Homelab
Mini-PCs, NAS, Proxmox, and a Tailscale tailnet. Hobbyist-grade ops.
The setup of choice for self-hosters, homelab enthusiasts, and people who want to learn ops by doing.
Hardware
- ★ Mini-PCs — Beelink, Minisforum, GMKtec, Intel NUC. $200–500 buys you a quiet 6–32 GB RAM machine that runs everything below.
- Used enterprise — Dell PowerEdge R-series / HP ProLiant on eBay; cheap big iron, loud and power-hungry.
- Raspberry Pi 5 / Pi cluster — fun but limited; great for Pi-hole / Home Assistant / IoT.
- NAS — Synology / QNAP for Plex / time-machine; or build your own with TrueNAS / Unraid.
- Networking — UniFi (or OpenWrt / OPNsense if you want full control).
Hypervisor / OS
- ★ Proxmox VE — free open-source Debian-based hypervisor with a great web UI. The default for homelabs in 2026.
- TrueNAS Scale — ZFS NAS that also runs containers + VMs; great if storage is the focus.
- Unraid — paid, friendly, mixed-disk parity. Very popular.
- XCP-ng — Citrix-derived hypervisor; less common.
- Plain Debian / Ubuntu Server with Docker + Tailscale — fine for one box.
- Bare-metal Talos / k3s — for k8s practitioners who want to learn.
Connectivity
- ★ Tailscale — connect home boxes to your phone / laptop / cloud VPSes without opening ports.
- Cloudflare Tunnel — expose specific services to the public internet without a public IP.
- WireGuard + Headscale — DIY Tailscale.
- Dynamic DNS (DuckDNS, Cloudflare API, no-ip) — if your ISP rotates IPs.
Common workloads
- Home Assistant — home automation; the killer app for many homelabs.
- Frigate / NVR — security camera with ML object detection.
- Pi-hole / AdGuard Home — network-wide ad blocking + DNS.
- Plex / Jellyfin / Emby — media servers.
- Nextcloud / Immich — file / photo cloud.
- Bitwarden / Vaultwarden — password manager.
- Paperless-ngx — document scanning + OCR.
- Audiobookshelf, Calibre-web, Navidrome — books, audiobooks, music.
- PrivateBin / FreshRSS / Wallabag / Linkding — your own internet plumbing.
- Gitea / Forgejo — self-hosted git.
- n8n / Activepieces / Windmill — workflow automation.
- Outline / BookStack / Wiki.js — wiki / docs.
- Uptime Kuma — monitoring with a great UI.
Discovery / inspiration
- awesome-selfhosted — exhaustive list of self-hostable services.
- r/selfhosted / r/homelab — daily inspiration.
- TechnoTim, Christian Lempa, Jim's Garage, Network Chuck — YouTube tutorials.
- YunoHost — distribution that makes installing dozens of services trivial.
What's good about this
- You learn an enormous amount. Networking, DNS, TLS, storage, monitoring — all hands-on.
- Privacy. Your photos, files, passwords stay on your hardware.
- Cost over years. A $400 Beelink runs forever; $0 monthly recurring (after electricity).
What's annoying
- Power outages = data risk. A small UPS is a great purchase.
- ISP issues affect your "production." Get a backup connectivity plan if you care.
- Family-tier reliability. "The internet's broken" → you broke the internet.
- Heat / noise. Mini-PCs are quiet; rack servers are not.
Pick this if…
- You want to learn ops by doing.
- You self-host services for personal / family use.
- You're building a side project before committing to paid infra.
- Privacy / sovereignty is a value of yours.
Skip if "downtime" matters to anyone other than you, or if your time is worth more than $50/hr that you'd rather spend on hobbies that aren't infra.