Self-Hosting

For years I used a commercial password manager. It worked fine. Then the price went up, there was a security incident that made the news, and I found myself wondering why I was paying monthly for something I could run myself on hardware I already owned. That’s how I ended up on Vaultwarden. It’s been running in my homelab for months now, it’s never gone down, and I’ve not thought about it since the initial setup. This post covers why I made the switch, how Vaultwarden works, and exactly how to set it up. ...

One of the things that surprised me when I started using Proxmox seriously is that it doesn’t just give you one way to run workloads — it gives you three: full virtual machines, LXC containers, and Docker (running inside one of the other two). Choosing between them isn’t just a technical preference; it affects performance, maintenance overhead, and how much of your hardware you’re burning for each service. Here’s how I think about it, and what I actually run on each. ...

Port forwarding has a bad reputation, and honestly, most of it is deserved. You open a hole in your router, expose your home IP to the internet, and spend the next week watching fail2ban block login attempts from IP ranges you’ve never heard of. There’s a better way. Cloudflare Tunnels let you expose self-hosted services to the internet without opening a single port on your router. Your home IP stays hidden. The traffic goes through Cloudflare’s network. And setup takes about fifteen minutes. ...

Every homelab eventually has the same problem: services go down and you don’t find out until you try to use them. You open Jellyfin on the TV and it won’t load. You go to check Vaultwarden from your phone and it times out. You spent twenty minutes wondering if it’s your phone, your network, or the service — and it was the service, and it’s been down for three hours. ...

So you want a homelab. Maybe you’ve been lurking on r/homelab for months, staring at rack builds that cost more than a used car. Maybe you’re an IT engineer at work and want a place to break things without a ticket being raised. Either way - good news: you don’t need to spend a fortune to get started. This guide is for people who want a useful homelab, not a showpiece. ...

Every month you’re probably paying for at least one service you could run yourself - a password manager, cloud storage, a notes app, a photo backup tool. Self-hosting these isn’t just cheaper; it means your data lives on hardware you control. Docker Compose makes this accessible to anyone comfortable with a terminal. You don’t need to be a developer. You just need a machine that stays on, a basic Linux install, and this guide. ...