Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware · brennan.day

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Server racks at the NOIRLab Headquarters Computer Server Room in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. | Wikimedia Commons

Building on my last post about the Gemini and Gopher protocols, I realized I wanted to take a step further in helping others reclaim web autonomy and sovereignty. So I'm writing this guide.

A few months ago, I wrote about permacomputing and computing for the apocalypse where I briefly spoke about self-hosting and creating your own homelab. But I did not get into the "how-to" at all.

I want to do that today, because I took another swing at creating a homelab, and though there was a lot of trial and error, I was overall really impressed by how much capability and functionality you can get out of old, inexpensive hardware.

I originally shelved the project in January and put it on the backburner, because I'm the stereotypical dev that enjoys hopping from one new shiny idea to another. But more than that, I am not a full-stack web developer. I stick to the front-end and JAMstack, avoiding databases, backend, and DevOps altogether.

But the Internet doesn't actually work that way. Sure, you can use Netlify or Vercel to host and deploy your front-end static sites or Astro.js solution or whatever else you might be building, typically for no cost. But this means you're relying on a company that could suddenly begin charging you money or change their licensing. Regardless, it's a fragile solution, albeit a really convenient one I'm still using.

I want to build for the long web, and really, homelabbing can be a fun, useful hobby.

What Can Be Self-hosted, and Why?

Before we get into hardware, I want to make the case for why this is worth doing at all. It's easy to look at a list of Docker containers and wonder why the hassle is worth it.

Every service you use daily that you don't control is a liability. Companies shut down, or change their pricing, or get acquired, or start monetizing your data, or make unethical decisions that don't align with your values. I'm sure you've been there.

Self-hosting is the practice of running your own software on your own hardware. Taking back ownership of the tools you rely on. Here's a taste of what's possible:

Instead of Google Drive/Dropbox → Nextcloud or Seafile. Your files synced to all your devices.

Instead of 1Password/LastPass → Vaultwarden, a lightweight Bitwarden-compatible password manager you host yourself.

Instead of Feedly/Feedbin → FreshRSS or Miniflux. Read the web on your own terms.

Instead of GitHub → Forgejo or Gitea. Your repositories, with no Microsoft or genAI training on your code.

Instead of Discord/Slack → Matrix/Synapse or Mattermost. Private and federated.

Instead of Google Photos → Immich. A beautiful, fast, self-hosted photo library with mobile backup.

Instead of Notion → AppFlowy or a simple DokuWiki. Flat-file format with no lock-in.

Instead of Twitter/Mastodon (someone else's instance) → GoToSocial or Mastodon. Your own Fediverse node, so your posts live on your server.

Instead of Substack → Ghost or a static site generator like Hugo.

Instead of Google Analytics → Umami or Plausible. Privacy-respecting analytics that don't treat website visitors as products.

The Spectrum of Homelab

It's important to be mindful that homelabbing is a very wide spectrum: You can have 48U 4-post cabinets in a dedicated, soundproofed, climate-controlled server room with redundant 30 kVA online double-conversion UPS systems backed by a natural-gas automatic standby generator.

Or, you can have an old Android phone or a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero with a 2GB microSD serving index.html with the command darkhttpd /home/pi/site --port 8080.

The overwhelming majority of home servers are far closer to the Pi Zero: A decommissioned work laptop, or a tower pulled from someone's curb, a SFF (small form factor) desktop bought at a garage sale. A machine considered e-waste can actually run web services, drawing only ~40–60 watts from the wall.

My Philosophy

A popular reason people get into homelabbing and self-hosting is for private streaming of your personal media library, which is usually pirated. That's fine with me, all the power to the pirates! But that's not what this guide is going to be about.

Primarily, this is because software media systems like Jellyfin are resource-intensive compared to the services I'm going to be going over. Hardware transcoding, large media libraries, and multiple simultaneous streams ask too much of modest old hardware.

My homelab, running at brennan.cafe, is a privacy-focused and self-hosted personal infrastructure built on sustainable principles. It represents a journey away from corporate cloud services toward digital sovereignty and ethical...