If you’ve spent any time in IT circles online, you’ve probably heard the word “homelab” thrown around. But what actually is a homelab, and why do so many IT professionals swear by them?

This post breaks down - and makes the case for why you should consider building one yourself.

What is a homelab?

A homelab is a personal computing environment you run at home for learning, experimenting, and building skills. It can be as simple as an old PC running a couple of virtual machines, or as complex as a rack full of enterprise-grade servers with a fully segmented network.

The key word is yours. No change management process. No ticket to raise. No risk of breaking something a client depends on. You can try things, break things, and learn from the fallout - all on your own term.

Why botter?

Here’s the honest answer: your day job will only teach you so much.

In a support role, you’re mostly reacting. Something breaks, you fix it. You get good at diagnosing known problems in familiar environments. But the deeper understanding - how things are actually built, why they behave the way they do, what happens when you push them - that comes from building things yourself.

But if I’m being completely honest, my original motivation wasn’t purely about learning. It was about subscriptions.

We live in a world that has quickly shifted everything to a monthly fee. Cloud storage, password managers, media servers, note-taking apps, photo backups - every service you rely on now comes with a recurring cost. Individually the seem small. Together they add up fast, and at the end of the month you’re paying for a dozen things you half-use and fully depend on.

I wanted out of that cycle. Or at least, I wanted control over it.

A homelab lets you self-host many of those services yourself - on hardware you own, with data you control, at a cost you pay once. Your own cloud storage instead of Google One. Your own password manager instead of a 4€/month subscription. Your own media server instead of juggling three streaming platforms.

The learning came naturally alongside it. Once you start building, curiosity takes over - and suddenly you’re deep in a rabbit hole of networking, virtualisation, and infrastructure that makes you genuinely better at your job.

A homelab gives you that space.

What I learned from mine

My first homelab was, and still is, an HP DL380 G6 - a second-hand enterprise server I picked up for free. Before that I’d run a few services locally, nut nothing structured.

The DL380 changed that quickly.

Setting it up forced me to learn things I’d never had a reason to touch before. Cloudflare tunnels, for example - exposing services to the internet without opening ports on your router. OPNsense gave me a proper firewall and taught me how to build a controlled, segmented network from scratch. And troubleshooting issues in that environment thaught me something no certification ever could: how to diagnose a problem when you have absolutely no idea where to start.

One early example that comes to mind involved SMB protocol differences between Mac and Windows devices - a rabbit hole that took hours to untangle and taught me more about network file sharing than years of support tickets ever had. (That one deserves its own post.)

The homelab didn’t just teach me new tools. It taught me how to think through problems methodically, even when I was completely lost.

What do you actually need to start?

Less than you think.

You don’t need a rack server or enterprise hardware to get started. A spare PC, an old laptop, or even a Raspberry Pi is enough to run your first virtual machines and start experimenting. The goal isn’t the hardware - it’s the learning.

That said, if you want to go deeper, second-hand enterprise hardware is surprisingly affordable. Servers like the HP DL380 regularly show up on eBay and local marketplaces for €100-€300. They’re loud and power-hungry, but they’re built to run 24/7 and give you a proper platform to work with.

What should you run?

A good starting point for most IT professionals:

  • Proxmox — a free, open-source hypervisor that lets you run multiple virtual machines and containers on a single machine. This is your foundation.
  • OPNsense — a powerful open-source firewall you can run as a VM. Teaches you networking concepts that are directly applicable to real-world environments.
  • A self-hosted service — something useful like a password manager, a documentation tool, or a media server. Having something you actually use keeps you motivated to maintain and improve the setup.
  • Self-hosted alternatives to paid services — Vaultwarden instead of 1Password, Nextcloud instead of Google Drive, Immich instead of Google Photos.

Own your data and cut the subscriptions.

The real benefit

The homelab community often talks about the technical skills you gain - and those are real. But the deeper benefit is confidence.

When you’ve built something from scratch, broken it, and fixed it yourself, you approach problems differently. You’re less intimidated by unfamiliar systems. You have a mental model for how things fit together. And you have a place to test your ideas before you try them anywhere else.

That confidence is hard to put on a CV - but anyone who’s hired in IT can spot it immediately.

Start small, start today

You don’t need to wait until you have the perfect hardware or spare room for a rack. Start with what you have. Install Proxmox on an old machine, spin up a VM and break something.

Next up: My homelab hardware