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.

I run both Authelia and Authentik in production — not because I couldn’t pick one, but because I learned the hard way that they’re solving different problems. Here’s what the comparison guides won’t tell you.

Every shortcut I took setting up my homelab made sense at the time. Six months later, I was untangling decisions I barely remembered making — and that’s the real cost nobody talks about.

After 28 years of running various home lab setups, I’ve learned that the hidden costs go way beyond your electric bill. Here’s what nobody tells you before you start hoarding old servers.

Running a homelab isn’t all rainbow cables and perfectly organized racks — here’s the real talk about what it takes to keep your digital kingdom running.