nearly all your time back is incredibly cheap.
Lastly it seems like a lot of people forget how quickly an ultimate cable package used to cost. Or how quick paying for every stream service would add up to. Which when using ElfHosted with RD is essentially and more what you get. Quick hint it’s far above the asking price.




/u/MMag05. (Reddit)
As a happy Elfhosted customer—who also self hosts MANY things across about 10 severs (dedicated, VPSes, and VMs running on Synology), I wouldn’t switch to self hosting the services I get from Elfhosted. They just work with very little effort configuring things, and the support the owner and his team provides is second to none. Plus I love being part of a fledgling—but quickly growing—enterprise.




/u/jatguy. (Reddit)
I recently found ElfHosted and decided to start out with the Infinite Starter Kit. Within a week I realized that this was for me and upgraded to the Hobbit plan. Give it another week and I was up to the Ranger plan.
I just love the simplicity and the fact that things just work. For years I've ran a home server and between the constant maintenance and always upgrading harddrives, it became apparent I wanted to make it easier on my self. Enter ElfHosted.
Setup was super easy with the guided documentation and the discord community. It seems that somebody is available at all hours of the day to help with questions. I started with the Aars, which I knew from my prior hosting... but saw a newer product called Riven. I decided to jump in feet first. I enjoy being on the front end of an up and coming replacement for the Aars and will soon be upgrading to the annual plan!




@.theycallmebob. (Discord)
I’ve been using this service for a while now, and honestly, it’s a game-changer compared to anything else I’ve tried for managing my media library. The support is fantastic—super quick, and if the staff aren’t around (which rarely happens), the community steps up right away. I can’t imagine going back to any other platform.
Before this, I had my own setup with a NUC, NAS, and tools like Sonarr and Radarr. It worked pretty well for a while, and my internet speed was high enough to stream without any buffering. But in the end, it wasn’t worth the time or headache of managing all the storage and keeping everything running smoothly.
Now, with this service, everything runs smoothly in 1080p+ with no buffering issues. The interface is really easy to use, which makes managing everything a breeze. Plus, having a whole community of smart people available for guidance is a huge bonus.
I was sold from the start, which is why I quickly upgraded from a 1-month to a 3-month subscription, and I’m planning to switch to a 1-year plan soon. This service totally pays for itself, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. It’s been really impressive.




@seapound (Discord)
Best possible options for anyone looking for the do-it-all option along with the best customer service ive experienced in this space so far. Id rate it a 6 if I could but its limited to 5/5...




@hashmelters (Discord)
(responding to a Reddit thread re the cost of ElfHosted vs mainstream streaming / self-hosting):
I didn't know that the goal of this project was to compete with large companies running/renting entire DCs. I was under the impression that the goal of this project was to manage the updating of almost selfhosted applications on a shared platform with other users. Basically, be my sysadmin for me.
That being said, paying for services is the 'easy button'. There is a real world cost incurred for the time saved. Time is money. Time is the most valuable currency that exists. Once time is spent, it's forever lost, one cannot retrieve it again (yet). In my mind, there are 3 options for use of time with respect to: mainstream, selfhosting, elfhosted.
-
mainstream - my time is valuable and I don't want curated content and I don't care what content that I have the ability to consume. I only like what's popular.
-
elfhosted - my time is valuable, I want my own curated content without being forced to browse past the same damn entry 500 times just to find out that I can't watch the movie I want because it's not available in my current location or was removed last week from mainstream providers.
-
selfhost - I care about costs and I have nothing but time to waste or I want to learn about the backend of the systems involved. I'll pay for my own VPS/homelab, electricity, manage the OS, manage app updates, figure out how to make the apps talk nice to each other, create my own beautiful frontend.
I know how much my time is worth, does that reddit poster know how much their time is worth? Without knowing what you are worth, you can't make effective capital expenditures with respect to the time it will take to recoup the capital.
I know I don't need elfhosted at all for my use case. I choose to stay with elfhosted because it's my 'easy button'. It's an efficient capital expense for the amount of time it saves me managing my own hardware, apps and saves me electricity costs. I'm also in a situation where I don't have upload bandwidth from my home to serve HD content to myself remotely. If I lived back in a city, I would still be here. My time is worth $$/hr.




@cobra2 (Discord)
"Just wanted to check in here and let @Darth-Penguini and anyone/everyone else know...WOW. I have been struggling with storage for years, maintenance of Docker containers, upkeep, all of it. Elfhosted is so freeing. It's an amazing service that I hope to be a member of for a long, long time!"




@Fingers91 (Discord)
"I just have to say, I am an incredibly satisfied customer. I had been collecting my own content for nearly 20 years. Starting off with just a simple external HD before eventually graduating to a seedbox with 100TB of cloud storage attached and fully automated processes with Sonarr and Radarr . However, the time came when the glory days of unlimited Google Drive storage ended. I thought my days of having my full collection at my fingertips via :plex: were behind me, until I found Real-Debrid and ElfHosted.
Now I essentially have the exact same access to content as I had before, but even better. Superior support and community involvement. Content is available almost immediately after being identified. A plethora of tools at my fingertips that give me more control and automation than ever before. Wonderfully well done and impressive! I am looking forward to being a customer for a very long time! Massive kudos to @funkypenguin 🤟




@BSM (Discord)
"I would recommend ElfHosted to anyone. It has been great so far and made life a lot easier than running my own setups. If you’re in the fence give them a try and help support this great community."




Zestyclose_Teacher20 (Reddit)
"thanks for the help and must say this is the best host I every had for my server 🙂 10/10 🙂 All other places I have try have I got a lot buff etc. Your host can even give me full power on a 4K Remux on 200GB big movie file . That's damn awesome 😄"




@tjelite (Discord)
"What an amazing support system these guys have Chris and Layzee i think it was! Both are very patient with me even though I am a newbie at all this. Very thorough and explained everything step by step with me
I couldn’t ask for anything better than the service I have received by these guys! Happy happy client❤️"




@dead.potahto (Discord)
"Very happy customer. Great service"




@ronney67 (Discord)
"Very good customer service, frequent updates, and excelent uptime!!!!!"




@ed.guim (Discord)
"I had my own plex-arrs setup on hetzner for years. Yesterday I deleted everything as elfhosted has gone above and beyond it. And it has a fantastic, active community as well! Very friendly, helpful and like-minded folks always willing to help and improve the system. Top notch!"




@alon.hearter (Discord)
"Absolutely Amazed with the patience and professionalism of all Elf-Venger Staff including bossman penguin❤️"




@dead.potahto (Discord)
"@BSM went above and beyond to make sure I had all the one on one support needed with my sub. Thank you for your patience! Elfhosted continues to be Elftastic !!"




@bfmc1 (Discord)
"really enjoying the service from elfhosted. The setup is really easy from the guides on the website. And the help on the discord channel is really quick."




@jrhd13 (Discord)
"Support is amazing, and once you find a setup which works best for you it works perfectly, very happy 😊"




@fiendclub (Discord)
"great fast service, resolved my problem and really friendly"




@allan.st.minimum (Discord)
"Great service and sorted out a billing issue super quick and easy."




@scottcall707 (Discord)
"Very friendly support, resolved a problem with my account! I also appreciate the community that has been built around the service!"




@leo1305 (Discord)
"excellent customer service and very fast replies"




@yo.hohoho (Discord)
"Loved the simplicity, experience and support"




@y.adhish (Discord)
"Very friendly help as always, problem solved, one happy elf here!"




@badfurday0 (Discord)
"Great Helpful and Fast support. Thanks!"




@.mxrcy (Discord)