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My home servers are not a homelab
- p_ing 1y agoNo one will honestly want to know but you can just say "I have a few computers and a switch in the garage".
- vhodges 1y agoHow about 'On Premise Micro Data Centre" :-p Doesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)? There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
- p_ing 1y agoWhich premise is this based on?
- vhodges 1y agoSorry, did I get it wrong? I only ever see it as onprem ;).
- aspenmayer 1y agoI think they were making a kind of play on words on your misspelling. It is short for on premises.
- vhodges 1y agoNo, worries, I knew, I couldn't remember if it had the s or not... I'll have to look up the etymology.
- p_ing 1y agoJust a tease :-) On-premises means in a physical location, i.e. data center (or garage) in this context. On premise would mean based on an argument/inference.
- vhodges 1y agoNo offence taken :). Just today I saw a post (on Reddit) 'Mauling' over whether to get a Framework 16 or not (I assume that English was not their native tongue). Me? I would have just let the bear have it ;-p
- up-n-atom 1y agohome edge
- cjtrowbridge 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoBe kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bombcar 1y agoI prefer to consider them munitions. See: https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
- CobaltFire 1y agoI actually really feel this. Before I retired I had a homelab in the learning, testing, experimenting sense. I didn't run anything for home "production" on it because the downtime wasn't appreciated. Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills. So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
- bee_rider 1y agoIt is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting. Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
- breput 1y agoHas it? How many PiHole, ESPHome, and other random Raspberry Pi Home Assistant "servers" are out there? I suspect it has never been more popular. On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products. [0] https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-06-27/ https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-06-27/
- petesergeant 1y ago> that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again. Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever. The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
- haiku2077 1y agoMesh Wireguard VPNs like Tailscale/Zerotier/etc. have brought it back. Now you can self-host all sorts of stuff and your ISP just sees regular VPN traffic like a remote worker. Handy for self-hosted movies/TV, photos, ebooks, and NAS.
- barkingcat 1y agothat's the definition of the home datacentre.
- ranger207 1y agoMy home server is definitely also a lab. Like they say, everyone has a dev environment; some people are lucky enough to also have a prod environment
- jumploops 1y agoJust call it a puddle :) 1. No fault tolerance or high availability 2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed 3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants) On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
- OccamsMirror 1y agoBack in the day you set up a homelab with enterprise level hardware so that you could gain experience on hardware and platforms you otherwise wouldn't have access to. Cisco firewalls, VMWare Hypervisors, vSan, etc.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoI'll run ESXi 7 Enterprise Plus on a 2x 7402 96 thread, 512 GiB lights-out manageable system with 16 TiB of SSD and 140 TiB of HDD (in a 4U JBOD dual path SAS enclosure) at home until the wheels fall off. Attached UPSes have environmental monitoring including temperature and humidity.
- dheera 1y agoI have a rack for convenience, not education. It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBuy a house now. It's usually cheaper since apartments (in expensive metro areas) are often tantamount to setting money on fire. :o) Where I live now (in a house) is way, way cheaper and I get regional co-op 2.5 Gbps internet for $90/month.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoYeah I've posted a few times here and there that selfhosting and homelabbing are different concepts with different goals. You might use the same hardware but what solutions you choose will differ based on your goals. For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
- treve 1y agoHome rack!
- aspenmayer 1y agoWhy I never! You will address the lady of the house with the honor and respect she deserves! /s
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoAnd never mention the work rack!
- burnt-resistor 1y agoSpicy rack.
- CompoundEyes 1y agoDomicile servers? I took from the article that the term homelab makes it sound like the use case is trite, hobbyist or not serious.
- haunter 1y agoIf home data center than this gentleman takes the crown https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs https://youtu.be/-b3t37SIyBs
- tehlike 1y agoIt's pedantic - it's what's known as a homelab. I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things. It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need. Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.
- petesergeant 1y agoIs it really a lab if you can't break it without stopping things working that you'd like to continue working?
- tehlike 1y agoI restart my server and break prod sometimes.
- juahan 1y agoWent to the site pricetracker.wtf, tried one example search and Cloudflare blocked me. Before that it gave a few 500 errors. Cloudflare Ray ID: 957b4f2ee9b40b9c
- tehlike 1y agoWhat country are you from, and what url did you try? Email in profile. Please reach out
- JimRoepcke 1y agoLAN
- adfm 1y agoSeriously, this! OP has a LAN with a server(s) running local services. A home lab isn’t for them and that’s fine. They obviously recognize that others like to call their local setup a home lab. At an institution, it would be called a computer lab and has been since they’ve been around. Businesses have various names (closet, colo, noc, etc.) but they’re all servers and networking infrastructure. Maybe gear is the deciding factor. A home lab would more likely use professional gear where if you’re merely self-hosting with SOHO gear, it’s just a LAN. No lab needed.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoDMZ
- mindslight 1y agoI'm in the homeprod camp. The lab is on the other side of the room with the scope etc. Although come to think of it most of the electronics I do these days is fixing things, so maybe that should be considered production too. argh.
- udev4096 1y agoA perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere. Does OP have nothing productive to say other than dunking on the term? Since when does "homelab" resemble to anything concrete? Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
- brookst 1y ago“My 1967 Camaro that’s on blocks with a couple of body panels off is not a ‘project car’”
- zxexz 1y agoNo, at this point it’s more is a permanent art installation :D For real though, I have several cars on blocks at the moment. I can’t think of a single way to rationalize not calling them projects, even though when they were put up it was just going to be a “quick fix”. At least I finally got one in a state where I felt comfortable donating it.
- brookst 1y agoYeah, as soon as you’re arguing the semantics of a common phrase it’s a sign of denial or attempted spousal appeasement.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nradk 1y agoWell, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)
- sieabahlpark 1y ago[dead]
- shmoe 1y agoproduction environment @ home
- leohonexus 1y agoI call it my "homeprod" - but then, what happens if your infra spans multiple sites, and the cloud? Then it's just "prod" at that point. Probably best to just call it your "personal infra / servers", or if you have a family, "family servers".
- phuff 1y agoI present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes. So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on. It's not a home "lab for experimentation.". It's a home "lab for getting work done."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- somat 1y agoI call it my house-mind. However in my case it definitely is a homelab, as I am always tinkering with it and the router/server ratio is way to high.
- zxexz 1y agoI call it my deprod, or home office nonproductivity suite. Or fire hazard. Or “those f**ing wires”. I’ll usually refer to just a piece of it, like “my computer”, “my weird ARM switch”, or “that engineering sample that a guy sold me at the Flea for $10 and still hasn’t died after 5 years of being on”. I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
- senectus1 1y agodont be such a sook. if you're not making money off it, its a homelab. If its just infrastucure to run your house its then you wouldnt be blogging about it. your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting. which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
- hmottestad 1y agoI definitely have a homelab, though I’ve tried to keep mine concealed and out of the way. It’s fairly reliable, but so overkill I wouldn’t want to talk to loudly about it in fear that people would burst my tiny little bubble of justification. I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button. But I’m not OP.
- schmookeeg 1y agoYou have a homelab. If this colloquialism continues bothering you, seek help. Of the psychiatric variety.
- shmerl 1y agoHome network describes it sufficiently, no need to reinvent the wheel for terms.
- nunez 1y agoSame. I have a pile of machines in a closet connected to a 10GbE switch that host some internal services. Homelabs do become more important when you're doing tech sales for server based software, but I try my best to run things on my laptop, or, when that fails, the cloud.
- queenkjuul 1y agoI run a 'production' 'home server' in my 'homelab' that runs a dozen or so services used by myself and my friends. Just use the word we all use and get over it, dude.
- joshka 1y agoIt sounds like the concern here is that the OP is over-indexing on the use case for a home lab being a place to learn, and not a place to be productive. > But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects. > But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too. If you want to split hairs on naming, then the problem here is that you're imputing an overly strict definition onto the term 'homelab' to not include your use case, complaining that your use case is different to this definition, and then failing to see that the term is generally used loosely enough that it does your use case. Call it what you will, but from your description of things, you're using the server and associated tech as a homelab. I'd allow you to call it a "it's not a homelab, but" if you want permission to use a different term... ;P
- philwelch 1y agoOP has a homelab. Normal people don’t have rack-mounted servers in their homes to “self-host” ten services for their family. If you have the skills to do that kind of thing it may very well make sense to do so but you’re basically signing up to do that as a hobby. And that’s fine! Hobbies can be productive! Some people keep chickens as a hobby and feed the eggs to their families. But if you’re running rack mounted servers in your house as a hobby, that’s called a homelab.
- thefz 1y agoSaw in /r/homelab a guy runningenterprise grade NASes with an idle power draw of 1KW. I think this is insane. Most posts on Reddit are performative, not just in the homelab sub. Over time the sub defines what is "cool" to be in the in-group for that particular community and people post their overwordly set-ups just to be considered part of it for 10 minutes. I mean, you don't need this
- Calwestjobs 1y agoI have small 2 computer personal setup, virtual / software defined networking. virtualization is available in commodity hw from 1999 when VMWare allowed to have 56 virtual machines inside of one computer... email"relay" server. because i do not want hassle of DKIM and other useful and appropriate technologies, needed to have to be able to have reliable delivery of mail. which i had problems with having my own email server not being able to deliver mail to some small business in past. im just using one of the big guys mail system, but all mail is archived in my "relay server". i can change email provider in few minutes that way. and take address with me. fileserver. rsync or iscsi or btrfs send/receive works great. Most linux distros use rsync + small script as a "installer". under GUI. Owncloud, jitsi, wireguard. Whonix. nothing nefarious. 2 vm setup for reality checking shadowbanning, price manipulation based on your social network profiles etc. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25okvSzFUZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25okvSzFUZY] - video explaining Federal Trade Commissions pricing study about individualizing prices. network connected cameras, collection device is "frigate nvr", every camera is just streaming RTSP anyway... you can check on them even with MPV/VLC. cameras are not exposed in any way to internet. your cameras get updates 2 times per lifetime... your windows at least once per month... subnet / internal network - every service has its own IPV6 address so i can have visibility on multiple places into activity on my network. one of the services is changing ip address every 5 minutes. for security reasons. it is great indicator of intrusion, proved that twice already. :( if you do not have IPS, IDS, file change monitor etc, you know NOTHING about activity in your net. most linux distros are awful in default config. nonsense like WINE or products built on top of WINE are worst thing for security ever invented. you pay for unhampered surveillance of you. Externally i rent for 2 dollars per month a private DynDNS relay / wireguard helper server for nat holepunching. because i do not have public ipv4 address, and you still need ipv4 for internet ADs ADs ADs ADs to work. I use service similar to Hurricane Electric IPV6 service. i host my own SoftwareDefinedRadio for few "friends". Also bought kiwi sdr to sit in "DMZ" for public to use, it is great service/device. HAMs can check if their signal is received / receivable in my location. space weather, antenna misconfiguration, jamming ... also wspr beacon. i can show people how many radio signals are out there free to use. im thinking about deploying DMR and/or dPMR "basestation" to enable connectivity in my area. "neighbourhood watch" can work even in no grid situation. we already have own wifi network but wifi handhelds (PTT, talkpod, zello etc) are not reliable for us, for some known to us reason. already big users of PMR446 but lacks privacy, but children like them for small formfactor. (roughly 60 users) and that will be self hosted too. meshtastic / reticulum / sideband is great as a home alarm notification system. PtMP. homeassistant as a home manager + pv data aggregator/visualizer, it is almost not updated, i do not have nerves to deconflict plugins etc after every update. it is not exposed to wan anyway. to update only after newly bought devices require that. passive house standard. + PV with storage. 92 % of hot water from solar photovoltaic (not solarthermal) past 365 days. ( first three months were exceptionally sunny this year) other years 88-90%. my house needs same amount of energy for heating as a 40 houses near me combined... why? electric - house, cars, bikes, lawnmower, semi self driving cart for garden (no AI/ML just basic "bug racing" arduino project magnified 1000 times. ).
- hatly22 1y agolocal network? Seriously, it seems theres a cycle where people just reinvent things that have been around for aeons, then argue about the name.