A homelab on a budget: what you actually need (and what is a waste)
Measured, not imagined: what a home stack really costs in RAM, disk and watts. A real 3-year homelab total cost for a used mini PC vs a VPS — and the gear that is pure waste.
#homelab
The one-person homelab: what to run, what to skip, and the honest tradeoffs of owning your own infrastructure.
13 posts
Making a homelab power-efficient (measured, not guessed)
Homelab power consumption measured, not guessed: real RAPL readings of idle power vs busy on an i7-8550U, a CPU governor A/B test, and an honest checklist for a power-efficient server.
Raspberry Pi vs mini PC vs VPS: where should the service actually run?
A decision, not a shopping list: Raspberry Pi vs mini PC vs VPS judged on real measured CPU, disk and CPU-steal numbers from a laptop and a 1-vCPU VPS, plus power consumption, TDP, public IP and the mesh-VPN split.
BGP in a homelab: BIRD, FRR, and how far to go
A practical guide to BGP in a homelab: what the protocol actually does, when multi-homing, ISP failover, or your own IPv6 PI space justify it, the BIRD and FRR options, the concepts (AS, prefix, local-pref, route filtering) you must understand, a minimal config, and an honest recommendation.
A local smart home: no cloud smart home with Home Assistant and Zigbee
Why cloud-default smart homes are a liability, how a local smart home with Home Assistant, Zigbee, Z-Wave and local MQTT works, how to pick devices that survive if the vendor dies, and the honest hard parts nobody mentions.
ZFS basics for people who just want snapshots (and won't lose data)
A no-theory ZFS basics guide: the four concepts that matter (pool, dataset, snapshot, scrub), the commands you actually type, why ZFS snapshots are not backups and how zfs send receive fixes that, the honest ZFS ARC answer for small machines, the ECC myth, and how to recover.
btrfs vs ZFS for a homelab: what I'd actually pick, and why
A practical btrfs vs ZFS comparison for a homelab: what they share (checksums, snapshots, send/receive, RAID-like redundancy), where they diverge (in-kernel per-file vs integrated volume management and RAIDZ), the memory/ARC and licensing trade-offs, and a recommendation per scenario.
Home network segmentation: why, and how far to go
A practical guide to home network segmentation: the real risks from IoT gear and lateral movement, the options ranked from a free guest network to a VLAN home network with a managed switch, a concrete topology, firewall rules, and an honest take on how far to go.
Proxmox vs plain Linux for a homelab: honesty over hype
Proxmox vs plain Linux is not a holy war. Here is what a homelab hypervisor actually buys you, what it costs in patching, RAM and backup work, when each option wins, and the pragmatic middle path with systemd-nspawn, podman and real backups.
The best self-hosted apps I actually recommend in 2026 (and what to skip)
The self-hosted software I actually recommend in 2026: one app per job — Vaultwarden, Gitea, Syncthing, Jellyfin and more — each with a one-line why, a rough footprint note, and what it replaces, plus the self-hosting tools that are overhyped and the rule for choosing well.
Mesh VPN comparison 2026: Tailscale vs ZeroTier, NetBird, Nebula, EasyTier
A mesh VPN comparison for 2026 — Tailscale vs ZeroTier, plus NetBird, Nebula and EasyTier — judged on control plane, data plane, L2 vs L3, NAT traversal, self-hosting and lock-in. No stale pricing tables, just the tradeoffs that decide a self-hosted VPN.
What I self-host in 2026: the awin-x self-hosted stack
The self-hosted stack I actually run in 2026 — one public VPS at the front door, a private overlay network behind it, plus Gitea, log-based analytics, file sync, a password vault and mail — with an honest RAM/effort/sanity note for each, the services I refuse to self-host, and what beginners should skip on day one.
Building a private mesh VPN with EasyTier across my homelab machines
I replaced a hub-and-spoke WireGuard setup with an EasyTier mesh VPN: one overlay network name and secret, peers that punch through NAT for direct P2P paths, and a relay only when they can't. A concrete homelab walk-through — install, form the private mesh, verify routes, and expose a service.