My home servers are not a homelab
89 comments
·June 30, 2025udev4096
A perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere. Does OP have nothing productive to say other than dunking on the term? Since when does "homelab" resemble to anything concrete?
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
nradk
Well, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)
esperent
Labs can be places for getting serious, routine work done, as any working pharmacologist or chemist would tell you. The term doesn't imply experimentation outside of vernacular usage.
BLKNSLVR
I self-host a few things that are important to me but likely unimportant to anyone other than me. I use the term 'homelab' because that's the use that seems to be the norm in describing various computers in a network running shit at home that, if it were in production, would be on more modern, serious and redundant hardware.
I don't experiment much these days, so 'lab' isn't quite right. But if I were to experiment then it would be using the same hardware as all the other stuff. So it's both accurate and inaccurate.
In this instance: who cares, it gets the message across to the necessary demographic - and isn't that what communication is about?
...and I'm someone who could care less about words and grammar (notice the correct use of the term, so as not to say the literal opposite of what I'm trying to say (notice the correct use of the word literal, rather than it's not-oft-used-but-oft-correctly-applicable figurative)).
I don't know the (in)correctness of the use of brackets within brackets.
n3storm
Indeed we do. I call it the same but in a local network I bought domain. Lake backups.mylocaldomain or webs.mylocaldomain or storage.mylovaldomain or kavita.mylocaldomain
brailsafe
I've had people get visibly upset when either questioning the intent of a word they've used or when attempting to use a more specific descriptor for something they've asked me about, specifically when it's failed to accurately capture a given concept or could otherwise be ambiguous. Seems to me that it's at the heart of language and communication to think about these things, and while some may be more trite than others, I say go ahead, split those hairs and write about it. I also don't have a home lab, I have computers at home, and some random bits of gear. I don't know at what point I'd consider it a lab, maybe if it was more of a collection that was deliberately experimental, but it's not, it's just computers that have general purposes.
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sieabahlpark
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znpy
> A perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere.
Agreed.
It's still a homelab, the author just doesn't seem to like the term.
brookst
“My 1967 Camaro that’s on blocks with a couple of body panels off is not a ‘project car’”
zxexz
No, at this point it’s more is a permanent art installation :D
For real though, I have several cars on blocks at the moment. I can’t think of a single way to rationalize not calling them projects, even though when they were put up it was just going to be a “quick fix”. At least I finally got one in a state where I felt comfortable donating it.
brookst
Yeah, as soon as you’re arguing the semantics of a common phrase it’s a sign of denial or attempted spousal appeasement.
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Calwestjobs
in europe you can not have haphazardly build electricity system without calling it "lab". (you need electrician to do your electricity work, but calling it "lab" you can do it yourself )
so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great.
look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI cluster" etc. so i would argue that nonresistance to these farces actually proves OP is right. albeit i do not really see strong nor attacking rhetoric from OP in his post either, so i think problem is just that you have to chill out ;)
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days... so even american president has to say something about it, so i think there is something to it, dont you think ?
asalahli
As a Canadian who doesn't follow daily news, I'm very curious to know what you're referring to in your last paragraph. Care to elaborate?
esperent
> in europe
Laws don't work like this in the EU, let alone in all of Europe.
Calwestjobs
of course you can not have your whole house be build like that, but calling one room as lab is allowed in most continental europe countries.
noone cares in Russia etc, you just have to make small donation to your public official (if they even care/notice) and everything is fine,
even those pizzaboxes...
EDIT: in most countries there are devices which can not be connected to grid without electrician in any case, like PV. but again germany has balkon PV something something. so yes, exceptions are to everything.
JohnBooty
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days
Calwestjobs
also your usage of 12 bit numbers horrifies me.
aaron695
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jumploops
Just call it a puddle :)
1. No fault tolerance or high availability
2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
OccamsMirror
Back in the day you set up a homelab with enterprise level hardware so that you could gain experience on hardware and platforms you otherwise wouldn't have access to. Cisco firewalls, VMWare Hypervisors, vSan, etc.
burnt-resistor
I'll run ESXi 7 Enterprise Plus on a 2x 7402 96 thread, 512 GiB lights-out manageable system with 16 TiB of SSD and 140 TiB of HDD (in a 4U JBOD dual path SAS enclosure) at home until the wheels fall off. Attached UPSes have environmental monitoring including temperature and humidity.
dheera
I have a rack for convenience, not education.
It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
burnt-resistor
Buy a house now. It's usually cheaper since apartments (in expensive metro areas) are often tantamount to setting money on fire. :o)
Where I live now (in a house) is way, way cheaper and I get regional co-op 2.5 Gbps internet for $90/month.
queenkjuul
I've got the fastest Internet available in my neighborhood at 1.5gbps for $90 and i wouldn't give up my apartment or my neighborhood for an extra gigabit.
And after seeing all the unbelievably expensive surprise repair bills my homeowner friends have had to deal with, I'm not convinced I'm lighting money on fire, either.
dheera
> Buy a house now. It's usually cheaper since apartments (in expensive metro areas) are often tantamount to setting money on fire. :o)
Not really. I live in an expensive area. I pay $4K+/month in rent for a nice apartment, and livable, nice houses here cost $3M+ which is over 700 months worth of rent.
1. The math doesn't work.
2. I don't have 3 million dollars.
3. I'm not going to fall into the stupid American trap of borrowing money to buy shit I can't afford just to stay poor and handcuffed to some bank. If I'm going to buy something that costs 3 million dollars I better have 3 million dollars in cash. That's how I roll. That's how I buy my car, computers, and my groceries. Make money -> spend money. Fuck borrowing. I don't do that shit.
phuff
I present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."
ranger207
My home server is definitely also a lab. Like they say, everyone has a dev environment; some people are lucky enough to also have a prod environment
joshka
It sounds like the concern here is that the OP is over-indexing on the use case for a home lab being a place to learn, and not a place to be productive.
> But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects.
> But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too.
If you want to split hairs on naming, then the problem here is that you're imputing an overly strict definition onto the term 'homelab' to not include your use case, complaining that your use case is different to this definition, and then failing to see that the term is generally used loosely enough that it does your use case.
Call it what you will, but from your description of things, you're using the server and associated tech as a homelab.
I'd allow you to call it a "it's not a homelab, but" if you want permission to use a different term... ;P
leohonexus
I call it my "homeprod" - but then, what happens if your infra spans multiple sites, and the cloud? Then it's just "prod" at that point. Probably best to just call it your "personal infra / servers", or if you have a family, "family servers".
bee_rider
It is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
breput
Has it? How many PiHole, ESPHome, and other random Raspberry Pi Home Assistant "servers" are out there? I suspect it has never been more popular.
On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products.
petesergeant
> that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
haiku2077
Mesh Wireguard VPNs like Tailscale/Zerotier/etc. have brought it back. Now you can self-host all sorts of stuff and your ISP just sees regular VPN traffic like a remote worker. Handy for self-hosted movies/TV, photos, ebooks, and NAS.
queenkjuul
I use a free-tier Oracle Cloud VPS as a wireguard relay for all my public services. Yes, Oracle sucks donkey balls to deal with, but it's pretty set and forget, and they give you essentially unlimited bandwidth (like 50TB/mo each way or something I've never been able to get remotely close to)
petesergeant
That makes a lot of sense, but I guess if I'm already doing that, why would I not just pay the extra $5 a month for a VPS too? I'm sure there are reasons (you need a more powerful server, interesting hardware, interlink to home automation, whatever).
zxexz
I call it my deprod, or home office nonproductivity suite. Or fire hazard. Or “those f**ing wires”. I’ll usually refer to just a piece of it, like “my computer”, “my weird ARM switch”, or “that engineering sample that a guy sold me at the Flea for $10 and still hasn’t died after 5 years of being on”.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
vhodges
How about 'On Premise Micro Data Centre" :-p
Doesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)?
There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
p_ing
Which premise is this based on?
vhodges
Sorry, did I get it wrong? I only ever see it as onprem ;).
aspenmayer
I think they were making a kind of play on words on your misspelling. It is short for on premises.
nunez
Same. I have a pile of machines in a closet connected to a 10GbE switch that host some internal services. Homelabs do become more important when you're doing tech sales for server based software, but I try my best to run things on my laptop, or, when that fails, the cloud.
CobaltFire
I actually really feel this. Before I retired I had a homelab in the learning, testing, experimenting sense. I didn't run anything for home "production" on it because the downtime wasn't appreciated.
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
local network? Seriously, it seems theres a cycle where people just reinvent things that have been around for aeons, then argue about the name.