Down the Rabbit Hole: A Year of Self-Hosting Adventures

I'll be honest—I'd been curious about self-hosting for a while, but 2025 was the year I finally stopped thinking about it and actually did something. What had always seemed like a project I'd "get to eventually" became the thing I found myself doing during my nights and weekends. Now, nearly a year in, I'm genuinely surprised by how much this hobby has given back to me—not just in terms of skills, but in pure enjoyment.

If you've been thinking about starting your own homelab, let me share what I've learned along the way.

Your Homelab, Your Rules

Here's the awesome thing about homelabs: there's no "right" way to do it. Your setup can be as minimalist or as elaborate as you want it to be.

Maybe you start with a single Raspberry Pi sitting on your desk, running a handful of Docker containers. That's a homelab! Or perhaps you eventually find yourself with a full network rack in your closet, complete with services carefully segmented across different VLANs and orchestrated through Kubernetes clusters. That's also a homelab!

Your setup should evolve naturally with your interests and needs. Don't feel pressured to build a data center in your basement right out of the gate. Start small, experiment, and add complexity when you're ready for it. Your lab should grow with you as your skills and needs grow.

Breaking Free from Subscription Fatigue

Between streaming services, cloud storage, productivity apps, and photo backups, those monthly subscriptions add up fast. Self-hosting offers a compelling alternative: you pay for the hardware once and own your services outright.

The ecosystem of self-hosted alternatives is genuinely impressive. Take a look at awesome-selfhosted and you'll find open-source options for nearly everything. Need photo backup? Immich provides a fantastic Google Photos alternative that you control completely. Looking for password management, note-taking, or media streaming? There's a self-hosted solution for that.

Sure, there's an initial investment in hardware and some electricity costs, but for many people, the math works out favorably—especially when you consider you're not just saving money, but also gaining control over your data and privacy.

The Ultimate Learning Playground

If you work in tech or just enjoy learning new skills, a homelab is like having a sandbox that never gets boring.

For beginners, it's a fantastic way to get comfortable with Linux fundamentals. You'll learn the command line, understand file permissions, and get hands-on experience with system administration—all in a safe environment where breaking things is part of the process.

As you progress, the learning opportunities multiply. Want to understand containerization? Spin up Docker and see how isolated environments work. Curious about networking? Set up VLANs and experiment with firewall rules. Interested in infrastructure as code? Try managing your services with Ansible or Terraform.

The beauty is that you're learning by doing, not just reading documentation. When something breaks at 10 PM (and it will), you'll troubleshoot it, fix it, and understand what went wrong. These skills translate directly to professional environments, but you're gaining them on your own schedule and with your own projects.

It's a lot of Fun!

Okay, here's my "hot take": there's something genuinely satisfying about building and maintaining your own infrastructure. Watching your homelab evolve from that first tentative service to a sophisticated network of applications is incredibly rewarding.

There's a meditative quality to the tinkering—updating services, optimizing performance, organizing your setup just so. And when you successfully deploy a new service or finally get that tricky configuration working? That little dopamine hit is real.

For me, this past year has been both educational and entertaining. I've sharpened my engineering skills in ways I didn't expect, but I've also just had a good time. It's a hobby that happens to be useful, which is the best kind of hobby.

Taking the First Step

If this sounds appealing, my advice is simple: just start. Grab that old laptop gathering dust, install Ubuntu Server, and deploy one service you'll actually use. Maybe it's a Pi-hole to block ads on your network, or Jellyfin to stream your media collection.

Don't worry about having the perfect setup from day one. Half the fun is the iteration—the continual tweaking, learning, and improving. Your homelab journey is yours alone, and there's no finish line to race toward.

Welcome to the rabbit hole. It's cozy down here.