Home labs are great. They are a good learning tool to understand systems in _isolation_. They're terrible for understanding emergent properties of production

Home labs are great. They are a good learning tool to understand systems in _isolation_. They're terrible for understanding emergent properties of production systems and how to defend yourself against active and passive attacks. Critically you also need to know how to unwind an attack after you have been bitten by one. These are the most important parts of "self hosting." Otherwise, you might be getting in the habit of building big rube goldberg machines that are never going to be possible to deploy in any real production scenario. Make it real once in a while.