Homelab

Running a homelab without proper monitoring is flying blind. You don’t know when your disk is about to fill up, when your RAM spikes, or when a container silently dies — until something breaks. Grafana and Prometheus fix that. Together, they give you gorgeous real-time dashboards and deep metrics for every server, container, and service you run. This guide walks you through setting up a complete Grafana + Prometheus monitoring stack using Docker Compose. By the end, you’ll have live dashboards showing CPU, RAM, disk, network, and container stats — all self-hosted, no cloud dependency. ...

If you’ve decided to stop trusting Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud with your files, you’ve got two outstanding self-hosted options staring you in the face: Syncthing and Nextcloud. Both are open-source, both respect your privacy — but they are built around fundamentally different philosophies. This guide cuts through the noise. By the end, you’ll know exactly which one fits your situation. 💡 This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more. The Core Difference: Sync vs Cloud Before diving into feature tables, you need to internalize this: ...

Pi-hole is one of the most popular self-hosted tools in the homelab community — and for good reason. It blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains at the network level, protecting every device on your network without installing anything on individual devices. Smart TVs, smartphones, game consoles — they all benefit automatically. In this guide, you’ll learn how to run Pi-hole in Docker, configure it properly, set up custom DNS records, and squeeze every last bit of blocking power out of it. ...

Self-hosting gives you complete control over your data and services. But with great power comes great responsibility — if your Nextcloud, Jellyfin, or Vaultwarden instance is misconfigured or exposed, you become an easy target. Security breaches in home servers are real: exposed ports get hit by scanners within minutes of going online. This guide covers the practical security layers every self-hoster should have in place in 2026 — from firewalls and HTTPS to authentication layers and intrusion prevention. You don’t need to implement everything at once, but each layer you add makes your setup significantly harder to compromise. ...

If you’ve been self-hosting for more than a week, you’ve already written a docker-compose.yml file. Maybe you copied one from a GitHub README, fired it up, and it worked. Magic. Then six months passed. You have 15 services, four compose files scattered across your home directory, containers with restart: always that silently fail, hardcoded passwords in plain text, and a vague sense of dread whenever you ssh into your server. ...

Plex has been the king of self-hosted media servers for over a decade. Jellyfin has been chipping away at that throne ever since it forked from Emby in 2018. In 2026, the gap has narrowed dramatically — and for many self-hosters, Jellyfin has already won. This guide breaks down every dimension that matters: features, hardware transcoding, mobile apps, Docker setup, performance, and total cost of ownership. By the end, you’ll know exactly which one belongs in your homelab. ...

You spin up a dozen self-hosted services — Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, your reverse proxy — and then you go to bed. You wake up in the morning and, somewhere in the night, three of them fell over. Nobody told you. Your family was locked out of Nextcloud for six hours. Sound familiar? That’s exactly the problem Uptime Kuma solves. It’s a self-hosted monitoring tool that watches your services 24/7 and screams at you (via Telegram, Discord, email, Slack, or 90+ other channels) the moment something goes down. It’s beautiful, it’s free, and it takes about 10 minutes to deploy. ...

Building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system is often the foundation of any serious homelab. Whether you’re storing family photos, running Docker containers, or serving media to multiple devices, choosing the right NAS software can make or break your experience. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll compare the three most popular NAS operating systems in 2026: TrueNAS, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault. We’ll cover installation, features, performance, and help you decide which one fits your needs. ...

Your homelab is running smoothly. You’ve got Nextcloud for files, Vaultwarden for passwords, Immich for photos, and a dozen other services humming along. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your server dies tomorrow, can you recover everything? Most self-hosters only think about backups after disaster strikes. Don’t be one of them. This guide covers everything you need to build a bulletproof backup strategy for your homelab — from understanding the 3-2-1 rule to implementing automated backups with tools like Restic, Borg, and rsync. ...

When you’re running a homelab, secure remote access is essential. Whether you want to access your self-hosted services while traveling, share resources with family, or simply keep your data off the public internet, a VPN is your gateway to privacy and control. Two solutions dominate the conversation in 2026: WireGuard and Tailscale. Both are modern, fast, and secure — but they serve different use cases and philosophies. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll compare both solutions, provide complete setup instructions, and help you decide which one fits your homelab. ...