Selfhosted

They had the right product at the right time. No other free or paid alternative was that user friendly in allowing laymen in mixing and matching multiple disks and having redundancy

Doing that with pure Linux command line at the time it was inconceivable for 99% of users (at most a raid1 with mdadm over two drives could be easily attained) and windows home server initially was an alternative but Microsoft was completely misguided and "improvements" in Windows home server 2 completely killed it

Then they added docker support and it was even easier to self host everything.

But if they tried to launch today, with how mature are free alternatives, they would never reach critical mass adoption to be sustainable.

For example, I don't think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful

You’ve mistakenly conflated the Self Hosted community with the FOSS community. There is a lot of overlap in interests between the two, but the venn diagram of those communities are not at all a circle. UnRAID isn’t an exception to self hosting, it’s a textbook example of selfhosting.

It’s a similar thing with the SH community and HomeLabbing. All home labs are selfhosted obviously, but home labs are sandboxes for learning, testing and prototyping. A raspberry pi that runs one service your home depends on that you don’t tinker with outside of updates isn’t a home lab.

Proprietary doesn't necessarily have to be bad, obviously this will vary from person to person and who you ask. Personally Ive listened to enough podcasts with Unraid folks in them and read articles etc to be able base my trust in them and what they do.

Decent UI. Affordable lifetime pricing. Actually just-works. No retrospective enshittification. Free trial is actually free, not ad supported.

You get what you pay for, and you're not the product.

It’s less hassle than maintaining my homelab was when I used Ubuntu server. Just because I can do it the “hard way”, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy easy mode and not having to do much of anything.

They give you exactly what they promise with zero enshitification. It’s a solid product and was worth it to me to buy, just for the convenience.

I picked unRAID to be able to mix disk sizes. It also requires little maintenance in my experience, so that's also a plus.

If I've learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it's that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.

But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.

I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.

Off-topic, but if you want a competent Unraid alternative, then try Proxmox.

Has a nice UI, let's me mix and match disks, let's me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.

All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.

I don't know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.

Even in the open source community, the libre-ness of a product is just one of many factors. The fitness for a purpose, the initial difficulty of the setup, the continuous difficulty of operation and maintenance, the pace of development (if applicable), the professional or community support structure, the projected longevity of the product or service, and the general insanity of the people involved are all important factors that can, and often do outweigh the importance of open software.

Because it's easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!

Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you're doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.

The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.

The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.

They have (had?) a fairly generous free tier that works well for people starting out.

I ended up buying a license after evaluation because the UI provides everything I reasonably want to do, it’s fundamentally a Linux server so I can change things I need, and it requires virtually zero fucking around to get started and keep running.

I guess the short answer is: it ticks a lot of boxes.

Some don't care much about the license. Like how many people run Xpenology (hacked synology dsm) or Plex or stuff like that.

For me, it was the parity system and the fact that i could mix different disk sizes and the vm + graphic card pass-through setup. Unraid helped me to start in this world.

Years later, after gaining experience on all of that and investing in dedicated pcie card and disks, I've moved to truenas my data and containers.

Still using unraid for the vm part. But i plan to migrate to truenas too at some point.