What self-hosting means here
Running services on hardware you control — in this case a home datacenter — instead of consuming them as SaaS. You own capacity planning, patching cadence, network design, and incident response when something breaks at 2 AM.
Reasons it's worth it
- Data residency — family photos, documents, and chat on local ZFS with on-site snapshots and offsite replication.
- Customization — integrate Jellyfin with *arr automation, build n8n workflows, run local LLMs on dedicated GPU.
- Skill transfer — production-grade DNS, TLS, monitoring, and incident response applicable to military and enterprise IT.
- Shared platform — friends and family get curated services without a stack of recurring subscriptions.
- No vendor tiers — storage limits and transcode capacity are bounded by hardware, not a pricing page.
What you pay instead
- Operational overhead — patching, documentation, capacity planning, and troubleshooting on your calendar.
- Hardware & power — servers, drives, UPS, electricity, acoustic and thermal load.
- Security ownership — identity, perimeter hardening, vulnerability management, and audit trails are yours to maintain.
- You are on-call — when Immich or Nextcloud is down, there is no vendor ticket queue.
When managed cloud is the better fit
- You need zero operational burden and will pay for SLAs and support.
- Global anycast and edge POP density matter more than control.
- Outbound email at scale — deliverability and reputation are a specialty.
- Compliance frameworks that require third-party attestation you cannot self-audit.
Hybrid is normal: this lab uses Cloudflare for authoritative DNS, DDoS mitigation, and selective Access policies while self-hosting application tiers behind the edge.
How this lab grew
NB Cloud did not start as a three-node Ceph cluster. It evolved from a single service into a platform with defined storage tiers, identity, and observability. The architecture tour describes the current state — not day one. A first build of one Proxmox host and Pi-hole is a legitimate starting point.
Teaching from the same stack
As a Staff Sergeant, Nick uses this material for subordinates entering IT roles: structured tracks, fundamentals before production access, and an isolated Mini-Rack cluster so training mistakes do not affect family services.
Public summaries live here; the full Homelab Academy curriculum on BookStack covers depth for team members who need operator-level detail.