Getting Started with your own Homelab

Ever wanted to run your own servers at home but weren't sure where to begin?

A homelab is your personal playground for learning, experimenting, and self-hosting—whether that means running a media server, blocking ads network-wide, automating your smart home, or just satisfying your curiosity about how this stuff actually works.

You don't need a rack of enterprise servers or a dedicated room. You can start with hardware you already own.

We'll walk through several practical entry points for building your first homelab:

• Raspberry Pi — Small, cheap, quiet, and surprisingly capable for many homelab tasks
• Proxmox — A free, powerful hypervisor for running multiple virtual machines on spare or dedicated hardware
• Unraid — A user-friendly NAS and VM platform popular with the homelab community
• Docker on your existing computer — The lowest-barrier way to start experimenting with self-hosted apps today

We'll also touch on:

• What people actually run on homelabs (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, game servers, Nextcloud, and more)
• Hardware options at different budgets—from "free" to "I found a deal on eBay"

Who this is for: You don't need any prior experience—just curiosity. Whether you're a developer wanting to learn infrastructure, someone tired of paying for cloud services, or just the kind of person who likes tinkering, you're in the right place.

Bring your questions, your partially-formed project ideas, and your "is this a terrible idea?" scenarios. We'll figure it out together.