I’ve got two servers in my homelab that are supposed to be different environments. Lately they’ve been lying to each other. And honestly, I’m the one who let it happen.

Five years ago I was building a home lab the way most people do it, by stacking hardware and hoping for the best. Here’s what I wish somebody had kicked down my door and told me before I wasted the time and money I did.

Most people run WordPress like it’s 2008, and they pay for it every time they need to move or update anything. Here’s how Docker, MariaDB, Redis, and Caddy turn a traditionally brittle setup into something you can migrate in fifteen minutes flat.

If I could go back and talk to 2020-version-me standing in front of a half-racked server and a pile of ambition, the first thing I’d say is: slow down and draw a map before you plug in a single cable.

I’ve burned more Saturday afternoons than I care to count fixing Docker Compose files that should have worked fine from the start. Here’s what I actually learned, and it wasn’t from documentation.

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.

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.

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.