My Homelab Setup in 2026

I’ve been self-hosting services since I was 16. What started as a Minecraft server on an old laptop turned into a Proxmox setup, and eventually migrated to Oracle Cloud VMs. The hardware changed, the obsession didn’t.

The evolution

The early days were Proxmox on whatever hardware I could get my hands on. It was great for learning, VMs, LXC containers, ZFS, all the fundamentals. But at some point I realized I was spending more time maintaining hardware than actually building things on top of it.

So I moved everything to Oracle Cloud. Free tier VMs that are surprisingly capable, no electricity bill, no noise in my room, and I can access everything from anywhere without worrying about my home internet going down.

Docker everything

I’m a Docker fanatic. If it can run in a container, it runs in a container. No exceptions.

The main things I host:

Immich for photo backup. This is the one I’d save if I could only keep one service. Google Photos but self hosted, with actual ownership of my data. The mobile app auto uploads everything and the search actually works.

Custom services I’ve built myself. Monitoring dashboards for the security cameras I have at home, small utilities, personal tools. When you need something specific and nothing exists, you build it. Docker makes deploying your own stuff trivial.

Various smaller services that come and go. The beauty of containers is that spinning something up to try it takes thirty seconds, and tearing it down is just as fast.

Networking

Tailscale ties everything together. A WireGuard mesh network between all my devices, no port forwarding, no dynamic DNS, no headaches. I expose zero ports to the public internet. Everything goes through Tailscale’s encrypted mesh.

I can SSH into my cloud VMs from university WiFi, access Immich from my phone, check camera feeds from anywhere. It just works, which is the highest compliment you can give a networking tool.

Why bother

People ask me why I don’t just use Google Photos, why I don’t just pay for a monitoring service, why I build my own tools instead of using existing ones.

The honest answer is that self hosting taught me more about infrastructure than any class ever did. DNS, TLS, networking, containers, reverse proxies, backup strategies. I learned all of it because something broke and I needed to fix it.

When I started working as a sysadmin managing enterprise infrastructure, Oracle databases, VPN tunnels, Windows servers, none of it felt foreign. I’d already been doing a smaller version of the same thing at home for years.

Plus, there’s something satisfying about checking your security cameras through a service you built and deployed yourself. It’s not the most efficient use of time. But it’s fun, and in this field, fun is how you stay sharp.