My Homelab: A Journey into Self-Hosted Services
Building out my home server infrastructure — hardware, software, lessons learned, and what I'm running now.
A couple years ago I inherited an old workstation and had a dangerous thought: “I wonder what I could run on this.”
The answer, it turns out, is everything.
The hardware
Current setup is a proper server now, not just an old desktop:
- The Rack — A small 15u, but with a shcoking amount of hawdware packed inside. From top to bottom, my UDM Pro, USW Pro Max 16, 12 port PoE injector, main server (Cobblestone, 4u), 15 drive bay (populated with 4tb drives, 3u), IP PDU, and the last few spaces are for tools, my power backup equipment, cellular failover, and a small IP KVM (the JetKVM Nano)
- Primary server — Ryzen 9750x3D, 128GB RAM, mixed storage (SSD for system/VMs, spinning rust for bulk storage)
- Custom UPS — learned this lesson the hard way. Small RV battery with power inverter and an IP controlled PDU.
What I’m running
The stack has evolved a lot. Current notable services:
- Proxmox — hypervisor, runs everything else as VMs or LXC containers
- Nginx Proxy Manager — reverse proxy for all the services, automatic SSL
- Gitea — self-hosted Git (GitHub mirror + private repos)
- Vaultwarden — Bitwarden-compatible password manager
- Jellyfin — media server
- Monitoring — Grafana + Prometheus + Loki, because you can’t fix what you can’t see
- This website — you’re looking at it
- TrueNAS — over 40TB of usable storage, with a cool 69TB of physical drive space
- Games and misc. services — over 40 game servers hosted via Pterodactyl and dozens of small services I use every day, including a file converter, n8n, NodeRed, and Home Assistant
The lessons
Backups are not optional. I run 3-2-1 backups: 3 copies, 2 local mediums (HDDs and SSDs), 1 offsite. Paranoid? Maybe. But I’ve also never lost anything important after… the incident. I now take daily rolling backups of my entire computer… minus my steam games library.
VLANs are your friend. IoT devices on one VLAN, lab stuff on another, trusted devices on another, and a completely isolated and restricted one for other tasks like malware analysis and more. If something gets compromised, collateral damage is limited at worst, but other safeguards jump into play before VLANs can really save anything.
What’s next
Eventually I want to set up a proper Kubernetes cluster on the homelab for learning purposes. Not because I need it, I definitely don’t, but because that’s sort of the point of a homelab.