Hey ZimaSpace Community! 
We’ve always been building ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube for people who love tinkering and self-hosting, with the goal of making self-hosting simpler and a more natural part of everyday life.
Over the years, we’ve also seen the self-hosting community become more diverse, active, and creative. Maybe it’s time self-hosting had a day of its own.
So this year, we’re excited to join the r/minilab moderators and a group of amazing self-hosting projects to launch the very first Self-Hosting Day 2026! We hope that, starting this year, September 25 can gradually become a day that belongs to the self-hosting community.
We’d love to invite everyone to share your setups and experiences, so more people can see what self-hosting can make possible and find a reason to try it themselves.
Event Link: Self-Hosting Day 2026: Your Server. Your Story. – Zima Store Online
Self-Hosting Day: September 25
Event Period: September 25 - October 25
Winners Announced: October 30, 2026[EDT]
Meet the Self-Hosting Day Partners
Self-Hosting Day belongs to the whole community.
A huge thank you to the r/minilab mods for organizing this event with us, we’re also very excited to have AdGuard, Emby, PhotoPrism, OpenClaw, Karakeep, and Blinko joining us. Some of these names may already be part of your setup, while others might become your next discovery.
AdGuard
AdGuard helps you get rid of annoying ads and online tracking, protects your devices from malicious threats, and makes browsing faster, safer, and cleaner. Outside your home network, AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN, and Private AdGuard DNS can continue protecting your devices wherever you go.
Emby
Emby organizes your movies, music, photos, and live TV, and streams them from your personal server to all your screens.
PhotoPrism
PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, privacy-first self-hosted photo and video management app. It supports smart search, automatic organization, face recognition, maps, and a wide range of media formats, making it easier to manage your library on your own server.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw is an open-source AI Agent project focused on privacy, model freedom, and local deployment. It gives users the freedom to choose their own models and tools while keeping control over their data and technology.
Karakeep
Karakeep is an all-in-one self-hosted bookmarking app for saving links, notes, images, and PDFs. With AI-powered tagging, summaries, and search, it makes organizing and rediscovering saved content much easier.
Blinko
Blinko is an open-source note-taking project designed for quickly capturing and organizing ideas, helping you save inspiration the moment it appears before it slips away.
It’s these amazing projects, together with everyone reading this announcement, that show just how much is possible with self-hosting.
Now, we want to hear your self-hosting story.
Join the Celebration
Simply head over to the official r/minilab event thread and leave a comment.
There’s no fixed format and no single right answer. We want to hear any real self-hosting story you’d like to share.
If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few ideas:
- Your Setup: Tell us about your Mini PC, NAS, Raspberry Pi, server rack, or anything else you’re running. Photos and screenshots are very welcome.
- The Apps You Use: Which self-hosted apps do you use every day and couldn’t live without?
- Your Journey: Share your experience moving away from cloud services, lessons learned, mistakes you made, or a recent project you’ve been working on.
- Your Everyday Life: How has self-hosting changed the digital life of you or your family?
Whether you’ve just finished your first setup or have been self-hosting for years, we’d love to hear your story.
Prizes & Giveaways
To make the first Self-Hosting Day even more fun, we’ve prepared plenty of prizes together with our partners.
Community Story Awards
Together with the r/minilab moderators, we’ll select 5 winners from eligible submissions based on authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and value to the community.
First Prize × 1
- 1 × ZimaBoard 2 1664
- 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
- 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
- 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
Second Prize × 2
- 1 × ZimaBoard 2 832
- 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
- 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
- 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
Third Prize × 2
- 1 × ZimaBlade 7700
- 1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
- 1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
- 1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
Lucky Giveaway
In addition to the Community Story Awards, we’ll randomly select 100 eligible participants who did not win a Community Story Award, with each winner receiving one of the following software licenses:
- 35 × AdGuard Ad Blocker · 1 Year
- 35 × AdGuard VPN · 1 Year
- 25 × Private AdGuard DNS · 1 Year
- 5 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
Early Bird Treat
Join early and there’s an extra reward!
Based on the timestamp of Reddit comments, the first 100 participants who submit an eligible entry will each receive:
1 × ZimaOS Plus Lifetime License
A special thank you to AdGuard, Emby, and PhotoPrism for their generous support of the first Self-Hosting Day and for contributing so many prizes to the community! 
(For complete event rules and more information about our partners, please visit the event landing page.)
This Day Belongs to the Self-Hosting Community
We hope Self-Hosting Day can become more than just an event.
We want it to be a place where people share experiences, discover great projects, and meet others who enjoy building and running things themselves.
If you see an interesting setup, ask how it was built. If you meet someone who’s just getting started, recommend an app you love. Found a better alternative? Share it with everyone.
Once again, a huge thank you to the r/minilab moderators and all of our community partners for believing in this idea and making the first Self-Hosting Day possible.
See you in the comments. We can’t wait to hear your story. Let the celebration begin!
Best,
ZimaSpace Team