homelab-setup
Complete Homelab Setup Guide 2026: Hardware, Software & Security I've been running a homelab for three years now, and I've learned more from failures than successes. When I started in 2023, I made rookie mistakes—oversized hardware, undersized storage, and security practices that would make any
self-hosting
Self-Hosting Reality Check: Cost, Trade-Offs & Getting Started Self-Hosting Reality Check: Cost, Trade-Offs & Getting Started I switched my family from Google Drive and iCloud to self-hosted services three years ago. It was rewarding—and humbling. After running Nextcloud, Syncthing, and a dozen other services in my homelab, I'
homelab
Build Your First Homelab in 2026: Complete Setup Guide Build Your First Homelab in 2026: Complete Setup Guide I started my homelab journey three years ago with a single Raspberry Pi 4 and a backup drive. Today, I run 47 containerized services across a hybrid setup of Intel NUC and
homelab-organization
Organize Your Homelab in 2026: Setup Guide for Busy Admins My homelab used to look like a networking crime scene. Cables everywhere, drives stacked haphazardly, monitoring alerts I'd stopped reading weeks ago. Then my wife walked past the server closet and said, "This needs to change."
homelab
DIY IKEA Homelab Rack: Budget Server Setup Guide 2026 DIY IKEA Homelab Rack: Budget Server Setup Guide 2026 Six months ago, I stared at my growing collection of networking equipment—a used HP ProLiant DL360 Gen8, a Ubiquiti switch, a Synology NAS—scattered across my office floor. Commercial server racks
homelab
Repurpose 2016 Server Hardware for Homelab in 2026 Last updated: April 2026 | Reading time: 12 minutes Two years ago, a Craigslist seller literally handed me a Dell PowerEdge R730 from their 2016 refresh cycle. I still remember thinking, "Is this thing going to work with anything modern?" Fast
pfsense
Which Open-Source Firewall Should You Run: pfSense CE or OPNsense? You're sick of ISP-supplied routers and want a proper firewall appliance on your network—but you can't justify enterprise licensing costs. If you're evaluating pfSense vs OPNsense for a homelab, you're looking
homelab
The Backup Void: Why Your Data's Already Gone You've spent months configuring your Jellyfin instance, tuning your Nextcloud deployment, organizing 50TB of media across ZFS pools. Then your Docker host corrupts on a bad update, your SSD fails without warning, or a ransomware variant encrypts everything.
homelab
The Silent Killer of Homelab Dreams: Why Your 24/7 Lab Annoys Your Family Your homelab is mission-critical infrastructure for your family's services—but a 65dB server rack humming 24/7 is a mission-critical marriage problem. The homelab WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) isn't about hiding your
beszel
Why Beszel Beats Prometheus for Small Homelabs If you're managing more than three servers in your homelab, you need centralized visibility—but Prometheus + Grafana feels like overkill when you're running a NAS, a media server, and a Kubernetes node from spare hardware. Beszel solves this by
frigate
Why Frigate NVR on Proxmox for Self-Hosted AI Security Cameras You want AI object detection on your security cameras without sending video to the cloud or waiting 20 seconds for a notification while the burglar walks away. Frigate NVR is the answer—it's a lightweight, open-source NVR (network
open-webui
Why Open WebUI Beats the Alternatives for Local LLM Hosting You've got Ollama running on your homelab—solid choice—but you're stuck using CLI commands to chat with your models. Open WebUI changes that. It's a self-hosted web interface built specifically for local LLMs,