Are you on the fence with whether you should run a homelab? Well, what started as a small journey has now become the cornerstone of my house. I’m not kidding when I say that my homelab is the most useful and functional part of my home.
My Homelab Runs My Entire Media Center
My homelab does a lot in my household, but one of the main functions of it is my media servers. I have a video server, audiobook server, and ebook server even—all of which make accessing my self-hosted content a breeze.
Plex powers my video server, allowing me to access my media library both at home and when I’m out and about. I’ve used my Plex server to download movies to watch on airplanes before, or even just enjoy a movie in the car while riding down the road.
Audiobookshelf handlesall of my audiobook needs. Not all audiobooks are available on Audible, and I like to go directly to the publisher when I can. So, I have my own audiobook server that allows me to listen to my entire library anywhere I am.
For ebooks, I’m still getting the hang of things. Calibre and Calibre-Web both work fantastically, but my Kindle is old enough that it doesn’t like EPUB files that much. Either way, there are ebooks that I either get directly from the publisher or through other marketplaces that I want to read—soI host my own ebook server. This also works with PDFs guides that I purchase for my wife and me (like recipes), and Calibre-Web works great for reading them on any machine too.
The great thing about hosting my own media servers is the media that I host won’t go anywhere unless I want it to. Movies never leave Plex unless I remove them. Audiobooks take up hardly any space and once I purchase and upload them, they’ll never disappear. Ebooks are the same way: once they’re hosted on my own server, I never worry whether they’ll be there when I want to read them or not.
This can’t be said about using services that are run by third-party websites like Netflix, Audible, or Kindle. The media center part of my homelab is enough reason for me to make it the most useful thing in my house, but that’s just really scratching the surface.
Plex
With Plex, you can keep a single, unified Watchlist for any movie or TV show you hear about, on any service—even theater releases! You can finally stop hopping between watchlists on all your other streaming services, and add it all on Plex instead.
Without My Homelab, I’d Be Paying for Way More Services
My homelab doesn’t just house a media server. It also houses my game servers, photo storage, security camera, and so much more.
All of these services are things that I either was paying for before, or would have eventually paid for as the needs arose.
For starters, I can hostjust about any game serverI could ever want.Minecraft? You bet.Satisfactory? Of course.ARK: Survival Evolvedfor a buddy? Absolutely!
In all, I typically have somewhere between three and five (or more) game servers running at any time, with the ability to spin up dozens more if needed.
I also keepall of my photos backed up to my server. It allows me to have two copies of all pictures I take—one copy on my portable SSD and one on the server. I’m about to deploy a third server off-site, and then I’ll even back up to that remote server so that way I can have three copies of every photo I take.
An area that I didn’t expect that my homelab would come into play for is security camera recording. I never expected to host that locally—cloud storage is so ubiquitous and easy to use, right? Well, it is, until you find yourself paying a few hours wage per month just to store security camera footage.
That’s whyI recently spun up a network video recorder (NVR)in my homelab. It brings in camera feeds from various manufacturers and allows me to easily record all the footage locally. I picked up an8TB HDDon Amazon for $100, and now I can store months of recordings at one time before it starts to overwrite the oldest footage.
HGST Ultrastar He (8TB)
The HGST / WD Ultrastar 8TB Helium NAS hard drive offers 128MB of cache, spins at 7200RPM, and is data center-grade to deliver optimal performance and longevity to your network storage system.
This just scratches the surface of the services that I can self-host in my homelab to save me money every month. At some point, I’ll likely move my cloud storage local (which I currently pay for Google Drive).
I might even self-host my own AI large language model instead of paying for ChatGPT Plus in the future. The opportunities are endless when it comes to self-hosting services in a homelab.
My Homelab Keeps My Information Private
One of my favorite parts of my homelab is that my documents and information stay private. While storing my home security footage on a third party’s server gives them access to it to do what they please with the recordings, keeping those same files locally means only I have access to them.
Same goes for my audiobooks, movies, and ebooks. You name it, if I host it on my own server, I control who has access to it.
Yes, I do open up some services and files to the World Wide Web (with proper login credentials), but I get to choose what services are open and who can access it. If there’s a folder on my server that I don’t want anyone to access, like my tax documents or anything else, then I can absolutely do that.
This is one of the reasonsI spun up an Immich servera few months ago when I was exploring completely ditching all Google Photos ties and self-hosting all of my pictures. It’s also why I’m debatingspinning up a Nextcloud serverand ditching Google Drive.
The amount of control you have over the data that you host yourself is infinite. The amount of control you have over the data that other people host is, well, very limited.
Running My Own Server Lets Me Use Any Smart Home Gear I Want
Last, but certainly not least, my homelab opens up my smart home to use any device I want. I’m an Apple person through and through, and that means I rely on HomeKit to power my smart home. The downside to HomeKit? There are not a lot of certified devices.
So, to remedy that,I have Home Assistant deployed in my homelab. This allows me to bring unsupported devices into HomeKit as if they’re native, which has totally transformed my smart home setup.
I can now find dirt-cheap smart plugs at yard sales or thrift stores and use them in HomeKit. Plus, Home Assistant handles most of its communication locally, meaning you could even remove external network access from your smart plugs to make your home’s network more secure, while retaining control over using smart devices.
At the end of the day, I couldn’t imagine my house without my homelab. The hardware will change with time, but the homelab will remain there. In fact, I’m in the process of swapping out hardware in the homelab right now, but all of my services are still going to be running without question.
Ready to get started with your own homelab? There areseveral services I highly recommend everyone run. From Plex to Tautulli, Nginx Proxy Manager, audiobookshelf, and much more, my list will get your homelab started in a flash.
