From Scratch to Self-Hosting: The Homelab Journey

Setting up a homelab is more than just a tech experiment — it’s a deep dive into the world of self-hosting, network design, and infrastructure automation. This series explores the journey of building a homelab from scratch.

Homelab Setup Series: Self-Hosting Essentials

Building a homelab is a rewarding endeavor that combines technical curiosity with hands-on experience in self-hosting, networking, and system administration. This series documents the process of setting up and maintaining a homelab environment from the ground up.

Motivation Behind Self-Hosting

Self-hosting provides control, privacy, and customization over services that generally needs relying on third-party cloud providers.

  • Privacy & Control: Data remains on personal infrastructure, reducing reliance on third-party services.
  • Cost Efficiency: Ongoing subscription fees for hosted platforms can be avoided.
  • Customization: Services and applications can be tailored precisely to specific needs and workflows.

What This Series Covers

This homelab journey includes a variety of technologies and concepts:

  • Networking & Security
    Configuring pfSense, managing VLANs, and writing custom firewall rules.
  • Virtualization with Proxmox
    Deploying and managing virtual machines and LXC containers.
  • Containerization with Docker & Kubernetes
    Running services in containers and orchestrating workloads.
  • Storage & Backups
    Setting up NAS, configuring ZFS, and automating data protection.
  • Monitoring & Automation
    Integrating Grafana, Prometheus, and Ansible for observability and configuration management.

Planned Configuration Topics

Firewall & Router with pfSense

Virtualization Layer with Proxmox

Docker & Reverse Proxy Setup

This series will explore practical steps, challenges, and considerations for building a functional homelab, optimized for learning, experimentation, and long-term use.