After years of wrestling with NGINX blocks and Apache directives, I switched to Caddy and realized the problem was never my configs. It was everything I’d accepted as normal.

I own both QNAP and Synology hardware, and the most useful thing I’ve learned has nothing to do with throughput or RAID types.

Not every self-hosted service earns its keep. Here’s an honest look at the ones I spun up with good intentions, ran for a while, and eventually shut down without a single regret.

I had 70TB of storage across four NAS units and still felt like my family photos were one drive failure away from disappearing. Immich didn’t fix my storage problem — it fixed my trust problem.

Proxmox and TrueNAS get all the homelab hype, and I get why. I just don’t run either of them on my VMs, and it’s not because I don’t know what they are.

I have services running on my homelab right now that I couldn’t tell you the login for. Here’s what actually gets used every day, what’s quietly collecting dust, and what that gap actually costs.

Plex Pass isn’t a scam, but paying a monthly fee to unlock features on a server you already own and run yourself is a hard argument to make. Here’s where Emby ships what Plex sells.

I built a media server empire spanning four NAS units and a dedicated Emby setup. My family mostly watches the same twelve things on repeat.

Self-hosting a blog on your own hardware sounds like the power move. And it is. But nobody tells you what you’re signing up for when the glamour wears off.

I don’t use hostnames like SERVER01 or DESKTOP-A4F2C. Every machine on my network has a real name, a personality, and a reason it got that name. Here’s the system behind it.